7 Habits for a Highly Effective Summer

Hello Summer!

And also hello and no school! Which means kids are home and routines are going out the window. (As a T4 who loves routines and structure, this is breaking my brain.)  I have the added element of being married to a teacher, so he is home as well and is wanting to be in relaxing mode the whole time, which makes it harder for me to be doing my job as mommy and homemaker.

Fortunately I took the Home and Family Management class at BYU-I where Stephen Covey's 7 Habits for Highly Effective People was our textbook. It has been five years since then, so I have been feeling ready for a review anyway, and this ts the perfect time to share as we take on this season.

We'll start with the image that represents the 7 Habits and how they flow together, below.

I love how the goal of the Habits is to raise us to a higher level of living through personal and interpersonal growth. It's fun to then apply this format to different realms within our circles of influence. I've already worked on putting a Cub Scout spin on it (that may be September's post), but right now I'm needing to put this into practice in my home. That would be the point of learning this whole process in the Home and Family Management class to begin with.

With the Habits being split as Private and Public, I find it easy to replace those labels with Mommy and Family. This works because as a Mommy (or leader of any kind) you'll want to get yourself in order first so you can operate from a place of confidence and order, which is what the first three Habits focus on.

The First Habit is "Be Proactive". To paraphrase what is on the website, being proactive is taking responsibility for our own choices including our responses to life, to be "response-able" if you will. For me, this means pulling on my Big Girl Pants and actually being ready to be The Mom. 

The opposite of proactive is reactive. As a mom, I'd rather be ahead of the game and running things rather than have things running me. In daily life this looks like taking care of things before they become problems you have to react to, usually in an emotional way. An example of this can be as simple as making sure everyone is fed before anyone has the chance to get "hangry" which leads to everyone yelling at everybody else.

So, the first step here is getting into the mindset of "I can do this!" In other words, we are using faith in ourselves that things will work out if we put forth the initial effort to get on top of things. The next part is identifying our Circles of Influence, meaning the things we can actually take care of and affect. This saves us from using our energy to worry about things outside of our control. For me a great example of this is that I don't worry about politics at all. That is what Charles is for ;) 

My other notes under being proactive are: keep commitments, don't judge (those other people are outside of your Circle of Concern so don't be worrying about them), be a model, and be part of the solution.

The Second Habit is "Begin with the End in Mind". This is something that I'm pretty good at. For me, I can see the big picture, or at least solid glimpses of it, and some of the steps in how to get the results I am wanting. That is the beginning of this habit. You have to know where you are headed in order to plan out the steps of how to get there. Here we start the process of creating our lives. Mr. Covey suggests creating a personal Mission Statement at this point to help give yourself direction before moving ahead.

To create your own Mission Statement there are a few things to keep in mind: What are your principles that you base your life around? What are your roles? And what are your goals?

In exploring those topics, I just wrote my own mission statement out. So that will be my next post,

which saves me space here.

The Third Habit is "Put First Things First". Here is where action comes into play. After the first two

Habits we should be feeling empowered (#1) with a road map (#2) at least in a general sense. Now

we use that power to move forward in the direction of our mission. The quest has begun! (Sorry, I

married a nerd and it's had almost seven years to be rubbing off on me.)

The important thing about this forward movement is to make sure it is in a forward direction, hence

"first things first". It may seem redundant on paper, but think about how easily we distract ourselves

from actually being as productive as we know we can be? I know I have fallen into this trap. That is

the reason I'm revisiting this whole program is to get myself out of such a rut of diverted stagnation.

Habit 3's war cry is "PRIORITIZE!!!!!" And they provided a spectrum format to help us with that,

below.

The intention behind this is that we should spend the majority of our time in Quadrant 2 where things

are important but not urgent. This is where proactivity lives. Quadrant 1 is Reaction Zone. I tend to

avoid Quadrant 3 which is why my email inbox drives Charles crazy. None of the emails I get need

any sort of immediate action, so I only take enough time to mark them as read just to make the

notifications go away. Quadrant 4 has been my vice, but I am getting better at managing that. I'm

writing instead of playing Minecraft, enough said.

The application of this system of spending more of our time in Quadrant 2 is to use those planning

skills from Habit 2 to schedule things out. Remembering to connect to our Mission Statement, you

identify the "big rocks" you need to focus on to accomplish the important goals and plot them out

first. Everything else, all the "little things", then can be organized around what time is left. That is the

step I want to work more on for myself. (Structure=Good)

That wraps up the Private/Mommy/Leader half of the Habits. Onto the Public/Family/Organization

Habits.

Habit 4 is "Think Win/Win". This is where the rubber meets the road. It's great to be doing all the

private deep thinking of setting goals and making plans, but then you have to set all those wonderful

designs into motion... with other people involved.

I know at school, most of us probably preferred to do "Group Projects" alone. We can't do that in the

real world.

To explain this win-win mindset, I'm going to pull a quote from the Covey website:

"Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. Win-win is a frame of mind and

heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-win means agreements

or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying. We both get to eat the pie, and it tastes pretty

darn good! "

To illustrate this with a relevant biographical example, I'll put this in the terms that I used for my Cub Scout group. The boys come to Scouts with their "win" of having fun and (hopefully) learning something. As a leader, I come with the "win" of being able to present the material I have prepared to teach and guide these prepubescent males.

To make this a cooperative win-win situation, I have to put forth effort to make my material "fun" (not my strong suit, but I can default to being dramatic at least) and the boys have to reign in their energy enough to respectfully listen to and participate appropriately to the instructions/discussion/activity. If that goes smoothly we can have a positive experience where they aren't bored and I'm not wasting time and getting frustrated with ... shepherding their exuberant interruptions (read: telling them to "shut up!" every ten seconds).

I can happily report that I have seen success with this arrangement with this group of boys, which is beneficial for my sanity seeing how I teach this same bunch of boys' Sunday School class.

How did I achieve this success? I imposed Habit 5 on them: "Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood". I made sure they understood my expectations of our interactions. (I recently introduced them to the metaphor of the carrot and the stick...)

If Habit 4 is about cooperation, then Habit 5 is about communication. The actual emphasis is on empathetic listening. This is a surprisingly useful skill, even when parenting toddlers (assuming they have sufficient language skills or you can interpret their intentions).

My biggest application of this, particularly when issues are arising and my children entering fussy territory. Instead of just listening to what they are complaining about on the surface with their actual words, I try to be in tune enough to intuit what the root problem they are dealing with. I try to understand what is going on inside of them, probably better than they do in the moment. Depending on the circumstances, I either "suggest" they leave the situation to get out of that energetic space and we can talk about it later (time out) or I bring them into a hug right then before addressing the surface concerns. Sometimes my little boy just needs to get some "sads" out, then we can rescript the situation so we don't have that current problem again.

Once cooperation and communication are established, then we can begin to "Synergize", which is Habit 6. The innovation that can come from the healthy background that all the other Habits have set up can be mind-blowing. This is truly a situation of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

I think the secret behind this is the humility and confidence that have grown out of the other steps of this process. We have confidence in our own abilities and ideas but are still humble enough to work together to combine ideas to make something new that can work for everyone (win-win).

In the parenting format I can imagine an example of this being involving our kids when planning out routines or schedules or codes of conduct. When the kids are engaged in these processes they are more likely to respect them. Don't be afraid of this step; they may have ideas that will surprise you. Of course, this is more applicable with older children, but even little ones can at least make the planning stage more... entertaining with their input. (At 10:00 we slay the dragons!)

Our last Habit is "Sharpen the Saw". This is my second favorite Habit because I am a big fan of self-care. I have a firm testimony that I am not the best Momma I can be if I don't have the pieces of my inner puzzle all in the right order. A consistent pattern of this is when I don't get "enough" sleep then I turn into a "Mombie" and I don't use caffeine to combat the effects, so watch out!

Those "puzzle pieces" that need tending to, and ways to maintain performance in those areas, are:

•  Physical: Beneficial eating, exercising, and resting
• Social/Emotional: Making social and meaningful connections with others
• Mental: Learning, reading, writing, and teaching
• Spiritual: Spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through meditation, music, art, prayer, or service

I know I am still working on finding a good balance of all of these myself. The great part is that this

Habit is taken into consideration back in Habit 3. These activities are contained within Quadrant 2.

And that wraps up my rather long summary of the 7 Habits. I'd encourage you to follow the links to

the Covey website to learn more. I'll end with a little infographic that has a much more concise

review with added applications and affirmations. I'm feeling inspired. I hope you are too.

May we all have the best summer ever!

Marriage: Complements and Coming to the Lord

 
"Mawwage is what brings us togewah today."

(I had to do that.)

This month is our five year anniversary, so it seems appropriate for this month's testimony post to be about this third "M" (Motherhood, Missionaries, and Marriage).

Our love story is pretty basic. We met at college, got married, finished college together, and now, here we are, learning how to "adult" together.

After we got married, we had the opportunity to take a college class together. As a Religion requirement in the BYUI curriculum, we took the "Family Foundations" class together. To this day I look back on that class as one of my favorite and I'm using my class material for my jumping off points today.

The main material of the class is based around The Family: A Proclamation to the World and our text book was a collection of readings from our latter-day prophets to expand upon the teachings of the Proclamation.

In rereading the articles pertaining to marriage specifically, I found two themes that I'd like to share my thoughts on. It's nice because each has a pertinent graphic to go along with them.

The first is the idea of how men and women complement each other within the marriage relationship. The image of the Yin and Yang helps in visualizing this.

You'll notice that each half is the same size and they embrace each other more than a simple circle cut in half with a straight line would.  They also have a piece of the other within themselves. To me, this encompasses the meaning of "complement". Together, both halves become part of a perfect circle which they cannot do alone.

That is what marriage is meant to be.

Thinking of the parts that we share and how Charles and I complement each other, I can't help but think of our Types. Charles is a 3/4 and I am a 4/2. Sometimes it's funny to see how his secondary 4 comes out stronger than my dominant 4. In some things he has a keener sense of needing things to be clean and the paragraph in Carol's book about Type 4s and driving is spot-on for Charles.

The Type 4 things that we share are our loyalty to family, the strength of our personal convictions, and being strong authority figures in our respective circles of influence.

We also complement each other very well. His Type 3 push to get things done helps inspire me and helps me move on when I get stuck in a rut. My secondary Type 2 reminds him to be more gentle at times and my Type 4 comes in handy when things need to be done with more thoroughness (like helping him edit his blog).

Together we are trying to be the best parents we can be while helping to "parent" each other in our own growing processes. Another way to say that is that we nurture each other as well as our children.

Before I move on to my second theme, I'd like to add a quote from President Spencer W. Kimball:

In his wisdom and mercy, our Father made men and women dependent on each other for the full flowering of their potential. Because their natures are somewhat different, they can complement each other; because they are in many ways alike, they can understand each other. Let neither envy the other for their differences; let both discern what is superficial and what is beautifully basic in those differences, and act accordingly.

My second theme is that of coming to the Lord through the marriage relationship. I've already talked about how motherhood helps me to be more Christlike, but marriage does this as well for both of us.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the focal point in a covenant marriage relationship. Please notice how the Savior is positioned at the apex of this triangle, with a woman at the base of one corner and a man at the base of the other corner. Now consider what happens in the relationship between the man and the woman as they individually and steadily “come unto Christ” and strive to be “perfected in Him” (Moro. 10:32). Because of and through the Redeemer, the man and the woman come closer together. (Elder Bednar)

Charles and I are part of such a covenant marriage relationship because we were married in the temple. And, in fact, we had the above image in mind when we picked our wedding date, which is July 21 or 7/21.

Apparently, in Hebrew, 7 is the number that represents perfection, hence July, and then we multiplied 7 by 3 because of the three entities involved in our marriage (him, me, and God), so 21.

We are still human and sometimes it seems that the metaphorical length of the legs of our triangle are longer than at other times, but that is part of our journey. Remember, we are only five years into this and we covenanted to be together for eternity. Bumps along the way were part of the package deal that we signed up for.

The times when the triangle seems smaller and we become closer are the times when we are able to use the Atonement (think "at-one-ment") to forgive each other and become better individuals. It just so happens that those times are usually after a big "bump" came up in our road. This just shows that trials are really to be used to make us stronger.

So, Happy Anniversary to us!