ave you ever felt stressed out about all the things you are experiencing in your life as a college student, but you do not know how to figure it all out? Toni Villella, director of student activities and campus recreation, recently facilitated a seminar on author Stephen Covey’s popular self-help book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to explain how.
Villella began the seminar by asking the student audience if they knew what a paradigm was. Everyone looked at one another with a hazy expression of confusion; no one knew. Villella explained, then, that a paradigm is our own personal view of how we see the world, and each person sees how the world works through his or her own lens.
The one thing that people do in order to help them navigate through life is develop habits. “When people usually think of habits, they think of the negative ones,” Villella said. “However, habits are actually a good thing. You have to have them in order to work with other people.”
Villella then expanded upon the “seven habits” featured in the book. The habits can be divided into two categories: the private victories and the public victories. The private victories are more personal and what a person can do by himself or herself, whereas the public victories have more to do with a group and what they can achieve if they work well enough together.
Starting out with the private victories, the first habit is to “be proactive.” On the whiteboard at the front of the room, Villella wrote the words “stimulus” and “response,” and in the middle of the two words, she wrote down the phrase “freedom to choose.”
“In the middle of a stimulus and a response, there is a time where you have all the control to choose how you want to deal with the situation. And that is very powerful,” Villella said. “However, we cannot worry about things that we cannot control.” One example of this would be that you can decide what you are going to wear, but you cannot control the weather. You decide to wear a T-shirt and a pair of shorts to class, but it is 40 degrees outside. When you step outside in the frigid weather, you can decide in that moment if you want to go back to your room to get a sweatshirt or keep walking to class and freeze to death. That’s your decision.
The second habit is to “begin with the end in mind.” This habit is also related to the stimulus and response idea. In that moment when a person has the freedom to make the choice, he or she has to stop and think about what they want the end result to be. An important part is to figure out what matters to you. “In order to do this, you have to have discipline and be grounded,” Villella said. “It is a journey within itself, but it is an important quality to have when working with others.”
Putting “first things first” is the third habit and the final one in the category of private victories. This habit is divided into four quadrants: urgent and important, non-urgent but important, urgent and non-important, and non-urgent and non-important. It is said that most of your time should be spent in the second quadrant, because you are doing what is important to you, and you already have the other habits mentioned already in mind.
In the category of public victories, the fourth habit is to “think win-win.” Villella explained, “There is always a way to have a win-win, even when you are having a conflict with your roommate or whatever else. Just have the conversation.” She also said that boundaries have to be marked in order to do this. An example of this would be drawing up a roommate agreement when you first enter college.
The fifth habit is to “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” This means that when you are in conversation, you not only listen with your ears but also with your eyes and heart. In shorter terms, become an empathetic listener. Try to think of life in the other person’s shoes first, and then react to whatever they are saying to you.
“Synergize” is the sixth habit. The definition of synergy is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. “It is about building trust and cooperation,” Villella said. “It is about saying ‘I’m great, you’re great. We’re awesome.’” An example would be how the members of a sports team are good individually, but how they are awesome when they come together.
The final habit is to “sharpen the saw.” This last habit is about remembering that you are a lifelong learner and need to take care of yourself. “You keep cutting the wood, but if you take time to change the blade, it would be easier,” Villella said. The saw is a metaphor for how people need to take care of themselves physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The events and attractions included in the OSA calendar of events, she said, can fulfill all four of these things.
After the discussion, sophomore Caroline Montfort described why she wanted to come to this seminar. “It is my favorite book of all time,” Montfort said. “I try to live the way that the book describes.”
Etown students can surely benefit from Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits” within their daily lives.
