

Understanding the roles people try to fulfil and seeing their deeper human drives is the first step towards effectively changing their thinking.Īnother famous concept introduced by Covey is his Circle of Influence. Most people are family-centred, money-centred, pleasure-centred, work-centred or even self-centred. Not everyone has paradigms that are centred around these principles. Your goal should be to first understand the centres from which people make decisions. These principles manifest themselves in our lives as fairness, integrity, honesty, quality, growth, patience, encouragement and much more. These paradigms are born out of principles, deep fundamental truths that act like the natural laws of the human consciousness, unarguable and self-evident.


In order to change your own or someone else’s behaviour and attitude, you must start by examining the basic paradigms from which this behaviour flows. By adjusting your map of perception, you shift from seeing the world in one way, to another. Two people can see something entirely different but still both be right according to their paradigm.Ī paradigm shift is a transformation that allows you to widen your view and to shed new light on something. It’s an explanation or model of something else. In order to change our perceptions and behaviour, it becomes more and more important to look at the lens we use to see the world instead of just through it.Ī paradigm is the frame of reference that describes the way we see something. The way we see things governs how we behave.

Begin with the End in Mind – Use your imagination to build a vision of who you want to be.Be Proactive – You are in charge of your life, take responsibility for your choices.Real change comes from the inside-out, not from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behaviour via quick-fix personality ethic techniques, but by striking at the root, the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, the essential paradigms which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world.Ĭovey presents us with seven habits to adopt, categorized as private victories and public victories which will help us create a balanced focus between doing and increasing our ability to do. To change your situation, you often need to change yourself, which means changing your behaviour, which means changing your perceptions.
