Transition and Transformation

Back in November I had the opportunity to travel by car up to northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, stopping to see some of the jewels in my beloved National Wildlife Refuge System and visiting with Friends group members. Along the way I listened to a borrowed set of audio CDs containing the whole of  Stephen R.Covey's The Seven Habits of High Effective People, which I regard as the most important book of the 20th Century.  I also listened to Covey's The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness and was deeply moved.

I made a number of important decisions on that car trip, decisions that will greatly affect how I live, what I do, and how I take care of myself and others. I will be setting out in a bold new direction next year and transitioning my work and home life.  (More on that in due course.)  Even more importantly, as I listened to Dr. Covey's voice coming through my car speakers, I realized that the search for my best self has become a bit scattered... so many different authors, so many different ideas. It seems to me the time is right to conduct a more in-depth study, to focus on fewer ideas but put real effort in to applying them to my own life.

Dr. Covey himself provided this idea when he suggested spending a year working through The 8th Habit.  Each chapter is so rich and full of basic principles worth meditating on that it cannot be truly absorbed in a morning read.  The text comes with a companion website containing short videos and other resources. The bibliography is packed with other material, some of which I have read and some of which I am eager to explore for the first time. Covey challenges readers to dig in to each chapter, think through the application questions he poses, and commit to teaching the concepts to at least two other people.

I am convinced that by rising to this challenge, I can make 2016 a year of transformation, as well as one of transition. I will use this blog platform to share what I learn, and maybe there will be a new summary or two along the way as I catch up with some of Dr. Covey's other books or read some of the ones he recommended. In coming weeks I will fill in the last few months of this blog with reviews and summaries I have already completed, just to make the whole set available. I will update my Goodreads page and if I note any particularly pithy or eloquent quotes, I will post those at the What is Cathy Reading Facebook page.

There is a quote from the early pages of Seven Habits which I put on a poster and hung up on my office wall:

"If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other - while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity - then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do - even using so-called good human relations techniques - will be perceived as manipulative. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success. Only basic goodness gives life to technique."

Nothing is more important than who we are - not what we do, what we intend, what we say.  We are human beings, rather than human doings, and no one I know of ever spoke that truth with more clarity than Stephen R. Covey.  The world lost a tremendously important voice when he was killed (while riding his bike) in 2012. He was an original thinker whose contribution to human development may never be measured.   Fortunately, his legacy will always be there for anyone who wants it. I am looking forward to this journey and welcome anyone out there who may be interested to come along.