A habit is defined as the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire. Knowledge is the “What to do” & “Why”, skill is the “how to do”, and desire is the “Motivation” & the “Want to do” in order to make something a habit in our lives we have to have all three.

In a lot of ways busyness has become glorified in our society. You see someone else who is working really hard, and you feel like its a bit of competition. A lot of people think if you are not being as busy as they are maybe you are just being lazy. But being busy doesnt necessarity mean you are being more effective with your time.

A busy personmight take an hour to get a task done that an effective person could get done in about 15 minutes. Would you rather be a busy person or an effective person? I hope you are going to say the latter because here we are going to explore 10 habits of highly effective people.

Habits Of Highly Effective People

1) Being Proactive

Effective people focus their time and energy on things that they can control, like scheduling their time or focusing on healthy habits. The one thing you won’t see them doing is complaining about things that are out of their control. Because really, What good does it do to complain about the weather?

Three things that crush all productivity and effectiveness are comparing, criticizing and complaining. One thing that you do have to control is your mindset. For example- If you are comparing yourself to someone else. Maybe you envy their work or their healthy lifestyle choices often comparing them leads to self-criticism and then we go on to complain about it to our friends or to our family.

So you can see how it becomes a bit of a vicious loop of things we let our mind focus on. Precious mental energy that could instead be used to work on something constructive. So be proactive, realize that you can take charge, and break the chain anytime you feel yourself being emotionally affected by external stimuli.

When you are in any situation in life, you can choose to become reactive or proactive but the basic idea is that by choosing to be proactive you choose to increase your circle of influence. If you react without thinking or you say a harsh word to your friend or you drink all night and live in self-indulgence after a long day or you just become depressed when the weather is gloomy.

You are becoming a reactive person, you let the environment control you and you are simply a person reacting to stimuli.

2) Begin With The End In Mind

Beginning with the end in mind is the start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you are going so that you better understand where you are now and to see if the steps you are taking are in the right direction or not.

Once we know what we want to be and what we want to do and what our values are, then we can start taking actions that align with that end in mind. If we don’t know what our end in mind is, then this presents a problem where all the things we do, our activities, achievements, they all feel empty.

That’s because we are faced with not being able to answer the question, why am I doing this in the first place? Think about the end and this will help you become a more effective person. Do you want to be remembered as a person who added value to society? Maybe start filling your facebook statuses with more positivity and upbeat content.

Basically, are you doing the things that allow you to say you have become the person that you want to be. Everything is created twice, once in the mind and once in the physical real world. The problem is that many things are created in the mind but never manifested into tangible things because we tell ourselves “I can’t do it’.

A lot of time the only thing stopping you from doing something is yourself and an even worse situation is when things aren’t even created in the mind at all. For some people debt, drugs, despair or other life problems prevent a person from thinking about creation and only on the negative outcomes of their situation.

Stop focusing on what you can’t control and you will be able to create more. You will be able to add more value to the world.

3) Put First Things First

If I ask most people what they thought was important they would say things like their health, their relationship or financial credibility. But when you look into their actions they spend their time doing other meaningless things like organizing papers going out for long lunches, hanging out with the wrong crowd, fussing over little crab and doing stupid stuff for the better part of their day.

It doesn’t lead them to bettering the things that they said were important to them. So you have to put first things first. Spend some time with your family before you waste your time doing something like playing video games, start putting effort into creating a monthly budget instead of putting your effort pinning new things on pinterest.

Go and workout first before watching that new episode. Here is something psychologist call cognitive dissonance and its when the things you say are most important to you aren’t the same things that you are spending most of your time on. In Fact some psychologists say that this is unhealthy.

The disconnect between what we say we will do and what we actually do is terrible and I think working in this would improve a lot of our lives. So the first three habits are about managing yourself and what you can do independently. There are things you can make changes, mindset you can alter, an attitude you can adjust to. They set the foundation for the next three habits which have to do with becoming an effective person in society.

4) Think Win-Win

There are six types of relationships and you can think of them as personal, business or even biological animalistic relationships. The first is that people think the world is made of lose-win or win-lost, which means for me to win you have to lose or the other way around. People with this type of mentality think that to have the largest skyscraper in the neighbourhood, they must tear all the other skyscrapers down.

You should in these situations because someone will lose even if the net gain is zero. In fact, most people don’t even agree with us in this they believe in reciprocal altruism in the long run. With loss is like a parasite where one wins and the other loses. The next relationship that we are going to talk about is just toxic and nasty, it’s called lose-lose.

Solely winning relationships aren’t really a relationship at all. Since they only affect one person. People in this type of relationship don’t care what anyone else gets as long as they get what they want. It’s actually very selfish. The next relationship is called No Deal. This is a neutral mentality and it’s actually the most preferable one.

Basically each individual agrees that if both parties don’t win there is no deal. In other words it’s completely unselfish.If I can’t get what I want without you benefitting, it’s not worth it and there’s no deal. 

Win-win relationships happen in couple relationships or business relationships and even in ecology. Mutualist relationships or symbiosis is the term two animals benefit from living together. For you to win, the other person does not have to lose. You could buy and read a book that gives you huge insight into a recent problem you are dealing with and because of this you benefit from the advice and the author benefits from the money.

You can make a video and upload it to YouTube and it benefits from the advertisement revenue and the viewers will benefit from the life changing perspective. So start searching for win-win relationships and will surely become an effective person.

5) Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

How many times do we get mad at another person because they don’t think the way that you think? We haven;t even tried to hear their side of the story first. We see the world through our eyes even from a baby we are born egotistical and understanding others views does not come natural.

Learning to become an effective person is understanding everyone has their own perspectives and opinions from their own personal experiences in life. Events you should seek first to understand because once you understand the situation and the person’s feelings towards that you might have a better chance of helping them understand you.

For this habit, you need to understand 5 levels of listening

• Ignoring – Rude

It is just downright rude.

• Pretending – Barely Responding

This level is the way most teenagers talk to their moms like ‘yeah’, ‘uh’, ‘right’. You are at least responding to the person.

• Selective Hearing

Here you only hear certain parts of the conversation. Usually only the parts that benefit us and it’s really easy to do this with someone who talks a lot or preschool child.

• Attentive Listening

This is not necessarily listening to the content but rather the way the words are being spoken and you focus on the energy. If you listen to a motivational speaker in another language and you actually get motivated, that’s called attentive listening.

• Empathic Listening

This is the type of listening we hardly ever experience. This type of listening is listening with the intent to understand. You will get inside the other person’s frame of thinking and understand them better.

Its not just the words they say or how they are saying them either. We give them all of our attention including paying attention to their body language and paying attention to their feelings.

This is very powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with, to understand their thoughts, feelings and motive instead of you being a brick wall saying ‘conform to me’.

6) Synergize 

It basically means the interaction of two or more parts to produce an outcome that is greater than the sum of their individual parts. The basic version of synergy comes from teaching and physiology. So one part might be your heart, another might be your brain and the third maybe your stomach. They are very complex organs individually but if they work together they are extremely effective.

Another example will be trees and squirrels. Separately trees can reproduce by their nuts falling to the ground. Unless there’s a really strong wind they won’t spread very quickly.  On the other hand, squirrels can live without trees but they would have to live in bushes and eat only berries.

But they might struggle hibernating and eating food in the winter. Together though the squirrels get protection in the trees as well as tons of nuts to eat. The trees get the benefit of getting their nuts spread across even more in the land. Together they achieve and grow more than if they were separate.

Seeking synergy will benefit your life in many ways but particularly your business, relationships and general life will benefit if you can find synergy. That includes improving yourself by dealing with others.

7) Invest In Yourself

The best investment you can make is in yourself. Investing in ourselves is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in our lives. We are the ones that create results and produce and in order to be effective we need to invest in ourselves. Eating the right kinds of foods, getting enough rest, and exercising on a regular basis.

Exercising on a regular basis will preserve and enhance our capacity to work and adapt and enjoy. It will positively affect your view of yourself, your self-esteem, self-confidence and integrity. Renewing the spiritual dimension provides leadership in your life. The spiritual dimension is your core, your centre, your commitment to your value system.

Meditation, reading literature, relaxing with nature will help you renew spiritually. If we have a deep understanding of our centre and our purpose, we can review and recommit to it frequently. After many months of going for a certain goal, your motivation starts to fade away and that’s when you need to revisit the “why” of what you are trying to do.

8) Take 100% Responsibility

Successful people take 100% responsibility for their own life. To say that “I am responsible for my own life” every morning. Do not blame someone else, don’t blame your parents or boss. Don’t make excuses for anything. If you want to be successful then practice goal setting and write down your goals everyday. This will make you achieving your goal.

You have to decide exactly what you want. Most people in life don’t get what they want because they don’t know what they want. It can be a luxurious car, own house or anything that you need to motivate yourself. Once you know what you want, you have to believe that it is possible, you will visualise success. 

9) Self-Discipline

Effective people have great self-discipline. Discipline is a strong trait of all successful people. It is one that can be developed with consistent use. Anyone that works from home or unsupervised knows the importance of self-discipline. When you are alone, will you choose to go through social media, watch cat videos on YouTube or do something that will be beneficial for your future?

It is much easier to have discipline if you have clear goals and a meaningful purpose. Something that is much more important than meaningless distractions. Effective people are obsessed with self-development. You can’t really claim to be successful if you have given up working on yourself.

This doesn’t mean you are never satisfied, just that you know it is human nature to want to grow and learn new things. Be open to learn new things and develop your mind through mentors, audiobooks and reading. The more you learn, the more you will earn financially and spiritually.

10) Time Management

Effective people manage their time well. Time management is essential to success. Unsuccessful people usually get dressed and overwhelmed when there are too many tasks on their to-do list. Effective people are rarely fazed. They prioritise the big payoff, and most rewarding tasks first and leave the insignificant ones to last.

Knowing it matters most to do the most valuable tasks first. Effective people plan in advance, days, weeks, months ahead. Knowing clearly what needs to be done to complete their jobs and reach their goals. Effective people keep going when they suffer failure and setbacks. We all suffer setbacks.

Every single person that attempts to live their dream life will suffer through failure. Many of them might even lose everything but the effective and successful people never quit. They keep going, knowing their greatest character is formed in adversity.