For ardent business book lovers, the name Covey carries a lot of cachet. Stephen R. Covey was one of the world’s foremost leadership experts. He was named one of TIME’s 25 Most Influential Americans and his masterpiece, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has sold a staggering 20 million copies… so far. His son’s resume is equally impressive. Stephen M. R. Covey is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author who has challenged our beliefs about trust.
Below are some of our tops takeaways from the Coveys.
1. The Most Important Skill
“Communication is the most important skill in life,” writes Stephen R. Covey in his blockbuster The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. “We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You’ve spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening? What training or education do you have that enables you to listen so that you really, deeply understand another human being from that individual’s own frame of reference?” Read more about how you can brush up on your listening skills here.
2. The Three Lives
In Primary Greatness, a posthumous collection of Stephen R. Covey’s less known essays, he discusses the three lives that all of us lead:
1. Public life
2. Private life
3. Secret life
As Justin Gasbarre writes in his summary, “we need to be self-aware enough to spend time examining and exploring our secret life since that is truly who we are and who we want to be.” Learn more about our secret life, as well as the other two lives we lead, here.
3. Continuous improvement
In his book The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey discusses Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of “continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life”. So what does this have to do with trust? Covey explains: “When people see you as a learning, growing, renewing organization (or individual), they develop confidence in your ability to succeed in a rapidly changing environment, enabling you to build high trust relationships and move at incredible speed.”
4. The 5 Actions of Smart Trust
Stephen M.R. Covey continues the idea of “smart trust” in the aptly titled Smart Trust. According to Covey, there are 5 Actions of Smart Trust which “improve our own quality of trust while simultaneously planting seeds of trust’s benefits in the lives of those around us”. They are:
1. Choose to believe in trust
2. Start with yourself
3. Declare your intent, and assume positive intent in others
4. Do what you say you’re going to do
5. Lead out in extending trust to others
Some of the actions are self-explanatory, others not so much. Check out insight #2 of our summary to learn more about each.
What’s your favourite takeaway from the Coveys?
