Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People

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Selling Procedures Reading assignment The 7 habits of highly effective people Throughout the introduction Stephen Covey explains the power of paradigm. One of the important concepts explained in the introduction is perception, which is the immediate or intuitive recognition of a person or a given situation. People do not have a full understanding of a scenario until they actually understand the whole picture, or the way they perceive a situation. There are numerous examples given including one that I found pretty interesting. Stephen was on a subway with many others and a father and his kids got on the subway shortly after. The kids were being loud and obnoxious and disturbing the people around them. The father was not doing anything to stop their behavior so Stephen asked him politely if he could stop them from disturbing the people on the subway. The father responded “Sorry. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.” After hearing him say that, Stephen then understood why the father was not doing anything about the kids’ behavior. He has not been in that situation before so his perception was immediately changed. Another important context given is the sequential stages of growth and development. An example is this is trying to find out and understand who you really are or someone close to you. His son did not fit in at school, was un-athletic, and was academically challenged. That being said, as a parent, he tried to support his son in every way so that he would be ‘accepted’. He and his wife did not see good results by just giving him support, so they tried doing things in a different way. They began to see their son in terms of his own uniqueness, and get a sense of his identity, individuality, separateness, and worth. In doing
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