Seven Gifts that Multiply Happiness

By Steve Brunkhorst

Did you know that there are gifts that will multiply your happiness when you give them away?

1. Share appreciation

Tell someone how much you appreciate the faith they've shown in you. Thank them sincerely for being part of your life. Tell them how much they are needed. Feeling appreciated is one of the most important needs that people have. When you share with someone your appreciation and gratitude, they will not forget you. Appreciation will return to you many times.

2. Share time

Balance your time expenditures so you can spend time with the people that you love. Support local organizations by sharing your special talents. Volunteer time for projects that benefit others in your community, country, and world. When we slow down and observe our thoughts closely, we will sometimes uncover gifts and talents we didn't know we had. Sharing time and talents can result in discoveries that bring happiness beyond measure.

3. Share knowledge and ideas

Tell someone about a great book that you read so they can benefit from it too. Teach a new concept or idea that you've learned. One of the best ways to strengthen new concepts in your mind is to share them with others. The more often you share what you've learned, the stronger that information will become in your memory. Sharing knowledge also provides solutions to problems. The more knowledge we share, the more knowledge we receive in return.

4. Share friendship

Acknowledge someone's strengths. Let them know that you are willing to be there when they need you. Visit someone you haven't seen for a long time. Telephone friends or relatives who live far away. Introduce two friends who don't know each other. Bringing one individual into another's life can result in tremendous changes for both people, and for you. We succeed with the help of others. People grow by growing together. If you'd like to have many friends, then share friendship with others generously.

5. Share kindness
Perform a random act of kindness for someone: a smile, compliment, or a favor just for fun. These will multiply and spread very rapidly. There is a powerful quote by Stephen Jay Gould who said, "The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days." Kindness is priceless. The love, kindnesses, and value we have given authentically to others will be our remaining treasures at the end of life.

6. Share experience
Keep written or photo journals of your life: things you've done, places you've traveled, things you've learned. Record successes and failures. Share a happy memory. Also share the difficult times that have helped you become stronger and wiser. When shared, the value of these experiences multiplies. Our unique experiences and perceptions of life are priceless. Sharing experiences will build one of the strongest bonds with others. Our descendants can learn and benefit from our lifetime experiences for generations to come.

7. Share enthusiasm
If you are excited about a new success, tell someone. If you're ecstatic about a new project, show your glow. Your enthusiasm will inspire others to move forward with actions that bring rewarding achievements.

Enthusiasm keeps us looking forward to the future. It brings many of those exciting days that we can savor with gratitude. That kind of glowing excitement for life is impossible to hide. It is contagious and will quickly spread to others.

Think about this statement by Norman MacEwan: "Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."

Sharing these gifts sends our thoughts on a far-reaching journey where they will touch many lives, and reconnect with our own. Would you like to receive these same life-enhancing gifts again and again? Begin multiplying your happiness by sharing one of these special gifts with someone today!

Put First Things First - Principles of Personal Management

Personal Management is the exercise of independent will to create a life congruent with your values, goals and mission. The fourth human endowment, Independent Will, is the ability to make decisions and choices and act upon them. Integrity is our ability to make and keep commitments to ourselves. Management involves developing the specific application of the ideas. We should lead from the right brain (creatively) and manage from the left brain (analytically).

In order to subordinate your feelings, impulses and moods to your values, you must have a burning "YES!" inside, making it possible to say "No" to other things. The "Yes" is our purpose, passion, clear sense of direction and value.

Time management is an essential skill for personal management. The essence of time management is to organize and execute around priorities. Methods of time management have developed in these stages: 1) notes and checklists - recognizing multiple demands on our time; 2) calendars and appointment books - scheduling events and activities; 3) prioritizing, clarifying values - integrating our daily planning with goal setting (The downside of this approach is increasing efficiency can reduce the spontaneity and relationships of life.); 4) managing ourselves rather than managing time - focusing in preserving and enhancing relationships and accomplishing results, thus maintaining the P/PC balance (production versus building production capacity).

A matrix can be made of the characteristics of activities, classifying them as urgent or not urgent, important or not important. List the activities screaming for action as "Urgent." List the activities contributing to your mission, value or high-priority goals as "Important."

Quadrant I activities are urgent and important - called problems or crises. Focusing on Quadrant I results in it getting bigger and bigger until it dominates you.

Quadrant III activities are urgent and not important, and often misclassified as Quadrant I.

Quadrant IV is the escape Quadrant - activities that are not urgent and not important.

Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because they aren't important. They shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II.

Quadrant II activities are important, but not urgent. Working on this Quadrant is the heart of personal time management. These are PC activities.

Quadrant II activities are high impact - activities that when done regularly would make a tremendous difference in your life. (Including implementing the Seven Habits.)

Initially, the time for Quadrant II activities must come from Quadrants III and IV. Quadrant I can't be ignored, but should eventually shrink with attention to Quadrant II.

1) Prioritize 2) Organize Around Priorities 3) Discipline yourself

Self discipline isn't enough. Without a principle center and a personal mission statement we don't have the necessary foundation to sustain our efforts.

Covey has developed a Quadrant II organizer meeting six criteria:

Coherence - integrates roles, goals, and priorities.

Balance - keeps various roles before you so they're not neglected.

Quadrant II Focus - Weekly - the key is not to prioritize what's in your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

A People Dimension - think of efficiency when dealing with things, but effectiveness when dealing with people. The first person to consider in terms of effectiveness is yourself. Schedules are subordinated to people.

Flexibility - the organizer is your servant, not your master

Portability

There are four key activities in Quadrant II organizing, focusing on what you want to accomplish for the next 7 days: 1) Identify Roles 2) Select Goals - two or three items to accomplish for each role for the next week, including some of your longer term goals and personal mission statement 3) Scheduling/Delegating - including the freedom and flexibility to handle unanticipated events and the ability to be spontaneous 4) Daily Adapting - each day respond to unanticipated events, relationships and experiences in a meaningful way.

Here are five advantages of this organizer: 1) It's principle-centered - it enables you to see your time in the context of what's important and what's effective. 2) It's conscience directed - it enables you to organize your life around your deepest values. 3) It defines your unique mission, including values and long-term goals. 4) It helps you balance your life by identifying roles. 5) It gives greater perspective through weekly organizing.

The practical thread is a primary focus on relationships and a secondary focus on time, because people are more important than things.

The second critical skill for personal management is delegation. Effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity there is. Delegation enables you to devote your energies to high level activities in addition to enabling personal growth for individuals and organizations. Using delegation enables the manager to leverage the results of their efforts as compared to functioning as a "producer."

There are two types of delegation: Gofer Delegation and Supervision of Efforts (Stewardship).
Using Gofer Delegation requires dictating not only what to do, but how to do it. The supervisor then must function as a "boss," micromanaging the progress of the "subordinate." The supervisor thus loses a lot of the leveraging benefits of delegation because of the demands on his time for follow up. An adversarial relationship may also develop between the supervisor and subordinate.

More effective managers use Stewardship Delegation, which focuses on results instead of methods. People are able to choose the method to achieve the results. It takes more time up front, but has greater benefits.

Stewardship Delegation depends on trust, but it takes time and patience. The people may need training and development to acquire the competence to rise to the level of that trust.

Stewardship Delegation requires a clear, up-front mutual understanding of and commitment to expectations in five areas:

1. Desired Results - Have the person see it, describe it, make a quality statement of what the results will look like and by when they will be accomplished.

2. Guidelines - Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate, and what potential "failure paths" might be. Keep the responsibility for results with the person delegated to.

3. Resources - Identify the resources available to accomplish the required results.

4. Accountability - Set standards of performance to be used in evaluating the results and specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.

5. Consequences - Specify what will happen as a result of the evaluation, including psychic or financial rewards and penalties.

Using Stewardship Delegation, we are developing a goose (to produce golden eggs) based on internal commitment. We must avoid Gofer Delegation to get the golden egg or we kill the goose - the worker reverts to the gofer's credo: "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it."

This approach is a new paradigm of delegation. The steward becomes his own boss governed by his own conscience, including the commitment to agreed-upon desired results. It also releases his creative energies toward doing whatever is necessary in harmony with correct principles to achieve those desired results.

Immature people can handle fewer results and need more guidelines and more accountability interviews. Mature people can handle more challenging desired results with fewer guidelines and accountability interviews.

Begin With The End In Mind, Personal Leadership

When we begin with the end in mind, we have a personal direction to guide our daily activities, without which we will accomplish little toward our own goals. Beginning with the end in mind is part of the process of personal leadership, taking control of our own lives.

All things are created twice. We create them first in our minds, and then we work to bring them into physical existence. By taking control of our own first creation, we can write or re-write our own scripts, thus taking some control and responsibility for the outcome. We write or re-write our scripts using our imagination and conscience.

There are three major aspects of our personal management. First is leadership - what do Iwant to accomplish? Second is management - how can I best accomplish it? Third is productivity - doing it.

A starting point in beginning with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement, philosophy or credo. It will help you focus on what you want to be (character), do (contributions and achievements) and on the values and principles upon which your being and doing are based. The personal mission statement gives us a changeless core from which we can deal with external change.

We must reexamine the center of our life. Our center is the source of our security, guidance, wisdom and power. Making people or things outside ourselves important places ourselves at the mercy of mood swings, inconsistent behavior and uncontrollable changes of fortune. Being self-centered is too limiting - people develop poor mental health in isolation.

By centering our lives on correct principles, we create a stable, solid foundation for the development of our life support factors and embrace and encompass the truly important areas of our lives. Successful relationships, achievement and financial security will radiate from the principle center.

The principles we base our lives on should be deep, fundamental truths, classic truths, or generic common denominators. They will become tightly interwoven themes running with exactness, consistency, beauty and strength through the fabric of our lives.

In developing your personal mission statement, you can use your creative ability to imagine life milestones such as birthdays, anniversaries, retirement and funerals. What accomplishments would you like to celebrate? Visualize them in rich detail.

You can make your mission statement balanced and easier to work with by breaking it down into the specific role areas of your life and the goals you want to accomplish in each area.

If you find your actions aren't congruent with your mission statement, you can create affirmations to improve. An affirmation should have five ingredients: it should be personal, positive, present tense, visual and emotional.

Be Proactive, Personal Vision

In our society, we have accepted 3 deterministic explanations of human limitations: genetic determinism, psychic determinism and environmental determinism.

On closer examination, we discover that between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose. We don't have to function on "auto pilot".

Proactivity means that, as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.

Our most difficult experiences become the crucibles forging our character and developing our inner powers.

There are three central values in life: the experiential (that which happens to us), the creative (that which we bring into existence), and the attitudinal (our response to difficult circumstances). What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.

Taking the initiative means recognizing our responsibility to make things happen. Use your Resourcefulness and Initiative.

Proactivity is grounded in facing reality but also understanding we have the power to choose a positive response to our circumstances.

We need to understand how we focus our time and energy to be effective. The things we are concerned about could be described as our "Circle of Concern". There are things we can really do something about, that can be described as our "Circle of Influence". When we focus our time and energy in our Circle of Concern, but outside our Circle of Influence, we are not being effective. However, we find that being proactive helps us expand our Circle of Influence. (Work on things you can do something about.)

Reactive people focus their efforts on the Circle of Concern, over things they can't control. Their negative energy causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.

Our problems fall in three areas: Direct Control (problems involving our own behavior), Indirect Control (problems involving other people's behavior), or No Control (problems we can do nothing about). Direct Control problems are solved through the private victories of Habits 1, 2 and 3. Indirect Control problems are solved through methods of influence, the public victories of Habits 4,5, and 6. No Control problems are best dealt with through attitude.

The Circle of Concern is filled with the "have" statements. The Circle of Influence is indicated by "be" statements. Anytime we think the problem is "out there," that thought is the problem.

While we are free to choose our actions, the consequences of our actions are governed by natural law. Sometimes we make choices with negative consequences, called mistakes. We can't recall or undo past mistakes. The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. Success is the far side of failure.

At the heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. Our integrity in keeping commitments and the ability to make commitments are the clearest manifestations of proactivity.

Personality Vs Character Ethics

There have been two dominant theories of achieving success: the personality ethic and the character ethic.

According to the character ethic, it is most important to focus on integrating the principles of effective living into one's character. This may be a long-term process, but working on the character, including an effective view of the world, is getting at the root from which behavior flows and so is fundamental. The character ethic sees individual development as a long-term process bearing results according to the law of the harvest.

According to the personality ethic, there are skills and techniques one may learn and a public image, personality and attitudes one may develop that result in success. The problem is, eventually we may be discovered as insincere and shallow. These ideas may be helpful when they flow naturally from a good character and the right motives, but they are secondary.

A paradigm is a model, theory or explanation of something else. It is the "lens" of our preconceived notions through which we view the world. If our paradigm is not close to reality, our attitudes, behaviors and responses will not be effective or appropriate. We will be as lost as a person trying to function in India with a map of Australia. We can only accomplish quantum improvement in our lives if we accomplish a paradigm shift resulting in a more accurate and effective view of the world. Some paradigm shifts may be fast (a blinding flash of the obvious), some are more slow (a change in character).

The Seven Habits is a principle-centered paradigm. Principles are guidelines for human conduct that are proven to have enduring, permanent value -- they are fundamental.

From Dependence to Interdependence

Our character is a composite of our habits. Changing habits is hard, but can be done by tremendous commitment.

A (good) habit can be defined as the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire. Change is a cycle of being and seeing (visualization).

Our objective is to move progressively on a maturity continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence. Although independence is the current paradigm of our society, we can accomplish much more by cooperation and specialization. However, we must achieve independence before we can choose interdependence.

Habits 1, 2 and 3 (Be Proactive, Begin With The End In Mind, Put First Things First) deal with self mastery. They are the "private victories" required for character growth. Private victories precede public victories.

Habits 4, 5 and 6 are the more personality-oriented "public victories" of Teamwork, Cooperation and Communication.

Habit 7 is the habit of Renewal, creating an upward spiral of growth.

Effectiveness lies in balancing our Production (P) with building Production Capacity (PC).

Organizationally, the PC principle is to always treat others as you want them to treat you.

This process of growth will be evolutionary, but the net effect will be revolutionary.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Stephen Covey’s theory (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) is applicable to our personal life, our social life and our working life. According to Covey, our paradigms affect how we interact with others, which in turn affects how they interact with us. Therefore Covey argues that any effective self-help program must begin with an "inside-out" approach, rather than looking towards our problems as "being out there" (an outside-in approach). We must start with examining our own character, paradigms, and motives.

The Seven Habits

1. Be proactive. This is the ability to control one's environment, rather than have it control you, as is so often the case. Self determination, choice, and the power to decide response to stimulus, conditions and circumstances

2. Begin with the end in mind. Covey calls this the habit of personal leadership - leading oneself that is, towards what you consider your aims. By developing the habit of concentrating on relevant activities you will build a platform to avoid distractions and become more productive and successful.

3. Put first things first. Covey calls this the habit of personal management. This is about organising and implementing activities in line with the aims established in habit 2. Covey says that habit 2 is the first, or mental creation; habit 3 is the second, or physical creation. .

4. Think win-win. Covey calls this the habit of interpersonal leadership, necessary because achievements are largely dependent on co-operative efforts with others. He says that win-win is based on the assumption that there is plenty for everyone, and that success follows a co-operative approach more naturally than the confrontation of win-or-lose.

5. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. One of the great maxims of the modern age. This is Covey's habit of communication, and it's extremely powerful. Covey helps to explain this in his simple analogy 'diagnose before you prescribe'. Simple and effective, and essential for developing and maintaining positive relationships in all aspects of life.

6. Synergize. Covey says this is the habit of creative co-operation - the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which implicitly lays down the challenge to see the good and potential in the other person's contribution.

7. Sharpen the saw. This is the habit of self renewal, says Covey, and it necessarily surrounds all the other habits, enabling and encouraging them to happen and grow. Covey interprets the self into four parts: the spiritual, mental, physical and the social/emotional, which all need feeding and developing..

8. Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs. Striving towards "greatness", means to act with integrity as an individual and to help others to do the same. According to Covey, this habit represents the 3rd dimension of his model. Greatness is the overlap of:

Personal greatness. Applying the 7 habits in the forms of: vision, discipline, passion and conscience.

Leadership greatness. Applying the 4 roles of leadership, which are modeling the 7 habits:

Path finding. Creating the blueprint.
Aligning. Creating a technically elegant system of work.
Empowering. Releasing the talent, energy, and contribution of people.
Modeling. To build trust with others. The heart of effective leadership.

Organizational greatness. This is greatness turned into a vision, mission and values. This brings clarity, commitment, translation, synergy, and enables accountability.