Attack the Right Priorities - Episode: 027
Want to architect your life with purpose? Today we're going to break down chapter two of Stephen Covey's book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. We unveil how the simple yet powerful principle of "beginning with the end in mind" can influence your choices, propel you towards your goals, and shape your legacy. We also underscore the importance of crafting a personal credo that serves as your moral compass amidst life's twists and turns.
Speaker 1
This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. Alright, episode number 27,. What's happening, guys? Hope everyone out there listening is enjoying their day, enjoying life, work, their car ride, wherever you're at. Hope you're enjoying it, soaking in life.
Speaker 1
I am feeling good today. I started this morning off with a morning workout, so I've mentioned on this podcast before I'm in a men's workout group and it's called F3. I don't know if I've ever said the name of it before. It's F3. So you can go to F3nationcom and learn about the organization. There's some quirky things about it, but I've been a part of it for the last three years now and it's had a huge positive impact on my life. Anyway, this morning was for 45 minutes. We're doing a bunch of work and it was hot out, it was sweaty and there were five other guys out there and I had to drink a lot of water afterwards and I came home with grass like all over my body and, yeah, I wouldn't want to start the day any other way. So I'm kind of still riding that high.
Speaker 1
It's the afternoon and right now we're going to dive into the topic for today. I'm reading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. It is not a new book, it's been around for a long time, and the chapter, the habit that I want to talk about is the second habit. It's begin with the end in mind. I want to break it down because I think that it's powerful to reframe how we look at our day to day with the end in mind, with our vision in mind, with our credo in mind. So those are the two parts that I'm going to talk about today. It's our vision and our personal credo. So Covey calls it your personal mission statement, a vision. You know, we all know what a vision is. I'm not going to talk about how to create a vision, but what I do want to point out about vision is that typically, we just get done what we think is most important, and that's the in the moment stuff, the fires that are in front of us, and our brain doesn't think long term unless we guide it to. So this second habit begin with the end in mind. I really want to keep the focus on in the mind, because if you think about the things that you're putting off. Let's just focus on work.
Speaker 1
What are you putting off at work right now? Is it hiring or firing people? Is it creating SOPs for efficiency so you can delegate and grow faster? What are you currently putting off? Because you're focused on those immediate fires that need to be put out and we're telling our brains, telling ourselves, those are important. We need to get those done, and because we don't have the vision in mind of where we want to be five years from now, where we want to be one year from now, we put them off. We put off the hiring and firing. We put off the bigger decisions, the strategic plays that we need to make. We put those off because we don't continue to have the end in mind.
Speaker 1
Same thing goes with the home front. What are you putting off? What have you been telling yourself that you haven't been doing? Have you been saying that you're going to have more one-on-one time with your kids and you just haven't made that happen yet? Or you've been telling yourself you're not going to be as distracted in the evenings, you're going to put your phone away, and that just hasn't happened.
Speaker 1
If you remember that you have this vision of creating a legacy for your kids and connecting with your kids and having an awesome relationship with your kids now and into the future. If you keep that future vision in mind, how would your decisions change right now? So that's vision right. Do you have your vision in mind of what you want your career to look like? Do you want to change the field that you're in? But if you're too focused on the bills you have to pay right now and the immediate needs that you have, you're going to focus on a job that pays you the most money and it might not be the job that fulfills you or excites you, or isn't the meaningful work that you really want long term.
Speaker 1
So keeping our long term vision in mind for the decisions we make right now is what habit number two is all about. You want to be a highly effective person. You keep the end in mind and you'll make decisions that lead you to where you want to go. That's vision. That's one part of beginning with the end in mind. The second is your personal credo that you live by. Yes, we want to have a vision for our business, for our family, the memories we want to make, want to write those down, but we also need this credo, or what Covey calls your personal mission statement, to live by. This is almost like the vision you have for yourself what kind of man you want to be. This personal credo becomes your center.
Speaker 1
So Covey talks about what guides a human being. How do we make our decisions? What are we basing each of our choices off of? He calls it your center. So we can be money centered or career centered.
Speaker 1
If we're money or career centered and we're basing our decisions off of that, we might prioritize working late over family time. I have a guy that I'm working with that has been very career centered for a long time and there's nothing wrong with it. We want to excel in our careers, we want to challenge ourselves by our careers, and he noticed that when he had this center too much, it was bleeding into family time and the dad that he wanted to be and he wasn't connecting with his kids as much at home and he was getting to bed late and not taking care of himself when he was career centered. So the first step is being aware. He became aware of this career centered focus. And then, what do you want to be centered on? And we could say family, but being family centered isn't always the best either, because when we're family centered we might focus too much on our kids and their behavior and doing it the right way and making sure that our kids feel good, and we won't have that long term development, that long term emotional independence in mind if we're just family centered. So this concept of centered you could be money centered, you could be career centered, you could be family centered, possessions, pleasure but to center yourself around a credo, around what you stand for, is the most solid center that we can have. Because we don't control money, we don't control our career, we don't control the members of our family, but we do control our actions. And if we have a credo of how we're going to act and how we're going to respond and how we want to feel and how we want to live, we can always go back to that and allow that to guide us. And if we're living up to the principles that we set for ourselves, then we're going to feel pretty good about life and it's going to be a good guide, a good North Star, all right. So Mainly what we're looking for is like what do you stand for? How do you wanna be remembered In the book Covey does this exercise where you visualize your funeral and at your funeral, all these people are there that you've known throughout your life, and what do they say about you?
Speaker 1
What do you want them to say about you? What do you want your kids to say about you, about what kind of dad you were? Do you want them to say you were a dad who worked really hard and provided for them, which is not a bad thing, right? Maybe that is part of what you want them to say, but what else do you want them to say? That you were a dad that was around, that played with them, that was patient, that showed interest in what they were interested in? How do you want your employees to speak about you? Or your coworkers? Do you want them to think that you were honest and fair and that you listened? Well, what contributions do you want to make to the world?
Speaker 1
When it's all said and done, how do you wanna be remembered? And this is what keeping the end in mind is all about, and it's not self-centered. Self-centered is really focused on how everything impacts you, and these questions really start to clarify how you wanna impact others, what the legacy is that you want to leave. So this past weekend I went, did an early morning workout, grabbed a cup of coffee, went and sat by the river and gave this a shot, answered some of those questions and then yesterday, before I recorded this, I went and kind of read through everything I wrote on Saturday and dialed it in a little bit more. And that's what Covey talks about.
Finding Life Direction and Legacy
Speaker 1
It's a living document. It's not something that you get right the first time or there's a right or wrong answer. It's something that you revisit often. You read it every day and if you need to tweak things, you tweak things. But this is the work. Right, we're responsible to do this kind of exercise because we can get caught up in the daily planning of work, of figuring out school schedules and sports schedules. But if we don't take the time to really tell ourselves the man that we want to be, how we want to live, then we're going to run on autopilot and these questions. I'll run through the questions again. But the purpose of them is to pull out our inner meaning. Our purpose here on the planet is not outside of us, it is in us. We don't go looking for it outside of ourselves, we look in. And Victor Frankel says we detect rather than invent our mission in life, and detecting takes some work, but it doesn't take that much time, just some dedicated work.
Speaker 1
So here are the questions you can take. You can ask yourself to create your own personal credo. What do you stand for? How do you want to be remembered when your kids speak at your funeral? What do you want them to say about you? What kind of dad do you want them to describe you as? How do you want your wife to describe you as a husband? How about your employees? How do you want them to talk about you? What contributions do you want to make to the world? What impact do you want to have?
Speaker 1
All right, those are the questions. Make some time to answer them, start to get some clarity in the direction that you're heading in life and give yourself this north star. Begin with the end in mind. So this exercise, these questions that I'm laying out, is doing that You're understanding what the end is, the legacy you want to leave, who you want to become, and then we'll be able to start living that today. All right, dudes, that's what I got for you today, if you're not driving right now. Follow, hit, download this podcast, click five stars, rate it. The more reviews. The more ratings, the better for us to spread the word of the work. So have an awesome day and I'll catch you next week.
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