• Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able”.

• They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior.
• Reactive people, on the other hand, are often affected by their Environment . If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance, and they blame the weather.

• Begin With the End in Mind is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation.

• If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.

What are “first things?” First things are those things you find of most worth. If you put first things first, you are organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities.

• Most of us learn to base our self-worth on comparisons and competition. We think about succeeding in terms of someone else failing—if I win, you lose; or if you win, I lose. Life becomes a zero-sum game. We all play the game, but how much fun is it really?

• Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions.

• Most people listen with the intent to reply, not to understand. You listen to yourself as you prepared in your mind what you are going to say, the questions you are going to ask, etc. You filter everything you hear through your life experiences, your frame of reference.

• Listen deeply
• Understand
• Reply with full understanding

• To put it simply, synergy means “two heads are better than one.” Synergize is the habit of creative cooperation.

• Together, they can produce far better results than they could individually. Synergy lets us discover jointly things we are much less likely to discover by ourselves. It is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

• Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have—YOU. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.

• Increase your capacity to produce and handle the challenges around you. Without this renewal, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive.

• Proactive people work on the things they can do something about.

• Management is doing THINGS RIGHT; leadership is doing the RIGHT THINGS.

• A paradigm is a way to “see” the world.

• We see the world, not as it is, but as we are conditioned to “see” it.

• To make relatively minor changes in your life, focus on your attitudes and behaviors. To make significant, quantum change, work on your basic paradigms.