The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens - Habit 4

Hi, and welcome back! As you know, I've recently enjoyed exploring Sean Covey's Book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. Today, I'm excited to share more of its information with you by diving into the fourth habit: Think Win-Win. This habit is the first in the second section, Known as the public victory. The first section is about improving yourself, and the second is about improving your relationship with others.

This fourth habit is about the attitude with which you view life. It's about choosing to see life not as a competition between yourself and others but as something that we can all win if we choose to work together. To get to this mindset, we need to look at life and try to find win-win situations, not Win-lose, lose-win, or lose-lose situations.

Part 1 - The other mindsets

To understand how to have a win-win mindset, we must first learn about the other mindsets: Win Lose, Lose-Win, and Lose-Lose. Sean Covey describes a Win-Lose mindset as a totem pole. This mindset forces you to think that life is a competition that you either win or lose. Win-lose means that somebody else has to lose for you to win, which can destroy your relationships with other people. The second mindset is Lose-Win. People with this mindset are doormats. They choose not to fight for what they want, making it easy for others to step over them. This is a frail mindset and can lead to someone burying feelings, which is unhealthy. The third mindset is Lose-Lose. This mindset is the idea that if I'm going to lose, then we all will. This is the ultimate losing mindset.

Part 2 - Win-Win

Now that we know about the other habits, we can look into the one his chapter discusses: win-win. The Book describes Win-Win as an all-you-can-eat buffet where everybody ends up happy and satisfied with themselves and each other. With this mindset, everyone works towards their goals without hurting others, and everybody ends up happy and satisfied with each other. Win-win feeds off itself; when you help others achieve their goals, they are more likely to help you.

Part 3 - How to accomplish it

The hardest part of this habit is adopting it. The Book says that this habit is best adopted by doing two things. The first thing is adopting the habits of the first section, the private victory, into your life. Practice the first three habits and get them down to a science. The 2nd step to accomplish this habit is to avoid Comparison and Competition. These two mindsets are the opposite of Win-Win thinking.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this habit is about learning to look at the world with the mindset that we can all win if we work towards it. To accomplish this habit, one must forgo comparison and competition and practice the private victory to become a better version of oneself.