‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens’ for All Age Groups

A pandemic special

In 1998, Sean Covey published a bestselling book titled ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens’. Years later, my dad gifted this book to me on my 13th birthday. It quickly became one of the best self-help books that I knew of and got brownie points for ditching the preachy undertones that most books of this genre tend to have.

Recently, while going through my belongings, I found this book again and decided to give it a read. This time, from the perspective of someone in her mid-twenties and I realised two things:

1. These habits are noteworthy for most of us, irrespective of age. They helped me understand the quarter-life crisis better and can similarly help with most matters.
2. They may help ease the mental stress this pandemic has started to cause in our relationships, both with others and with ourselves.

Here are a few gems that I picked up from this book:

Assessing our paradigms and making the shift

This is related to our perceptions — of ourselves, of others and of life. Most perceptions are incomplete and often inaccurate. While positive self-paradigms can bring out the best in us, negative ones can bind us with limitations. It’s important to acknowledge these deceptive perceptions as they keep us from understanding our true depths and potential.

The most interesting part is Sean’s take on the paradigms of life. He believes that to find the paradigm of your life, you need to answer this — “What is the driving force of my life?” Whatever is the most important to you, will become your paradigm or your life centre. Here are some of the most common examples of life paradigms:

Paradigm name: Friend centred Trait: You base your identity on being liked, accepted or popular Issue: You’ll find that you keep altering yourself to suit the needs of your friends so that you can continue to be liked and accepted.

Paradigm name: Spouse centred Trait: The responsibility of your happiness lies with your partner (or you need to have a partner in order to feel loved and happy). Issue: You’ll find that you’ve lost your independent inner strength. It is hard for you to be your own person. In such a state, you may even choose to continue a dying relationship, only because it is hard to let go.

The issue with the above paradigms or any person based paradigm is that we tend to jeopardize our relationships with these people by burying them under a million expectations. We could be driving the very people that we love away from us by centring our life and existence around them.

Why is this relevant during the pandemic?

We’re all amidst a global healthcare and an economic crisis. We’re away from some of our loved ones. Life is still and we’re not in the best of spirits and mental health. We could be putting the burden of this onto our partners or friends who are also dealing with their own issues and moods. Just because we need some help in getting through these times, we could unknowingly want them to centre their lives around us and our miseries which is highly toxic. It’s time for us to recognise and willingly change this pattern.

Here is another common paradigm:

Paradigm name: Work centred Trait: Your life revolves around work alone. You find the incessant need to chase after applause, recognition, status or money. Issue: When work takes up most of your life, you tend to miss out on the other things. God forbid that you get fired or are forced to take some days off, you won’t know what to do with that time. You won’t recognise yourself outside of work and this can take a toll on your mental well being.

The book goes on to say that the real paradigm of life should be the paradigm of principles. Hard work, responsibility, love, compassion and empathy are all principles that you could choose to centre your life around. These can easily be applied to all aspects of life and help in building a strong personal identity.

Packing more into our lives

Sean says that we could all learn something from packing a suitcase. You can fill a lot more stuff inside when you neatly fold and organize your clothes as opposed to just throwing them in. Similarly, the better you organize yourself, the more you’ll be able to pack into your lives — more time for family, friends, work, hobbies, chores and rejuvenation.

Why is this relevant during the pandemic?

Most of us are juggling through numerous hats while working from home. If you’re staying alone — you’re cooking, doing the dishes, going on zoom calls, chopping up the veggies, cleaning up the place, ordering groceries and doing a lot more single-handedly. If you’re a parent, you need to look after your child while also working and managing household chores. This can cause burnout and you may have lesser motivation to power through the day.

The book classifies all activities into two buckets — urgent and important. Based on how we handle these activities, it helps us identify time management patterns that could add to the trouble:

Those who only focus on important urgent things:

Let’s say that task A is urgent and needs to be done today while task B is important but not urgent. People from this category will only focus on what’s urgent. They shall keep doing only the urgent requirements of each day so much so that they’ll forget about task B which was to be done by next week. They’ll work on task B at the last minute, cause chaos, stress and anxiety, will burn out frequently and will have mediocre performance.

The time not spent on task B was spent on cleaning similar messes from the past leading to a vicious circle with hardly any time left for other things in life. This category is popularly known as the procrastinators.

Those who focus on unimportant urgent things:

This category caters to things that are urgent but may not be important. They are categorized by the need to please people and respond to their every desire at once. They are deceptive because urgent and immediate things often feel important but are not. These may have a hard time pleasing everyone and may end up pleasing no one, including themselves. They are popularly known as the yes-men/women.

Those who focus on unimportant and trivial things:

They focus on activities that are neither urgent nor important like excessive napping or binge-watching a series the whole day. Sure, 1 hour of your favourite TV show may be the ideal way to unwind but if it extends to 6 hours, till 2 AM and your eyes burning, it probably is no good for you. People from this category also tend to feel guilty for wasting precious time and are missing out on fun and adventure as well. They’re the ones who won’t go on that trip because they want to catch up on work but when it’s time to work, they’ll take a nap instead. They are popularly known as the slackers.

Those who focus on important things (irrespective of urgency):

These are people who have chalked out the important things in life — quality time with friends, relaxation, getting work done or preparing for an exam. All these activities hold high priorities in their lives but are not necessarily urgent. They’ll plan in ahead to get done with a big project at work or they’ll study at a steady pace throughout the year for that one big exam. They’ll take initiatives to go out with friends and family. The only reason they’re able to do all of this is through prioritization.

To be honest, none of us can fall under one category alone. In different times and situations, we’ve been part of all four categories. The idea is to try and prioritize/plan more while reducing the other three traits in order to have a well-balanced life. While it may seem like fairly simple advice, the tricky part here is to recognize these situations when you’re in them but somehow, it’s always easier to realise in retrospect. This is where the examples help in objectively assessing situations.

While the book has plenty more advice, I’ll leave you with these — the ones that struck me the most, given the times that we’re in.