Habit 1 Of Highly Effective People - Be Proactive

Описание: Hi there

Steve Kaufmann. This is going to be the first in a series of 7 videos where I deal with each of the seven habits of highly effective people that Stephen Covey covers in his book (of the same name) which I made a reference to in my video last week. First of all I’ll go over very quickly the 7 habits and this is advice for people in their lives, advice for Managers, advice for business people and for people generally. You can Google Stephen Covey’s 7 habits and you will get a lot more information, but there are 7 habits.

The first 3 have to do with Independence. The next 3 have to do with interdependence and the 7th one has to do with constantly renewing yourself and constantly improving.

So the first one today, I am going to talk about the need to be proactive. I think it’s true in many things in life, if we wait for things to happen to us, some things may have, I mean, many things will happen to you. However by being proactive and taking initiatives and by pursuing your goals, it is more likely that good things are going to happen to you. And certainly I found in language learning that as long as I was a passive learner in school with a Teacher teaching me and as long as I waited for the Teacher somehow or the text book to teach me, I was not making very good progress.

Once I took control of my learning, once I went out – and this meant looking for things in the language that interested me; books, in the case with Chinese, in those days before the internet, books with vocabulary lists behind each chapter. Taking the initiative in terms of what I wanted to learn about, what aspects of the language I needed to work on.

Taking the initiative not to stay with the program that the Teacher is leading you into in the classroom. Many Teachers don’t like this. They don’t want the students to get ahead of them, this is so wrong because the language isn’t just chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3. The language is basically a whole package and we learn different parts of it again and again and again and so for the student to go out and find things of interest to him or her and then go back and then go back and do what they are doing in class, all of this is good. You have to take the initiative, you have to take responsibility.

There are people who say that there’s no bad learners, only a bad teacher. I don’t believe that at all. I think whether you are in a classroom, or whether you are studying on your own, only those learners who take the initiative, who are motivated to take charge of their learning, are going to be successful. And we have amble evidence of this in our school system in Canada, and I am sure in other language schools where a small percentage of the learners actually improve and equally large numbers can improve on their own if they are motivated, so that the important point is not the number of instructional hours, but rather the important point is; to what extend are you prepared to be proactive and take charge of your own learning.

So that is the first of the 7 habits that Stephen Covey talks about and it might even be the most important.

Be proactive. Take charge of your own learning. And that is the first of the 7 habits of highly effective people.

Thank you for listening.