Academic life and Skills I Karwan H. Sherwani

1. Academic life and Skills I Karwan H. Sherwani

2. A critical analysis of the freshman experience • There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living. • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People provides a holistic, integrated approach towards personal and interpersonal effectiveness. • Habits are patterns of behavior that involve three overlapping components: knowledge, desire, and skill. 

3. The Power of a Paradigm • Paradigmis a word which means "a pattern or model; the generally accepted perspective. • A paradigm is the mental maps that we use to describe the world around us. They are the lens that each of us uses to understand everyone and everything. The key of a paradigm isn't as much in the true nature of a thing as much as our perception of the thing. • The way we perceive, understand & accordingly interpret and judge things.

4. Paradigm Shift • A paradigm shift is the change in one's perspective concerning the way we perceive things. They are two different things: changing the way we see things around us and changing the things around us. Covey describes how once he was frustrated in the subway to see the very bad behavior of a man's children. • A "paradigm shift" occurs when our paradigms change, allowing us to see the world in a new light.  Sometimes this happens suddenly, and sometimes very gradually.

5. Do you see an old woman or a young woman?

6. If you look at the picture one way, you see an old woman. If you look another way, you see a young woman. How you interpret the picture depends upon your paradigm. And you paradigm determines what are going to say about the picture. Our behavior is the result of the way we see the world. Listen to others and be open to their perception, to get a far more objective view. Two people can see the same thing, disagree and yet both be right.

7. "Habits" • we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. • Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. • Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three. • By working on knowledge, skill, and desire, we can break through to new levels of personal and interpersonal effectiveness as we break with old paradigms that may have been a source of our habits.

8. Can we create a HABIT? • Habits are learned and unlearned • Habits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness or ineffectiveness.

10. Principles of Growth and Change • The principle of growth and change refers that there is some quick and easy way to achieve quality of life -- personal effectiveness and rich, deep relationships with other people -- without going through the natural process of work and growth that makes it possible. • There are sequential stages of growth and development. For instance, a child learns to turn over, to sit up, to crawl, and then to walk and run. Each step is important and each one takes time. No step can be skipped. • People know and accept this fact or principle of process in the area of physical things, but to understand it in emotional areas, in human relations, and even in the area of personal character is less common and more difficult.

11. Maturity Range Independence

12. P/PC Balance • “The fable of the goose and golden eggs” • The social Mirror and Social Maps • 1- Genetic determinism, DNA, grandparents. • 2- Psyhic determinisim, Parents, childhood experience. • 3- Environmental determinism, boss, your spouse, economic situation • Stimulus and Response

13. The Way We See the Problem is the Problem • People are intrigued when they see good things happening in the lives of individuals, families, and organizations that are based on solid principles. They admire such personal strength and maturity, such family unity and teamwork, such adaptive synergistic organizational culture. • And their immediate request is very revealing of their basic paradigm. • "How do you do it? Teach me the techniques.“ • What they're really saying is, "Give me some quick fix advice or solution that will relieve the pain in my own situation.“ • The more people are into quick fix and focus on the acute problems and pain, the more that very approach contributes to the underlying chronic condition.

14. Listening to Our Language

15. Circle of Concern/ Circle of Influence

16. Circle of Concern/ Circle of Influence • The excellent way to become more self-aware regarding our own degree of proactivity is to look at where we focus our time and energy. • We each have a wide range of concerns- our health, our children, problems at work, the national debt, nuclear war. • We could separate those from things in which we have no particular mental or emotional involvement by creating a “Circle of Concern.” • By determining which of these two circles is the focus of most of our time and energy , we can discover much about the degree of our proactivity.

17. Proactive people focus their efforts in the circle of influence they wok on the things they can do something about.

18. Reactive people, on other hand, focus their efforts in the circle of concern. • They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control. Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increase feelings of victimization.

19. The Story of Organizations and Execution • Stephen worked with one organization for several years that was headed by a very dynamic person. • He was creative, talented, capable and brilliant and everyone knows it. But he had a very dictatorial style of management. The net affect was that he alienated almost the entire executive team surrounding him. • Once the executive team gather in the corridors and complain to each other about this manger. • One of the executives was proactive, instead of criticizing them, he would compensate for them. Where the president was weak in his style, he’d try to buffer his own people and make such weaknesses irrelevant. • This man focused on his circle of influence.

20. The Story of Organizations and Execution • This man treated like a gofer, also. But he would do more than what expected. He anticipated the president’s need and when he presented information, he also gave his analysis and recommendations. • From that time, the president took this man’s analysis and recommendations into consideration. instead of saying “go for this” and “go for that” but to this man it was “ What’s your opinion?” • So his circle of influence had grown. • This caused quite a stir in the organization.

21. “This man’s success wasn’t dependent on his circumstances. many others were in the same situation. It was his chosen response to those circumstances, his focus on his Circle of Influence, that made this difference.”