The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families summary

Imagine you’re on a construction site. You approach some of the workers and ask them what they’re building. “No idea,” they say. You ask to see the blueprint. “We don’t have one,” says the supervisor. “We’re building as we go and figuring it out along the way.” So you ask what purpose the building will serve. “We don’t know yet,” they reply.

When you think of your family in the same way, without a blueprint, how can you know where your family is heading, what it’s for, and what it’s trying to achieve? What you need is a family mission statement. This is where the second habit, begin with the end in mind, comes in.

Think for a moment about things that matter to you and how you’d rank them.

Most people put their relationships at the top of the list – family, friends, pets, work colleagues, and God, for example.

Life is filled with winners and losers. In the world of sport, for example, there can only be one winner of the NFL Superbowl.

But there’s no reason why, in a family setting, there needs to be winners and losers. Win-lose, lose-win, and lose-lose situations create at least one loser – and nobody likes to lose, least of all within a family. When we engage in win-lose battles, we’re only out for ourselves; we no longer care about what is right only about who is right; and we fight over who’s the best, creating a huge negative impact on our family’s culture.

Ask any family counselor what the top complaint they hear from their clients is, and you’ll invariably hear the same answer: poor communication.

In the classic book, The Little Prince, the fox observes that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” He has a point. Seeking to understand another family member’s heartfelt feelings creates a huge deposit in our Emotional Bank Account. So it’s no wonder that our fifth habit is to seek first to understand, then to be understood.

The sum of 1 + 1 can equal 3 – or perhaps more. No, I didn’t flunk basic math. There really are situations where this is, kind of, true.

When two people are put on a project to work together, if they have conflicting views on how to complete it, then the result is probably going to be less than if one of them worked on the project alone – let’s say the sum of their achievement = ½. If they compromise – each side gives way a little to the other – they might even get a result of 1½. And if they use teamwork and combine their efforts they’ll achieve a result of 2.

Imagine you and a neighbor are sawing down similar dead trees in your yards. You have the same age and physical build, and the same saws. You begin at the same time.

You stop after a few hours to rest. But your neighbor stopped for a break every hour. But what’s this? His tree is nearly cut through whereas you’re only halfway. How’s that even possible?