Hey all! It’s me, Dylan, once again, with another blog post. This time I’ll be talking about, shocker: my latest project in school! This one was in Maker. We learned about the 7 Habits, by Stephen Covey. The 7 Habits are, well… a series of 7 habits used to better yourself and make yourself a more successful and effective person.

When we started this project, I honestly didn’t love the idea of the 7 Habits but I approached it with an open mind and it has honestly had a huge impact on me. I think that goes to show how I can really enjoy things a lot more when I approach them with no expectations and just see how they go.

The 7 Habits are:

1 – Be Proactive

2 – Begin With the End in Mind

3 – Put First Things First

4 – Think Win-Win

5 – Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood

6 – Synergize

7 – Sharpen the Saw

We learned about each of the habits in order. My personal favourite is habit 5, Seek First to Understand Then to be Understood. I found that putting this habit into place is a great way to avoid having arguments with people and really being able to see things from other people’s perspectives and being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Using this habit has really changed a lot of the ways I think about the world and how I interact with other people. We also, as mandated by the curriculum, learned about different core competencies. The three main core competencies are communication, thinking, and personal and social. They connect very closely with the 7 Habits as well. Throughout the project, we did a lot of things that represented both the 7 Habits and the core competencies. For example, we made three things, 1 audio, 1 video, 1 kinesthetic, and each one had to connect to one of the curricular competencies. For example, for personal and social, I chose to do kinesthetic, and made an origami music note, which symbolizes habit 7, Sharpen the Saw. This is because I use music to refresh and renew myself whenever I feel unmotivated or down. Here’s a picture of the music note I made:

The first half of this project also coincided with Destination Imagination. I feel like if I had brought the 7 Habits into DI, I probably would’ve enjoyed it a lot more.

In my opinion, the most difficult but most rewarding thing that the 7 Habits require you to do, is approaching things with an open mind. I’ve been trying to do it for everything that I do, but I must admit, it’s quite hard. I’m currently doing it for this blog post, since, if I’m being completely honest, I’d rather be under a blanket watching a movie, or catching up on some sleep at the current moment, considering it’s Monday, but I’m putting it all aside and doing this right now, because it’ll benefit me in the long run. I feel like if I hadn’t learned about the 7 Habits, I wouldn’t have been doing this right now and would have been procrastinating doing this for the next three weeks. I’m honestly not even saying this to please my teachers when they read this post. I genuinely feel as though learning about the 7 Habits and putting them into use in my day to day life has had a significant positive impact on me, and I have noticed that I have been procrastinating a lot less, which is something that I do way too much. I’ll explain about my procrastination, uh.. sometime later…

Anyways, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is actually a book, published in 1989 but Stephan Covey. Throughout this project we also read the book, and did workbooks based on what we were reading.

For the other two core competencies, I chose to do a drawing of two people getting along and to make a playlist that I will listen to to sharpen the saw. Here is the drawing:

I have found that I can be my most effective self by using the skills I have to help other people and by taking time to renew myself when I need it.

That’s pretty much it. In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed this project. I learned a lot from it and am definitely benefiting from the knowledge I now have.

I hope you enjoyed all 725 words of this blog post and I’ll see you next time!

Bye!

-Dylan