It is surprising how much the same ideas crop up again and again across the literature.

I have been enjoying the classic, “7 Habits of Highly Successful People” written by Stephen Covey in 1989, and I urge you, if you haven’t already done so, to read this book!

It is chock-full of insightful and profound remarks, good instructions and personal examples. Stephen Covey was hailed by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most successful Americans, a college professor who co-founded a [then] $500m leadership training organisation called Franklyn Covey. So he achieved a very great success himself and wasn’t merely a dry academic! It is my criterion for my own constant self-development to follow the path of those who have already achieved conspicuous success in what I want to do and Stephen Covey is a model of high note.

Covey in fact says, 1. Learn it, 2. Teach it, then 3. Do it! Because when you teach you change your own sense of who you are; it is the easiest way to change your paradigm.

I agree with Covey that habits are not “a given” in the way of being a fixed prescription from one’s own biography, my having often preached (ad nausium!) that we have “a thousand choices in the moment!” This resonates with what Tom Butler-Bowden calls acting in “the gap between stimulus and response”.

Covey moved the whole success literature genre a stage forward from it’s then focus of concentrating upon various tricks and techniques to get things done. He returns the reader to the time-honoured principles – perhaps lost for 50 years before he wrote his book – that strategies are only truly successful when laid upon the bedrock of integrity, honesty, openness and trust, and he offers plenty of examples of how strategies work well, only once character has first been built, and this  can be done consciously. This book is a masterful synthesis of success techniques and personal development training. Stephen Covey in fact, foreshadowed the modern field of personal coaching.

Perhaps the most powerful negotiating strategy one can adopt is “let me listen to you first”.

I know from my own personal experience that being steeped in a stubborn, life-long habit of personal development training, I have when I have come across a number of newer investors, given them more perspective and knowledge-based services than merely sourcing them a property calls for. But this has brought about the benefit of a change in my own business, which is currently being re-branded to that of property purchase consultant. Win-Win!

Stephen charts the graduation of a person’s maturity that goes from dependent, via independent to interdependent, where the latter produces “Win-Win” conditions! I believe Stephen Covey first generated this term, now ubiquitous amongst property investors. And sometimes the only thing better than Win-Win, he reminds us, is to agree “Win-Win-or-No-Deal”, because Win-Lose, or Lose-Win are never good solutions,!

You can do no better than to drink in Stephen Covey’s eloquent and wise turns of phrase first hand, so to that end, and as a thank-you for reading this page I offer you the link below to a You Tube audio abridgement of the book. Enjoy! Go buy the book for yourself even, and read it in full!

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ex9irz2ikDo 1:08:28

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2pvga3DfSa0 1:04:46

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=byITGFRY09Y 1:10:28

Mike