THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE
MASONS AND LODGES
by Wor. John
Shroeder
We’re going to have a short
responsive reading.
Whence came you as an Entered
Apprentice?
Together -- [Response]
What came ye here to do?
Together -- [Response]
“...and to IMPROVE MYSELF IN
MASONRY.”
What does that mean to you? What
have you done about it TODAY? This week? This month? This year?
How many of you know who your Lodge
Education Officer (LEO) is? How many of you would be able to make a list of the
five most important and worthwhile lessons you have learned from your LEO this
year? What do you expect of your LEO? Does he meet your expectations? If not, is
that your responsibility or his?
On a recent cross-country truck trip
with my daughter, we alternated the driving duties. When I was not driving I
listened to the tapes taken from the best-selling book, Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People by Stephen Covey. This book is not just another quickie
self-improvement book full of sales tricks. Author Covey says we can receive
satisfaction and rewards in life only by acting on our inner values and
integrity.
Sounds kind of like a Mason,
doesn’t he? The tapes made me think (even though I was keeping one eye on my
daughter’s truck driving.) I thought I would like to share his approach with
you today to see if it makes you think also. But, nobody else can think for you,
you have to think for yourself.
What I normally do in my workshop is
to outline the seven habits discussed in the book and then have attendees form
into discussion groups with each group taking about 20 minutes to prepare a 2 -
5 minute report for the rest of us on how one of the habits they select can best
contribute to more effective members, leaders, and lodges. We then have a
general discussion of the reports. This provides everyone opportunity to become
actively involved in Masonic education. Today, we will not have time for the
discussion groups so I will outline the Seven Habits and ask that you take them
back to your lodge to implement.
We say that it is our purpose to
take good men and make them better. How can these seven habits be worked into
our daily lives as internalized habits or principles to make each of us a better
man and thus to make our relations with our families, our lodges, our
communities, the nation and the world better? This is going to involve some
active initiative by you upon completion of today’s program.
Dr. Covey defines a habit as the
conjunction of Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes necessary to make a habit an
effective part of our daily lives:
KNOWLEDGE - knowing WHAT needs to be
done.
SKILLS - the ability to implement
the WHAT.
ATTITUDES - the ingrained desire or
motivation to accomplish the WHAT.
Dr. Covey says that if we want to
make minor improvements in our effectiveness, we can work on our skills,
attitudes and knowledge but to make major improvements, we need to change our
paradigms.
Webster defines paradigm as a role,
pattern or model. Dr. Covey says it is the mental map that we carry with us and
by which we judge all other things.
He gives an example of a paradigm
shift, describing a Sunday morning subway ride with few passengers, quietly and
privately enjoying their newspapers and the ride. At a stop a man boards with
raucous children who disrupt the mood of the entire car. They are disturbing all
who were previously enjoying the peace and quiet. Finally, Stephen Covey, as
politely as he can, but also very directly, admonishes the father to get control
of his children. The man breaks down and tells Stephen that they have just come
from the hospital where his wife, the mother of the children, just died, and
they don’t know how to handle this crumbling of their world. Suddenly,
Stephen’s entire view of the situation is changed.
He now feels no resentment but only
sympathy and warmth for the family.
The situation has not changed at
all, but his paradigm has changed and it entirely reverses his attitude and how
he will behave. To make these seven habits have maximum effect, we must work to
change our own paradigms, to always look for that empathy he felt after learning
of the family loss.
The habits are divided into three
groups:
Group I contains habits 1, 2,
& 3 which are character habits.
Group II contains habits 4, 5, and
6 which are personality habits.
Group III contains habit number 7
which summarizes the other 6.
Most of the human relations seminars
available address Group II, the personality habits, and go for the “quick
fix”. These may resolve acute problems but usually fail to address the
chronic, underlying problems which will result in the recurrence of the acute
symptoms. I feel that this is very much like our approach in Freemasonry: First
we are to convert ourselves from rough to perfect ashlars (the character habits)
and then we can help our Brethren become better men by employing the personality
habits.
THE CHARACTER HABITS
The first habit discussed is BE
PRO-ACTIVE.
By this, the author means, “Take
responsibility for your own actions and your own futures. Don’t blame your
circumstances, situation, or problems on your company, boss, parents, spouse,
neighbors, children environment or you Lodge Education Officer, as I noted
earlier. Take charge of your life. ACT, rather than RE-act.” This applies to
organizations as well. How many times have you heard someone say, “Our Lodge
would do thus-and so but the DDGM [or the Grand Master, or the Lodge Secretary,
or whoever] won’t support it.” Or, “I wish we could do thus-and-so but the
Master isn’t interested in that.” And the matter is dropped there. One of
our diplomatic problem solvers has a bumper sticker which reads, “If the
people will lead, the leaders will follow!” Isn’t that a thought-provoking
idea!
I have a friend who once felt
totally alone, and under intense professional pressure in a very remote
situation with great responsibility and with no support structure for him to
turn to. He confessed that he stayed in bed for two days and may have had what
we term a nervous breakdown until the thought came to him in his despair, “No
one has dominion over my life except as I grant it to him.” This thought
converted him on the spot to a self-guided individual. Others recognized this in
him and turned to him for guidance and support and he continued to gain strength
from this. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her Civil Rights talks, said, “No one can
make you feel inferior without your permission.” This concept can give each of
us and our organizations the will to do what we will.
When I was in the third grade I was
asked to memorize a poem for a Church program. The title was “It Isn’t the
Church, It’s You.” The poem described all the criticisms which members make
of their churches and the bottom line was, don’t blame the church for those
things about it which you find unsatisfactory. The Church is You and you can
change yourself and so change the church. I think I understood this even as a
third grader. Isn’t that true also of our lodges? Whenever any Brother
complains about your lodge, ask him, in the most friendly manner, what he is
going to do to improve the situation. Of course this only works if you are
willing to stretch forth your hand to help him.
A feature article appeared in a
recent Washington Post about making a list of “Fifty Things I Want to Do
Before I Die.” This sort of goal setting can help stop aimless drifting and
give us more excitement, more accomplishments, and make us a better and more
interesting person to be around. What 50 things would you like to do before you
die?
What would you like to see your
Lodge do before you die? As the Nike shoe ad says, “Just DO IT!” This is the
essence of “BE PRO-ACTIVE”
The second habit is BEGIN WITH
THE END IN MIND
You have all heard the following
aphorisms:
“Don’t start the engine until
you know your destination.” “Plan ahead.”
“Don’t put the tongue in motion
until the mind is in gear.” “If you don’t know where you want to go, it
doesn’t matter what route you take.”
Author Covey’s family developed a
family mission statement to which all family members could subscribe. This led
him to his widely praised tape series, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective
Families.” What is your Lodge’s mission? Has it been stated? Would it be
helpful if it could be written down for all members to subscribe to? How do we
do planning without a mission in mind (or how do we plan our route if we don’t
know what destination we are seeking?)
The exercise of writing a Lodge
mission and obtaining concurrence in that mission statement can be very useful
to an organization and provide new insights and inspire renewed dedication. How
general or specific should a Lodge mission statement be? How do you fit into the
Lodge mission?
A few years ago, Coca Cola
Corporation worked long and hard to develop a mission statement and finally
settled on: “To satisfy the World’s thirst.” This is very general and
opens up many options. It did not prevent them from coming up with the new Coca
Cola and then returning to the Classic Coca Cola and adding Cherry Coca Cola,
etc. It also opened up the field to Iced Tea and set a worldwide arena for their
business horizons.
Is it a part of our mission to sell
Christmas trees or fireworks? Or are these means to our larger mission
accomplishment? If means, are these the best means available? What does “Take
good men and make them better” mean to our mission statement? Better in what
way? What activities or programs or counseling or other ways do we provide to
make ourselves and other men better? What is the Masonic mission for each of us?
What have you done to make a Brother a better man today? This week? This month?
The third habit is PUT FIRST
THINGS FIRST
This follows on the second habit.
Once we know where we want to go, what we want to accomplish, then we can
internalize and make a part of our very fiber, the total understanding of what
is most important and what is of lesser importance. This is far more than just
the assignment of priorities to a list of tasks which confront us. It does no
good to buy an expensive wardrobe for the ski slopes if we don’t first put
forth the effort to learn to ski and is less than useless if it is not important
in our personal system of values to be a well-dressed skier.
A feature article in a recent
Washington Post made a case that the purpose for feeding children is a two-fold
one: to provide pleasure and to provide needed nourishment, just as it is for
ourselves. The author said that forcing a child to swallow food they find
repugnant is cruel. That a happy child is more important than eating broccoli or
asparagus or whatever else it is that makes a child gag. The first, or most
important, thing is a healthy and happy child, not a clean plate. If a parent
agrees this is first, then the parent will behave differently than if the parent
believes that the meal hour is an opportunity to enforce parental authority to
make the child obediently eat everything served, or sit at the table in tears
until both parent and child totally lose interest in the process.
What do we consider most important
for our family, personal, and Masonic lives? Are these compatible? Or are there
conflicts between the relative importance we assign to the activities of these
various compartments of our lives? How do we reconcile priorities? Do we even
think about our priorities?
I had a friend who always assigned
priorities to all his work in the office and to his chores at home. His only
problem was that he then devoted as much time as was needed to do the top items
on the list perfectly, even those jobs where “acceptable, not perfect” would
have been good enough. The result was that he always had half his day’s work
undone because it was too low on his priority list to get his attention. This
was the quick fix attempt for an acute problem of task overload. Many, if not
all, workers suffer from this syndrome much of the time. That is the chronic
condition. The symptoms are fatigue and disaffection. If we really operate on
what is most important to us, we can be re-vitalized and gain new energies to
resolve those things to which we are truly committed.
This brings us to Group II, habits
4, 5, & 6, the personality habits
THE PERSONALITY
HABITS
The fourth habit is THINK WIN/WIN
I have a whole book on this topic
that I find inspirational. Decision theorists refer to zero sum games. Zero sum
games are those where there is only a defined limited amount of goods, dollars,
land, respect, or whatever is the reward for a competition, and what I win you
must lose and what you win I must lose. In chess, for example, if I win your
Bishop or Knight or Rook or Queen, I have become stronger and more threatening
to your King. We must always be 60 - 40 or 70 - 30 or 40 - 60 or 30 - 70.
“Ties are like kissing your
sister,” some coaches and sports writers have said. Stephen Covey says this is
the outlook of those who operate from a mental paradigm of scarcity.
Others, he says, who operate from a
paradigm of abundance say that life does not have to be like a game of chess.
Win/win strategy says that in the long run, the best solution is one in which
everyone wins. This was the basis for all of Henry Kissinger’s international
negotiations and, whatever you may have thought of his politics, he was the
world’s most respected negotiator among the international diplomatic corps.
Dr. Kissinger believed that if one side or the other felt they had been cheated
at the negotiating table, they would start working to undermine the result the
minute they left the table. For a historical example, Adolf Hitler was able to
gain influence in the Weimar Republic because the German people had been chafing
for 20 years under the punitive decisions of the Treaty of Versailles which
ended WW I which were designed to prevent them from ever gaining strength enough
to start another war.
A recent business management book is
called The Death of Competition. Its theme is that corporations of the next
decades will not thrive by putting their competition out of business, as in the
days of the old railroad barons, but will instead succeed by linking their
prosperity with the prosperity of the other companies in their field -- by being
facilitators of the success of their competition -- a win/win strategy.
The fifth habit is FIRST SEEK TO
UNDERSTAND, AND THEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD
Probably, everyone has heard a
friend, co-worker, and/or family member complain, “They just don’t
understand me/my problems/my needs/my potential/etc.” This is sort of a
sub-set of being RE-active instead of PRO-active -- again laying the blame on
others for our problems. Author Covey says the preferred effective approach is
to be a good listener, understand clearly what is being said and, of equal
importance, listen for what is not being said. What don’t we tell others? Our
fears? We don’t even let ourselves think of our fears. This may come from
being repeatedly cautioned as a child, “You must not be afraid of
that!” If we listen carefully to what is not being said, we come to
understand the other person’s fears, one of the most powerful motivators of
most peoples’ lives. If we understand their fears, we can help arrange
solutions which resolve those fears. Psychologists who have studied fear tell us
that 90% of what is feared will not happen. Of the other 10% of things we fear,
we cannot do anything to reduce the risks of about half.
We only need then to find a way to
help establish risk-reducing controls which can reassure the other person, and
95% of the time, we will be right.
The author illustrates the
effectiveness of the habit of seeking first to understand and then
to be understood by telling of a sales person who had spent many months working
on a huge sale which would generate as much income for him as he had made the
entire past year. He thought he had the sale closed until the final meeting with
the client and several competing firms when a new person in the client’s
organization seemed to be leaning toward one of the competitors’ proposals. He
could feel the commission slipping through his fingers and wanted to shout,
“But you just don’t understand the superior advantages of our proposal!”
and place the blame for a deal gone wrong on the new man in the client’s
office. But...he had attended one of the author’s seminars and remembered,
“First seek to understand and then to be understood.” so he said, “I feel
that you may have some reservations or concerns about our proposal. I want to truly
understand any reservations you have and would like to visit with you for about
20 minutes so I can fully understand your concerns.” After two hours of
listening to the client with very little being said by the salesperson, the
order was his because the client representative knew that he would have a
sympathetic listener in the supplier’s company. Everyone wants to be
understood and appreciated. When we genuinely want to understand and help and
appreciate others on an equal footing so that we can go for the win-win
strategy, it is automatically sensed by the other who is willing to be more
relaxed, more honest, more cooperative and to work with us instead of against
us. This is the very opposite of the high-pressure sales closing tactic which
can cause the reluctant buyer to up the ante of resistance to meet the increased
pressure to buy. It does not have to be a product we are talking about here, it
can be any decision in our home, office or Lodge.
I had one Brother, with whom I
shared these lessons, tell me that he felt that this lesson alone saved his
marriage, a most rewarding response for a Masonic educator or mentor.
The author guarantees this habit
will immediately improve all of your personal relationships -- in the
family, on the job, and in your social groups.
The sixth habit is SYNERGIZE
This is a management and human
relations buzzword which means that the effectiveness of the whole is greater
than the sum of the individual parts. In medicine, it means that a combination
of drugs given simultaneously can be more effective than the drugs would be if
given separately. This means that if we can bring different individuals with
different talents, interests, beliefs and prejudices together, capitalizing on
the different contributions of each, to pursue a common goal, or mission, as it
was termed in habit number two above, “begin with the end in mind”, we can
multiply our effectiveness. In warfare, leaders speak of “force
multipliers”. They mean, for example, that if a third-world nation drops a few
$5,000 mines in the sea, we have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to
counter this threat. General Collin Powell said that continued optimism is a
force multiplier. If we can bring together different individuals, recognizing
their differences as strength rather than a weakness, to achieve a common goal,
we can realize a force multiplication.
This requires deep thinking and
thoughtful planning, as it seems to be almost inherent in men and organizations
to reward uniformity and punish non-conformity. Differences are often seen as
threatening. I have been told that some pioneer farmers used to harness an ox
with a horse to plow the prairie under, one walking on the unplowed sod and the
other in the previously plowed furrow. To work a mixed team was more work but
they could plow more ground in a day by capitalizing on the inherent strengths
of the ox and the horse to offset the weakness of the other. Likewise, it can
require more thoughtful leadership to achieve a synergistic effect in an
organization.
This brings us to the last habit
which alone comprises Group IV:
The seventh habit is SHARPEN THE
SAW
This term comes from the story of
the woodsman who was wearing himself out and slowly sawing timber with a dull
saw but had so much work to accomplish before dark that he couldn’t take the
time away from sawing to sharpen his saw, so he tried to maintain his rate of
progress by sawing harder.
By this the author means to
continuously seek self-renewal of each of the four aspects of the human
personality: physical, mental, spiritual, and social. Again, this sounds much
like our Masonic teaching of the physical Entered Apprentice stage of human
development, the mental Fellow Craft stage and the spiritual or Master Mason
stage.
Stephen makes a good case that to be
effective individuals we need challenges, work, and problems to solve but we
also need to step away from our work to take a refreshed look at it with new
insights gained from study, new contacts, and improved health. Some might say,
“take a fresh look at things.” But I prefer the term REFRESHED look because
it is not our first fresh look we are talking about, but the richer, more
insightful renewed slant or view we may gain when we have refreshed ourselves by
changing our pace, by switching from physical to mental effort and back again,
by gaining new spiritual dedication through study of sacred literature and
prayer, new knowledge gained by deeply thinking about and studying the problem,
new contacts with others who are working similar or different problems with
solutions which can be applied to our problems.
Many of you have read of Thomas Alva
Edison sleeping only a few hours a day but switching from one type of activity
to another in order to refresh himself.
Is this one of the primary missions
for Masonic education, to foster a sharpening of the saws of our members? What
about prospective members? If this is the appropriate mission for Masonic
education, how should we go about it? Who should be doing it? Who should be the
target audience, as they say in the world of marketing, primarily new members,
old inactive members? What should we put first when we put first things first?
One of Brother Rudyard Kipling’s
aphorisms is, “I have six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew. Their
names were ‘What’ and ‘Where’ and ‘When’ and ‘How’ and ‘Why’
and ‘Who’.” An outstanding professor of education once comforted his
students worried about not being quite up to their responsibilities to educate
the youth of America, “There’s little you can do to keep the intellectually
curious from learning and no one can do a great deal to educate those who are
not.” I trust that each one here today will put forth his very best effort and
engage in that hardest of all work, original thinking, to analyze these seven
habits and work on ways that we can make ourselves and our Lodges more effective
by “frequently inculcating and strongly recommending” their daily practice
in order to make good men better and improve our families, our churches and
synagogues, our communities, our Commonwealth and our Nation.
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