Stephen R. Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Eff People pdf

Two Ways to Tap the Right Brain
If we use the brain dominance theory as a model, it becomes evident that the quality of 
our first creation is significantly impacted by our ability to use our creative right brain. 
The more we are able to draw upon our right-brain capacity, the more fully we will be 
able to visualize, to synthesize, to transcend time and present circumstances, to project a 
holistic picture of what we want to do and to be in life.
Expand Perspective
Sometimes we are knocked out of our left-brain environment and thought patterns and 
into the right brain by an unplanned experience. The death of a loved one, a severe 
illness, a financial setback, or extreme adversity can cause us to stand back, look at our 
lives, and ask ourselves some hard questions:
"What's really important? Why am I doing what I'm doing?
But if you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create
perspective-expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own.
There are a number of ways to do this. Through the powers of your imagination, you can 
visualize your own funeral, as we did at the beginning of this chapter. Write your own 
eulogy. Actually write it out. Be specific.
You can visualize your twenty-fifth and then your fiftieth wedding anniversary. Have 
your spouse visualize this with you. Try to capture the essence of the family relationship 
you want to have created through your day-by-day investment over a period of that 
many years.
You can visualize your retirement from your present occupation. What contributions, 
what achievements will you want to have made in your field? What plans will you have 
after retirement? Will you enter a second career?
Expand your mind. Visualize in rich detail. Involve as many emotions and feelings as 
possible. Involve as many of the senses as you can.
I have done similar visualization exercises with some of my university classes. "Assume 
you only have this one semester to live," I tell my students, "and that during this semester 
you are to stay in school as a good student. Visualize how you would spend your 
semester.
Things are suddenly placed in a different perspective. Values quickly surface that before 
weren't even recognized. I have also asked students to live with that expanded 
perspective for a week and keep a diary of their experiences.
The results are very revealing. They start writing to parents to tell them how much they 
love and appreciate them. They reconcile with a brother, a sister, a friend where the 
relationship has deteriorated.
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The dominant, central theme of their activities, the underlying principle, is love. The 
futility of bad-mouthing, bad thinking, put-downs, and accusation becomes very evident 
when they think in terms of having only a short time to live. Principles and values 
become more evident to everybody.
There are a number of techniques using your imagination that can put you in touch with 
your values. But the net effect of every one I have ever used is the same. When people 
seriously undertake to identify what really matters most to them in their lives, what they 
really want to be and to do, they become very reverent. They start to think in larger terms 
than today and tomorrow.