Inside Out Flashcards
What is Covey’s professional experience?
25 years of working with individuals in business, university, and marriage and family settings
What problem does Covey perceive among people he’s come into contact with in his professional experience?
He’s come across people who are outwardly successful, but looking for “personal congruency and effectiveness” and “healthy, growing relationships with other people.”
What list does Covey begin the chapter with?
One of problems of the type he’s encountered in his professional experience.
Summarize the story Covey tells of his own experience with a problem in his life of the type listed at the beginning of the chapter.
One of Covey and his wife’s sons was struggling socially, academically, and athletically. Covey and his wife wanted to help him as his parents, so they worked on their attitudes and behaviors and tried to work on his, reinforced good behavior, and reprimanded others when they laughed at him. Nothing they did seemed to work and his self-esteem was flagging, so they reassessed their approach.
During this time, in his professional role, Covey was involved in leadership development with many clients and in that capacity was preparing bimonthly programs on the subject of perception and communication for IBM’s Executive Development Program. As he researched these presentations, he became interested in how perceptions are formed, how they govern the way we see, and how the way we see governs how we behave, which led to a study of expectancy theory and self-fulfilling prophecies and to a realization of how deeply embedded our perceptions are.
As his wife and he talked about what he was teaching at IBM and their own situation, they began to realize that what they were doing with their son didn’t match how they saw him, and that their perception was that he was somehow inadequate or behind. They decided that if they wanted to change their situation, they first had to change themselves, and that in order to do that they’d have to change their perceptions.
At the same time, Covey was involved in an intense study of the success literature published in the U.S. since 1776. He noticed a pattern emerging in the past 50 years of material which he calls the Personality Ethic, which was superficial, as contrasted with the first 150 years, which emphasized what he called the Character Ethic, which appropriately worked on a person’s inner character.
Covey began to realize that the Personality Ethic was the subconscious source of the ineffective strategy they had been using with their son, and that his wife’s and his image of themselves as good parents was deeper than their image of their son as adequate, and may have influenced it. They began to work to change their motivations toward and perceptions of their son, and began to work on separating themselves from him, allowing him to develop more naturally on his own.
After some weeks and months, his son began to improve markedly.
Does Covey believe the Personality Ethic is useless or should be eliminated? What elements of it does he think are commendable, and what does he think of them?
No; he thinks personality growth, communication skill training, and education in the field of influence strategies and positive thinking are beneficial, sometimes essential for success.
Define secondary greatness.
Social recognition for one’s talents.
Define primary greatness.
Goodness of one’s character.
Why does Covey consider success built on the Personality Ethic secondary?
Because it’s artificial and can be short cut. He compares it to trying to take a shortcut sowing seeds for crops.
Define paradigm.
A model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference.
(Additionally, how we “see” the world.)
(MTPAF)
What analogy does Covey use to communicate the function of a paradigm?
A map.
Describe the analogy of the use of the map of Chicago vs Detroit Covey uses.
If you tried to navigate Chicago with a map of Detroit labeled Chicago, it would be frustrating and ineffective. You could work on your behavior and you attitude, but you’d still be lost.
What two categories does Covey say the “maps” in our heads can be divided into?
“The way things are,” or “realities,” and “the way things should be,” or “values.”
What visual exercise does Covey employ regarding the young and the old woman?
A drawing of the same basic shape but emphasizing different elements can be interpreted to be an old woman or a young woman.
Where did Covey first encounter the young and old woman drawing visual exercise? What does he say the instructor was using it to demonstrate?
Harvard Business School; that two people can see the same thing, disagree, but both be right.
Briefly describe Covey’s experience with the visual exercise at Harvard Business School.
The instructor would come in and assign students a large card each from one of two piles. One had an image emphasizing the old woman, the other emphasized the young woman. He then asked the two groups to describe the image to each other; communication problems flared up, etc. The difference in opinion was resolved when one of the students walked up to the large image of the woman at the front of the room and started pointing to elements of the drawing and naming them.
What does the young/old woman exercise yield according to Covey? What examples does he use?
Many deep insights into both personal and interpersonal effectiveness.
The four examples he uses are:
- It shows how powerful conditioning affects our perceptions, our paradigms.
- It also shows that these paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behaviors.
- 2 brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic: to try to change the outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow.
- It shows how powerfully our paradigms affect the way we interact with other people.
(1. Conditioning
2. Attitudes & behaviors
3. Flaw in the Personality Ethic
4. Interaction)
Summarize Covey’s description of our relationship with the world, facts, objectivity, and subjectivity.
We see the world subjectively, but we think we see it objectively. When we describe the world, we describe ourselves–our perceptions, or, as he’d say, “paradigms.” We tend to believe that there’s something wrong with people who disagree with us, but the young/old woman visual exercise shows that reasonable people can disagree. This doesn’t mean that there are no facts–just that each person’s interpretation of these facts reflects their previous experiences and that the facts are meaningless without these interpretations.
The more aware we are of these paradigms and the extent of their influence on our experiences, the more responsibility we can take for them, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others, and be open to their perceptions.
What’s perhaps the most important insight to be gained from the perception demonstration? (young/old woman) How does Covey describe it?
Paradigm shifting; “the ‘Aha!’ experience when someone finally ‘sees’ the composite picture in another way.”
