#485: Habits That MAKE or BREAK Your Career with Todd Davis, Author, Senior Leadership Consultant, & 7 Habits Content Expert

0:00And so how do we learn to prioritize and determine what are the most important things? I can't do it all. Nobody can do it all. So how do effective people decide, what am I going to accomplish this day, this week, and what am I going to be okay with not getting to? In this age of technology, that's one of the most important questions I think we can figure out for ourselves. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. Fasten your seatbelts. I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back.

0:33I'm so glad you're back with us this week. Okay, I'm really excited for you to meet our guest today. Todd Davis is a senior leadership consultant, seven habits content expert, and thought leader at FranklinCovey with over 35 years of experience in human resources, talent development, and executive recruiting. As the former chief people officer and executive vice president, Davis was responsible for the global talent development in over 40 offices, reaching 160 countries. Additionally, he authored and co-authored Wall Street Journal bestselling books, including Get Better, 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work, and Everyone Deserves a Great Manager.

1:08Todd, thank you so much for being here today. Well, thanks for the invitation. And maybe we could just read that over again. That felt really good. I love being introduced. It's so funny. Everybody always loves the bio. I always think it's so funny. It's like our highlight reel. Well, you're very gracious. Thank you very much. And thanks for inviting me. Well, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is an iconic book. Can you give us, obviously, you are the master at all this. Why is it so powerful and why is it so timeless? Yeah, thanks for asking. So as you mentioned, I've been with Franklin Covey.

1:41I've been with them for 29 years now. And I first read Seven Habits about 31 years ago. It was first published in 1989, so about 35 years old. And if I were new listening about this and never heard of seven habits, I might think, okay, well, that's great. But 35 years old, what am I going to learn from that? But to your question, Heather, it is the seven habits are based on principles of effectiveness. Dr. Covey, Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the book and made the point always that he didn't invent the habits. What he did was watch individuals like Heather and other people who were so effective in their roles and teams and organizations, how effective they were, and watched what do they do on a consistent basis to get, not just get any results, but get the results they're really seeking.

2:25And then he put those principles into a context that we could discuss them and talk about them. And so all of that is to say, because these are based on principles of effectiveness, they are as relevant today, if not more so than they were when Dr. Covey first wrote about them. It's just amazing to me that they seem pretty simplistic. I'd love it if we could get into actually talking about the seven principles and understand why each one is so powerful. You bet. Happy to do that. One other thing that you just brought to mind when we talked about irrelevancy, I was out delivering a keynote last two weeks ago now, and a gentleman came out to me after he was probably in his mid-50s.

2:59And he said, Todd, I got to tell you, my son just graduated college in Portland. And he called me two nights ago and said, Dad, I just read the most amazing book. Have you ever heard of the seven habits of highly effective people? And this gentleman, his name was Ross. We both laughed. But in addition to laughing, I just thought, isn't it amazing how timeless these are? You know, this recent college grad is reading is going, wow, this is going to make a huge difference in my life. So to give a quick overview, we'll do the Reader's Digest condensed version for those who are new to seven habits.

3:29The seven habits, the whole intent of the seven habits is to become even more effective than we are right now. And to become effective, we want to reach this maturity level of interdependence. So they're built around a framework we call the maturity continuum. And we start out in the world as dependent. You know, we have the mindset of you're responsible for me. Tell me what to do. It's not my fault. That kind of mindset. And that's fine. Of course, when you're a newborn, you're dependent on everybody to take care of you. But, you know, have you ever worked with an adult who's dependent and tell me what to do and it's not my fault?

4:03Yeah. And so the goal, of course, is to move from that stage to becoming independent. And the first three of the seven habits are what move us from being dependent to independent. Habit number one is to be proactive. and to your point these are very simple but says easy does hard is what i have found out so to be proactive is all based on the principle of choice there's so much we can't change or even influence but we can choose our response to any situation and so in habit one being proactive we learn how to be more thoughtful in our responses we don't just let a stimulus you know our response crash into the stimulus.

4:43We separate stimulus from response. We learn to work within our circle of influence versus our circle of concern. And we learn to use proactive language. The science that shows the words we use shape the creativity or open up the creativity in our brains so that we can come up with more effective solutions. So that's Habit One. I could ramble on all day, so I want to pause after Habit One to see if you have any questions or if I'm talking too much. So one of the things I wasn't aware of was the structure or strategy and how they're actually laid out. So there is an importance in this one being the first.

5:16Yes. Foundational, because I mean, if you and I give up our freedom to choose what our life's going to be like, or, you know, well, then there's no need to even go into the other six habits. So it's foundational. This be proactive, say, wait a minute, I'm in charge of my life. I'm not going to give up that choice to the outside circumstances or other people. Well, if I'm in charge of my life, that leads me to habit two, which is begin with the end in mind. And this habit is based on the principle of purpose. I like to think of it as habit one. I've decided I'm the captain of my ship. So habit two, begin with the end in mind.

5:49I got to chart my course. I got to decide what is it that I'm going to do with this life of mine? And then habit three is to put first things first. And this is based on the principle of focus. I'm the captain of my ship. I chart my course. Well, now I got to set sail. I got to take actions where the rubber meets the road. And these three habits, like I said, move us from dependence to becoming independent. And they help us attain what we call the private victory. It's where we become trustworthy. You know, people who do those three things, you think about them in your life. You can count on them.

6:19They do what they say they're going to do. They're trustworthy people. And that moves us up to independence where we're now ready to start building trust with others. And that leads us into the next three habits. Habit number four is to think win-win. and this habit is based on the principle of abundance. You know, how do we all win together? I want to find out what's a win for Heather, and I want Heather to know what's a win for me. Well, if we're really having this mindset or this attitude of win-win, that leads us to habit five, seek first to understand, then to be understood. I want to make sure we have a win-win relationship, so I'm going to take time to understand what's a win for you.

6:53And then you hopefully want to learn what's a win for me. And habit five, seek first to understand, then to be understood, is all based on the principle of respect. I respect you enough. It doesn't mean that I have to agree with you on everything or whatever, but I respect you enough to really understand your point of view. And once we've done that, we have this mindset of win-win, we've taken time to understand each other, then we can easily move to habit six, which is synergize. This is based on the principle of creative collaboration. We may not always get to synergy and we can talk about what synergy is, but synergize, creative collaboration, if we have a win-win mindset, you and I, And if we take time to understand each other, we can leave our egos at the door now and start to really brainstorm and come up with third alternatives, which is what we say synergy is, an idea that's way better than yours or mine, but something we can create together.

7:41Those three habits form what we call the public victory because we're winning with others now. We have this trust that we're building with others. And then surrounding, just picture a circle around those six habits is habit seven. Habit seven is sharpen the saw. This is the habit based on the principle of renewal. I liken it to the instructions we're given when the plane's taking off and the flight attendant says, if cabin pressure drops, you're to put your mask on first. And I bet when I was a little kid and I first heard that, I probably thought, well, no, my mom told me to put everybody else's mask on them first.

8:12But the principle in Habit 7 is to sharpen your own saw. Put your mask on first, not because you're selfish, but because by doing so, you can do then so much more for everybody else to be that much more effective. So sharpening the saw is habit seven, and it's really the gas in the engine for all the other habits. So how does somebody develop a habit, though? It's one thing I feel like to be aware that these are the right habits, and it does make sense. But how do you actually rinse and repeat and do it? That's a great, yeah, such a great question. So obviously, reading the book, this book has sold over 40 million copies.

8:47It's just, it blows my mind. It's translated into, I think, 38 different languages now around the world. 40 million copies and continues to sell thousands of copies every month. So we can read it. But to your point, okay, I can read this and say, gosh, this makes sense. How do I become this? In the work sessions, and we update the work session of the seven habits, it's called the seven habits effect. We update that about every eight to 10 years. We just launched our newest version, seven habits 5.0. And so that's why we appreciate you inviting us on the podcast and why I'm out traveling the globe to do overviews of what we're talking about here.

9:19But in the work sessions, we dive deep. It's two days worth of content that can be delivered, concentrated over two days back to back, spread out, virtual, on demand. And in the work sessions, we go in and study a particular habit. Let me back up here. The most significant thing about learning any habit, but particularly the seven habits, is something we call the see-do-get model. It's our paradigms. The way we see things influences everything we do. And of course, we know what we do gives us the results we get. But what is so powerful about developing any habit is backing up and saying, wait a minute, am I seeing this situation, this person, this relationship accurately?

9:59Or am I seeing it how I'm, I've just convinced myself that it is. For example, if I'm a micromanager, I bet people are familiar with micromanagement. If I'm a micromanager, how do I see my people? Well, I probably see them as incompetent. So I got to do everything for them, or I got to criticize, hover over, triple check. And if that's what I do, what kind of results do we get? Poor, mediocre at best. And then I see those poor results. And what do I say to myself as the micromanager? See, they are idiots. I got to micromanage even more. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy all driven by an inaccurate or an incomplete paradigm.

10:33So to your question, with each habit, we start out with a paradigm. Habit one, be proactive. An ineffective paradigm might be, hey, this is just the way things are. There's not much I can to about it. And I've been there before. I think we can drift into that. But a proactive or a highly effective paradigm is I am free to choose and I'm the one responsible for my choices. And if we take that paradigm on, then in habit one, there are three specific practices that we dive deep into with activities and rinse and repeat, as you say. We learn ways to separate stimulus from response. We talk about what's the last time you were reactive and what did that feel like?

11:11What would be some better ways to respond. How do we learn to pause before we respond? And it might be as simple as I count to 10, or I do box breathing or whatever, or it might be something that I look at my last week, and I look at those times I was reactive, and I write down, because those things are going to repeat themselves again, and I want to be prepared. So there are activities like that that we do throughout the days, and they are, and I know I sound dramatic here, but I'm telling you from my experience, they are life-changing. They are powerful, where all of a sudden, I've got a long ways to go.

11:40But I think about just in that one habit, how much more proactive I am today than I was, you know, when I started with Franklin Covey 29 years ago. So they are tried and tested and true.

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14:37Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash confidence free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at www.northwestregisteredagent.com slash confidence free. I ask you to try to find your passion. Oh my gosh, I love that you brought up that idea of responding instead of reacting to people because so many people in today's world with the political climates and whatnot are triggered constantly and you see getting angry and getting upset. And actually, when you were talking about the workbook exercises that you do to help people stop reacting, I thought of my own.

15:20I worked side by side with a woman who did not like me and would try tirelessly to trigger me. And how could someone not like you, Heather? What are you talking about? There are a few people out there. OK, so she would intentionally try to trigger me. And when I was younger, I would play the game. I would react and get upset. And it was exhausting and not a good look for me. Right. Of course. And I would end up being the one that looked like, oh, this lady's losing it. What's wrong with her? She's upset. She's yelling. She's, you know, it wasn't working for me. And so for me, the way I ended up teaching myself to beat it was I would visualize that person, whoever you're potentially going to react to puppeteering you, like pulling strings on you.

16:02Oh, that's a good visual. Yeah. Oh my gosh. And it made me, that made me so mad that I said, no way am I letting anyone do that to me anymore. So when the moment that you were talking about, whether you box breathe or whatever that pause moment is for you, I would see the puppeteering happen. And immediately I would stop and detach from whatever that situation was. I'm not going to participate. I love that example. I'm going to borrow that if you don't mind. I love that. Please put it in the course. I'd love for you to do that. You know, another, you just reminded me of one of the other activities that It is so, it sounds so simplistic.

16:33It is so powerful. We do this. We have participants write, I may not be able to statement. And so they have to write a statement. I may not be able to, and then they fill in the blank, but I can, and they fill in the blank. So for example, someone's in a company they really love, but they're kind of burned out on their role. They've done it for so many years and they just, they want to sit at the company, but and the company's not going to change their role. So I may not be able to change my role, but I can explore other areas of the company where I might be interested in looking. And people, again, it sounds so simple, but people have these real aha moments going, wait a minute, I can make a choice here.

17:07I have more influence than I think I do. One lady, I got to tell you, she wrote, this table was laughing. This is about a month ago. This table was laughing. I went over and I said, OK, what's so funny here? And this woman said she hated her house, by the way. And she said, I wrote, I may not be able to convince my husband to move, but I can make his life miserable for the rest of our marriage. I said, okay, not quite what we were going for, but I guess that is being proactive. In each of the habits, we have a series of activities and exercises, and then they make commitments to themselves. There's, of course, a workbook, everything they go through.

17:41In habit two, begin with the end in mind, one of the activities we do is called backcasting. This is super powerful. Backcasting is they partner up and they think about a goal that they would like to achieve that might take anywhere from three months to a year. One person I was working with, they have this goal of running a marathon and they were set on that. And so they visualize, and I'm sure your listeners are familiar with visualization exercises, but they visualize the day they accomplish that goal. They just crossed the finish line of the marathon or this one gentleman, he was building an addition to their home and he had never been a general contractor before, but he just finished the, you know, cutting the ribbon, so to speak on their new addition.

18:17and they visualize every detail and they partner up and they tell their partner, they talk for 10 minutes each about what it feels like. I just crossed the finish line and I'm getting all these cheers and people are handing me roses and I pick them up. And it's just this defining our outcomes before we act, beginning with the end in mind. And people come out of that and they go, wow, I can do this. I know I can do this now. I'm super excited to get started. So anyway, sorry, I get passionate and I talk too much. I love these real life examples that you're giving us. you know, have you ever heard of mind movies before?

18:49No, tell me. So it's interesting because what it's doing is sort of taking what you just described and this idea that, you know, we have this goal in mind and we've already achieved it and feeling the feelings of actually having to happen, but putting it into an actual movie that you create utilizing Canva and adding music to it. And the whole reason why you add the music to it is to elicit this emotion that, you know, really excited and believe something, you know, really positive is happening in your life. But it's exactly what you're saying. And this is from Dr. Joe Dispenza, you know, different teachings, but so very, very similar.

19:23And so interesting to me when you look across life and these different authors and different leaders and different teachers, but so much similarity in what actually works for people. Yeah. I love that example. I'm going to borrow that from you too, because to your point, music for most people, it's such an inspirational element in a visualization exercise. So that's, yeah, that's very cool. Same idea for sure. Yeah. And definitely works. I've heard some great success stories on that. All right. So what are some helpful habits for embracing and navigating the new world of AI? Because I'm sure you hear as often as I do, people are just shut down about it.

19:55They don't want to embrace it, much less try it, much less do anything. How can we help those people? To be open to AI? I would tell any of them. Now, I don't think AI will ever replace the interpersonal skills that we're talking about and the emotional intelligence. but I can't tell you how many times I've had to, we'll get a custom assignment from a client. I was just teaching a course on leading generations. And while I've done a fair amount of work in leading different generations, I'll use chat GPT and say, Hey, here's, here's the elements I want to add. And here's what I want to talk about.

20:26And boom, it'll pop out a pretty sophisticated skeleton or framework that of course needs your element. Now your personal touch, but I usually get the question, how do we make sure that AI doesn't, you know, is there still a need for seven habits because of AI. So I usually get the opposite. We just did or participated in and read the reviews of a study of 290 business practitioners that use AI on a regular basis. And they were asked in this survey, what are the most important skills, even with all that AI can do for us, what are the most important skills that are needed to grow your business?

20:59And the top three were integrity, creativity, and interpersonal skills or human skills, things that AI can't really do. I don't know that AI will ever be able to listen to you or me empathically and reflect back to us what we're really feeling. But boy, I would embrace it. I apologize that I'm not the expert on telling you all the ins and outs of AI, but I just know from a practical standpoint, how much it's helped me to get my creative thinking going by, you know, asking a question or saying, help me develop a framework for such and such. And then it's a great starting point for me to take off from.

21:34What would be some of the tactics to develop a new habit, like just going to chat GPT first? Like how could you advise us on like how to start just practicing something like that more? Yeah, well, in our seven habits, we have a learning platform at Franklin Covey that all of our content, not just seven habits, but all of our work solutions are on. And we have a platform for that so that it measures in companies and organizations, it measures the learner's progress and growth. And in the seven habits portion of the platform, there is an AI tool to practice empathic listening. And so you can set up a situation in this tool that we have through AI on the platform, and you can put together a scenario.

22:16Okay, this person, I'll go back to the friend that didn't like you or the person that didn't like you. Okay, I work with someone and for whatever reason, we are not syncing and everything I say, she criticizes or He criticizes. And so you can feed that information to it and say, I'd like to have a conversation. How would you begin the conversation? And I will say to you, I would start by saying, Joe, I'm really hoping that we can get to a great working relationship. And I want you to know my only intent in bringing this up is to see if we can figure out how to improve our communication skills.

22:52You know, it'll tell you things to say. You're going, oh, wow, that's a really, and you're writing down notes. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. So, I mean, that's just one example of AI out in the world, but how we use it on the platform to practice, seek first to understand, then to be understood. So interesting to me that this 7 Habits has been around for so long, yet you're incorporating and integrating the newest technology into it and putting it to work for the users. Thanks for calling that out, Heather, because that is why, while this was written 35 years ago, it's based on principles that are true.