The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
A book like this should be a pleasure to read – you should be able to whizz through it and feel inspired to put it into practice. Unfortunately it’s having the opposite effect on me – I’m finding it too dense and have had to foce myself to pick it up each time. So, less than half way through I’m giving up.
I’m sure it must be me and not the book. I really do want to be a highly effective person but I suspect that there are ways of getting the message across that will suit me better. Might have to head back over to Michael Heppel, who I know applies some of Stephen Covey’s techniques – but in a more Emily-friendly way.
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Been on holiday … to Cornwall
Are you ready for a bit of a sob story? We had a holiday to Spain planned this week. It was going to be our first trip abroad for about five years. My parents flew out a few days before and we were to join them on Tuesday for some serious relaxation.
But … the French decided to strike on exactly the day we were to fly out so our flight was cancelled! As there are only two flights a week from Newquay there wasn’t an awful lot we could do about it. So there went our Spanish holiday.
However, we decided to make the most of it. We live in Cornwall after all which is the perfect place to have a holiday anyway. And we’ve had some glorious weather. So we’ve been real tourists for the last few days – went for a wander round Newlyn and had an icecream from Jelberts; went for a walk along the coast to Botallack and had dinner at the Queens Arms (yum); and had a day out shopping in Truro, with lunch at good old Fodders.
Not quite what we had planned but a really chilled out few days. Back to work with a vengeance on Monday!
Nearly managed it
I’ve got a confession to make. I didn’t fully complete the last week of my 28-day marketing program. I kept putting it to one side and then all of a sudden it was the end of the week. At the weekend I went through my list and was pleased to be able to tick some of the actions off, things which I had just naturally done, but I’d completed nowhere near as much as I had planned.
It’s a bit disappointing because I’d been sticking to it so well and I missed out on that feeling of satisfaction of having kept to it to the end. However, I’m still feeling very positive about the whole thing. I exceeded the goal I had set myself (certain number of new prospects) and could really tell that my activities were having a positive effect. Definitely worth doing.
So, I’m planning another 28 days to start in a couple of weeks time. I’m going to keep the activities that were obviously working and try out a few new things. Now that I’ve used the book a few times I’ve got to the point where I’m adapting it to suit how I work. I’m going to use my own tracking sheet as I wasn’t finding the book’s way of doing it to really worked for me – wasn’t giving me an idea of how much of the week’s program I’d completed. I’m also going to skip the daily pep talk. I can see what the author intends with that but I think that after having read it a few times it’s losing its impact.
Looking forward to making a start on the next 28 days!
