The first article in a new series about incorporating the 7H into your life
In January 2024, I was fortunate enough to attend GV’s Deep Vision Day. It was a group setting designed to facilitate our vision for the coming year. Before we started on specific goals, we first identified the principles and values most sacred to us as individuals and used those to guide our plans for 2024.
It so happened that I had made a commitment to myself for the year. I decided to root this year in the wisdom of one of the most influential personal development books in history: Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you do because the wisdom within those pages is a manual for life-changing personal growth—if you want it.
This isn’t just an article about the 7H; it’s the first in a series where I’ll reflect on how my life has improved (or hasn’t) by integrating the 7H into my daily practice. I’ll delve into the specifics of that later, but for now, I want to introduce a core concept from the book.
Personal Trust and the Emotional Bank Account
From Habit 3: Putting First Things First, there’s the idea of an Emotional Bank Account of Trust. There are two types of accounts: the one you have with yourself and the accounts you have with everyone else in your life.
The mechanics are simple: If you say you’re going to do something, you create a liability because you’ve established an expectation that you will follow through. If you succeed and do what you say, that liability becomes a deposit, forming the basis of personal trust.
The Private Victory Comes First
Before you can begin to build trust with others, you first need to be able to trust yourself.
Habits one through three fall under the heading of Private Victory. They represent a private victory because they lay the groundwork for building personal trust. Before you can honestly ask others to trust you, you need to be able to trust yourself.
At the start of this year, I couldn’t trust myself. I was great at setting goals and making plans but not so good at executing them. Deadlines became flexible. I invested in numerous apps to create tasks and events with deadlines and reminders, only to end up ignoring the constant pop-up push notifications.
When you fail to fulfill a commitment, that liability becomes a debit in your Personal Trust Account with others. If you don’t have sufficient trust to begin with or if you make too many withdrawals, people won’t believe that you’ll meet your commitments. They’ll stop making commitments with you, and you’ll lose the synergy that came from working with that person and their unique talents.
Growing the Balance of Personal Trust with Yourself
Until this year, that had been a common experience in my life. In fact, the reason I dove so deeply into the 7H was that I was scared I’d mess up my responsibilities on the Shala steering committee and lose my role. At the start of 2024, that wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. And I knew I didn’t want that.
The reason we’re over halfway through the year before I started this column is that I wanted to improve the balance of Personal Trust I had with myself. I realized I had taught myself to ignore the commitments I made to myself. I taught myself that I couldn’t be trusted and that all of my goals were merely aspirations without motivation. I taught myself to ignore my vision of the person I could become. So, I spent the first half of 2024 building up my Personal Trust Account by setting and meeting self-imposed commitments and deadlines.
I’m still working on it, but I feel ready to start on the second part of the book: Public Victory. That begins with making and keeping commitments with others.
