Todd Davis
speaker
423 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Todd Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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 two weeks ago now, and a gentleman came out to me after. He was probably in his mid-50s, and 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 the gentleman's 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. The 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 have you ever worked with an adult who's dependent and tell me what to do and it's not my fault? Yeah.
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 or a response crash into the stimulus. We 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 brain so that we can come up with more effective solutions. So that's Habit 1. Now, I could ramble on all day, so I want to pause after Habit 1 to see if you have any questions or if I'm talking too much.
Yes, 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, I 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 action. It's 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. People who do those three things, you think about them in your life. You can count on them. They 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 5, 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. And 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.
Those 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, if 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. But 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 7, and it's really the gas in the engine for all the other habits.
That's a great, yeah, such a great question. So obviously reading the book, this book has sold over 40 million copies. It'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.
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