There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living. –David Starr Jordan

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People embody many of the fundamental principles of human effectiveness.

These habits are basic; they are primary.

They represent the internalization of correct principles upon which enduring happiness and success are based.

But before we can really understand these Seven Habits, we need to understand our own “paradigms” and how to make a “paradigm shift.”

Both the Character Ethic and the Personality Ethic are examples of social paradigms.

The word paradigm comes from the Greek. It was originally a scientific term, and is more commonly used today to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference.

In the more general sense, it’s the way we “see” the world—not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting.

• For our purposes, a simple way to understand paradigms is to see them as maps.

• We all know that “the map is not the territory.”

• A map is simply an explanation of certain aspects of the territory.

• That’s exactly what a paradigm is. It is a theory, an explanation, or model of something else.

Suppose you wanted to arrive at a specific location in central Chicago.

A street map of the city would be a great help to you in reaching your destination.

But suppose you were given the wrong map.

Through a printing error, the map labeled “Chicago” was actually a map of Detroit.

Can you imagine the frustration, the ineffectiveness of trying to reach your destination?

You might work on your behavior—you could try harder, be more diligent, double your speed. But your efforts would only succeed in getting you to the wrong place faster.

You might work on your attitude—you could think more positively.

You still wouldn’t get to the right place, but perhaps you wouldn’t care. Your attitude would be so positive, you’d be happy wherever you were.

• The point is, you’d still be lost.

• The fundamental problem has nothing to do with your behavior or your attitude.

• It has everything to do with having a wrong map.

If you have the right map of Chicago, then diligence becomes important, and when you encounter frustrating obstacles along the way, then attitude can make a real difference.

But the first and most important requirement is the accuracy of the map.

Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values.

We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps.

We seldom question their accuracy; we’re usually even unaware that we have them.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.

And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source of the way we think and the way we act.

The influences in our lives—family, school, church, work environment, friends, associates, and current social paradigms such as the Personality Ethic—all have made their silent unconscious impact on us and help shape our frame of reference, our paradigms, our maps.

• Paradigms are the source of our attitudes and behaviors.

• We cannot act with integrity outside of them.

• We simply cannot maintain wholeness if we talk and walk differently than we see.

This brings into focus one of the basic flaws of the Personality Ethic.

To try to change 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.

As clearly and objectively as we think we see things, we begin to realize that others see them differently from their own apparently equally clear and objective point of view. “Where we stand depends on where we sit.”

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective.

But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it.

When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms.

When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them.

Sincere, clearheaded people see things differently, each looking through the unique lens of experience.

The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms.

We can examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.

Michael Daras