Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially

Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day. Today we discuss "sharpening."

Hopefully, the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter along to others who you think would benefit from the content.

Sharpening

One of the first – and still best – books that I read related to personal development was Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. For those of you who haven’t read the book, the habits are:

• Be proactive.
• Begin with the end in mind.
• Put first things first.
• Think win/win.
• Seek first to understand.
• Synergize
• Sharpen the saw.

It’s the seventh habit that makes all the difference—in my opinion.

All too often, we get stuck in fighting the day-to-day fires and NOT growing as individuals. Yeah, I know, life’s busy and you don’t have time. But I’d argue you can’t NOT have time to invest in yourself. Failure to learn and grow condemns you to the current state you are in. And that’s no good, as I believe we all have massive potential to grow personally, professionally, and spiritually.

Sharpening the saw refers to making the time to assess where you are weaker than your potential and investing the effort to grow stronger. I won’t go into the process of how to decide on the area of focus here, but I will appeal to you to take the time to figure out which area you can grow in—and then invest in your growth.

That brings us to this week’s question:

• Are you sharpening your saw?

Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning.  

Have a great week!

Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Complaining