#485: Habits That MAKE or BREAK Your Career with Todd Davis, Author, Senior Leadership Consultant, & 7 Habits Content Expert

And so how do we learn to prioritize and determine what are the most important things? I can't do it all. Nobody can do it all.
So how do effective people decide what am I going to accomplish this day, this week, and what am I going to be okay with not getting to? In this age of technology, that's one of the most important questions I think we can figure out for ourselves. I'm on this journey with me.
Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. Hi, and welcome back.
I'm so glad you're back with us this week. Okay.
I'm really excited for you to meet our guest today. Todd Davis is a senior leadership consultant, seven habits, content expert, and thought leader at FranklinCovey with over 35 years of experience in human resources, talent development, and executive recruiting.
As the former chief people officer and executive vice president, Davis was responsible for the global talent development in over 40 offices, reaching 160 countries. Additionally, he authored and co-authored Wall Street Journal bestselling books, including Get Better, 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work, and Everyone Deserves a Great Manager.
Todd, thank you so much for being here today. Well, thanks for the invitation.
And maybe we could just read that over again. That felt really good.
I love being introduced. It's so funny.
Everybody always loves the bio. I always think it's so funny.
It's like our highlight reel. Well, you're very gracious.
Thank you very much. And thanks for inviting me.
Well, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is an iconic book. Can you give us, obviously, you are the master at all this.
Why is it so powerful and why is it so timeless? Yeah, thanks for asking. So as you mentioned, I've been with Franklin Covey.
I've been with them for 29 years now. And I first read Seven Habits about 31 years ago.
It was first published in 1989, so about 35 years old. And if I were new listening about this and never heard of Seven Habits, I might think, okay, well, that's great, but 35 years old, what am I going to learn from that? But to your question, Heather, it is, the Seven Habits are based on principles of effectiveness.
Dr. Covey, Stephen R.
Covey, who made the point, who wrote the book and made the point always that he didn't invent the habits. What he did was watch individuals like Heather and other people who were so effective in their roles and teams and organizations, how effective they were and watched what do they do on a consistent basis to get, not just get any results, but get the results they're really seeking.
And then he put those principles into a context that we could discuss them and talk about them. And so all of that is to say, because these are based on principles of effectiveness, they are as relevant today, if not more so than they were when Dr.
Covey first wrote about them. It's just amazing to me that they seem pretty simplistic.
I'd love it if we could get into actually talking about the seven principles and understand why each one is so powerful. 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 last two weeks ago now, and a gentleman came out to me after he was probably in his mid fifties.
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, his 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 second thing is, 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.
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, you know, our response crash into the, you know, 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 brains so that we can come up with more effective solutions.
So that's habit window. I could ramble on all day.
So I want to pause after habit one to see if you have any questions or if I'm talking too much. So one of the things I wasn't aware of was the structure or strategy and how they're actually laid out.
So there is an importance in this one being the first. 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 gotta chart my course. I gotta decide what is it that I'm gonna 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 gotta set sail.
I to take actions 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.
You know, 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 five, 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. You know, 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 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 we're winning with others now.
We have this trust that we're building with others. And then surrounding, 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. And it's really the gas in the engine for all the other habits.
So how does somebody develop a habit, though? It's one thing I feel like to be aware that these are the right habits, and it does make sense. But how do you actually rinse and repeat and do it? 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.
How do I become this? In the work sessions, and we update the work session, the seven habits, it's called the seven habits effect. We update that about every eight to 10 years.
We just launched our newest version, seven habits 5.0. And so that's why we appreciate you inviting us on the podcast and why I'm out traveling the globe to do overviews of what we're talking about here.
But in the work sessions, we dive deep. It's two days worth of content that can be delivered, concentrated over two days back to back, spread out, virtual, on demand.
And in the work sessions, we go in and study a particular habit. Let me back up here.
The most significant thing about learning any habit, but particularly the seven habits, is something we call the see-do-get model. It's our paradigms.
The way we see things influences everything we do. And of course, we know what we do gives us the results we get.
But what is so powerful about developing any habit is backing up and saying, wait a minute, am I seeing this situation, this person, this relationship accurately? Or am I seeing it how I'm, I've just convinced myself that it is. For example, if I'm a micromanager, I bet people are familiar with micromanagement.
If I'm a micromanager, how do I see my people? Well, I probably see them as incompetent. So I got to do everything for them, or I got to criticize, hover over, triple check.
And if that's what I do, what kind of results do we get? Poor, mediocre at best. And then I see those poor results.
And what do I say to myself as the micromanager? See, they are idiots. I got to micromanage even more.
It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy all driven by an inaccurate or an incomplete paradigm. So to your question, with each habit, we start out with a paradigm.
Habit one, be proactive. An ineffective paradigm might be, hey, this is just the way things are.
There's not much I can do about it. And I've been there before.
I think we can drift into that. But a proactive or a highly effective paradigm is, I am free to choose, and I'm the one responsible for my choices.
And if we take that paradigm on, then in habit one, there are three specific practices that we dive deep into with activities and rinse and repeat, as you say. We learn ways to separate stimulus from response.
We talk about what's the last time you were reactive and what did that feel like? What would be some better ways to respond? How do we learn to pause before we respond? And it might be as simple as I count to 10 or I do box breathing or whatever, or it might be something that I look at my last week and I look at those times I was reactive and I write down because those things are gonna repeat themselves again and I wanna be prepared. So there are activities like that that we do throughout the days and they are, and I know I sound dramatic here, but I'm telling you from my experience, they are life-changing.
They are powerful where all of a sudden, I've got a long ways to go, but I think about just in that one habit, how much more proactive I am today than I was, you know, when I started with Franklin Covey 29 years ago. So they are tried and tested and true.
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Oh my gosh, I love that you brought up that idea of responding instead of reacting to people because so many people in today's world with the political climates and whatnot are triggered constantly and you see getting angry and getting upset. And actually, when you were talking about the workbook exercises that you do to help people stop reacting, I thought of my own.
I worked side by side with a woman who did not like me and would try tirelessly to trigger me. And how could someone not like you, Heather? What are you talking about? There are a few people out there.
Okay. So she would intentionally try to trigger me.
And when I was younger, I would play the game. I would react and get upset.
And it was exhausting and not a good look for me. Right.
Of course. And I would end up being the one that looked like, Oh, this lady's losing it.
What's wrong with her? She's upset. She's yelling.
She's, you know, it wasn't working for me. And so for me, the way I ended up teaching myself to beat it was I would visualize that person, whoever you're potentially going to react to puppeteering you, like pulling strings on you and control.
Oh, that's a good visual. Yeah.
Oh my gosh. And it made me, that made me so mad that I said, no way am I letting anyone do that to me anymore.
So when the moment that you were talking about, whether you box breathe or whatever that pause moment is for you, I would see the puppeteering happen. And immediately I would stop and detach from whatever that situation was.
I'm not going to participate. I love that example.
I'm going to borrow that if you don't mind. I love that.
Please put it in the course. I'd love for you to do that.
You know, another, you just reminded me of one of the other activities. It is so, it sounds so simplistic.
It is so powerful. We do this.
We have participants write a, I may not be able to statement. And so they have to write a statement.
I may not be able to, and then they fill in the blank, but I can, and they fill in the blank. So for example, someone's in a company they really love, but they're kind of burned out on their role.
They've done it for so many years and they just, they want to see it at the company, but, and the company's not going to change their role. So I may not be able to change my role, but I can explore other areas of the company where I might be interested in looking.
And people, again, it sounds so simple, but people have these real aha moments going, wait a minute, I can make a choice here. I have more influence than I think I do.
One lady, though, I got to tell you, she wrote, this table was laughing. This is about a month ago.
This table was laughing. I went over and I said, okay, what's so funny here? And this woman said, she hated her house, by the way.
And she said, I wrote, I may not be able to convince my husband to move, but I can make his life miserable for the rest of our marriage. I said, okay, not quite what we were going for, but I guess that is being proactive.
So in each of the habits, we have a series of activities and exercises, and then they make commitments to themselves. There's, of course, a workbook, everything they go through.
And in habit two, begin with the end in mind. There's one of the activities we do is called backcasting.
This is super powerful. Backcasting is they partner up and they think about an act, a goal that they would like to achieve that might take anywhere from three months to a year.
One person I was working with, they have this goal of running a marathon and they were set on that. And so they visualize, and I'm sure your listeners are familiar with visualization exercises, but they visualize the day they accomplish that goal.
They just cross the finish line of the marathon. Or this one gentleman, he was building an addition to their home, and he had never been a general contractor before.
But he just finished cutting the ribbon, so to speak, on their new addition. And they visualize every detail, and they partner up, and they tell their partner, they talk for 10 minutes each about what it feels like.
I just crossed the finish line and I'm getting all these cheers and people are handing me roses and I pick them up. And it's just this defining our outcomes before we act, beginning with the end in mind.
And people come out of that and they go, wow, I can do this. I know I can do this now.
I'm super excited to get started. So anyway, sorry, I get passionate and I talk too much.
I love these real life examples that you're giving us. You know, have you ever heard of mind movies before? No, tell me.
So it's interesting because what it's doing is sort of taking what you just described and this idea that, you know, we have this goal in mind and we've already achieved it and feeling the feelings of actually having to happen, but putting it into an actual movie that you create utilizing Canva and adding music to it. And the whole reason why you add the music to it is to elicit this emotion that, you know, really get excited and believe something, you know, really positive is happening in your life.
But it's exactly what you're saying. And this is from Dr.
Joe Dispenza, you know, different teachings, but so very, very similar. And so interesting to me when you look across life and these different authors and different leaders and different teachers, but so much similarity in what actually works for people.
Yeah. I love that example.
I'm going to borrow that from you too, because to your point, music, for most people, it's such an inspirational element in a visualization exercise. So that's, yeah, that's very cool.
Same idea for sure. Yeah.
And definitely works. I've heard some great success stories on that.
All right. So what are some helpful habits for embracing and navigating the new world of AI? Because I'm sure you hear as often as I do, people are just shut down about it.
They don't want to embrace it, much less try it, much less do anything. How can we help those people? To be open to AI? I would tell any of them.
Now, I don't think AI will ever replace the interpersonal skills that we're talking about, you know, and the emotional intelligence. But I can't tell you how many times I've had to, we'll get a custom assignment from a client.
I was just teaching a course on leading generations. And while I've done a fair amount of work in leading different generations, I'll use chat GPT and say, hey, here's the elements I want to add.
And here's what I want to talk about. And boom, it'll pop out a pretty sophisticated skeleton or framework that, of course, needs your element now, your personal touch.
But I usually get the question, how do we make sure that AI doesn't, you know, is there still a need for seven habits because of AI? So I usually get the opposite. We just did or participated in and read the reviews of a study of 290 business practitioners that use AI on a regular basis.
And they were asked in this survey, what are the most important skills, even with all that AI can do for us, what are the most important skills that are needed to grow your business? And the top three were integrity, creativity, and interpersonal skills or human skills, things that AI can't really do. I don't know that AI will ever be able to listen to you or me empathically and reflect back to us what we're really feeling.
But boy, I would embrace it. I apologize that I'm not the expert on telling you all the ins and outs of AI, but I just know from a practical standpoint, how much it's helped me to get my creative thinking going by, you know, asking a question or saying, help me develop a framework for such and such.
And then it's a great starting point for me to take off from. What would be some of the tactics to develop a new habit, like just going to chat GPT first? How could you advise us on how to start just practicing something like that more? Yeah, well, in our seven habits, we have a learning platform at Franklin Covey that all of our content, not just seven habits, but all of our work solutions are on.
And we have a platform for that so that it measures in companies and organizations, it measures the learner's progress and growth. And in the seven habits portion of the platform, there is an AI tool to practice empathic listening.
And so you can set up a situation in this tool that we have through AI on the platform, and you can put together a scenario. Okay, this person, I'll go back to the friend that didn't like you or the person that didn't like you.
Okay, I work with someone, and for whatever reason, we are not syncing. And everything I say, she criticizes or he criticizes.
And so you can feed that information to it and say, I'd like to have a conversation. How would you begin the conversation? And I will say to you, I would start by saying, Joe, I'm really hoping that we can get to a great working relationship.
And I want you to know my only intent in bringing this up is to see if we can figure out how to improve our communication skills. You know, it'll tell you things to say.
You're going, oh, wow, that's a really, and you're writing down notes. I'm going to say that.
I'm going to say that. So, I mean, that's just one example of AI out in the world, but how we use it on the platform to practice, seek first to understand, to be understood.
So interesting to me that this seven habits has been around for so long, yet you're incorporating and integrating the newest technology into it and putting it to work for the users. Thanks for calling that out, Heather, because that is why, while this was written 35 years ago, it's based on principles that are as true.
Gravity was true forever. It will be true forever.
These are principles. So they don't age out.
Now their applications age out the way we use them. We have to change all the time.
And so to your well-stated point, the way we use those now in this world of technology and all of the being proactive, putting first things first. Habit three, boy, putting first things first has always been difficult.
But now when we have so much information coming at us, you know, in every minute, I mean, think about that. I can't imagine your email piling up right now while you're taking this time with me.
And so how do we learn to prioritize and determine what are the most important things? I can't do it all. Nobody can do it all.
So how do effective people decide what am I going to accomplish this this day, this week? And what am I going to be okay with not getting to? In this age of technology, that's one of the most important questions I think we can figure out for ourselves. Oh, it's so true.
All right. So to go to the opposite of AI, to your point, how do you recognize the key human skills, emotional intelligence, collaboration, trust, and resilience? And how do you improve those? Yeah.
In the seven habits course, in the work session, we go into workshop

activities where people use very real situations and, and, you know, they have to pick a situation

they're comfortable sharing with somebody. And then people have reps that they can only ask

questions. They cannot comment or advise or probe.
They just have to say, well, gosh, so how did that

make you feel? And of course it feels scripted and it feels a little bit uncomfortable, but it gets

Thank you. cannot comment or advise or probe.
They just have to say, well, gosh, so how did that make you feel? And of course, it feels scripted and it feels a little bit uncomfortable, but it gets people understanding that how much they didn't even realize they kind of respond autobiographically. You know, it's human nature to listen with the intent to reply.
I'll bet everybody that's listening right now, if they're being truthful, would say, yeah, there are many times when I'm face to face with someone. They're talking and I'm not talking and I'm looking at them and I'm nodding my head.
But in my mind, I'm already formulating my response. We all do it.
And I think it comes. I believe it comes from a good place.
It's not helpful, but it comes from a place that we want to help. We want to solve.
We want to fix. And so I hear just enough of what you're saying to think, oh, I know how to solve this.
As soon as she stops talking, I'm going to jump in. And while that sounds helpful, because my brain is focused on what I'm going to say, I'm missing out on half or three-fourths of what you're saying.
And so habit five, based on the principle of respect, we're saying suspend those feelings. Don't throw them away, but suspend your thoughts, your response long enough to really hear the other person to the point where when they finished, you say, gosh, help me understand more about that.
Or when you said frustrated, tell me what about that. And I'll tell you, when you start to listen with empathy to someone, they are shocked, but shocked in a good way because so few of us do it.
And so, you know, you have that person of those people. And when we do it, when I was the chief people officer for 18 years, this is very true.
I can't tell you how many times I'd be in my office with two leaders that didn't get along or even just one-on-one with someone that were trying to work out a problem. And if we were there for an hour, I would talk maybe about eight to 10 minutes of that hour.
They talked the rest of the time. And so we'd finish this session and I would almost start laughing because they would say, God, this was so helpful.
Thank you so much. I can't believe you are just so wise.
And I'm thinking, well, I didn't say much of anything. I just listened.
But that is the power of really listening with empathy, not trying to have all the answers, but helping others really be reflective of what they're feeling and what they're thinking. I mean, I loved your example of the interaction you had with this person who you realized, and hopefully it was unintentional on her part, but where she was just kind of manipulating the whole conversation with this marionette puppet.
And a good listener can help somebody come to that realization and saying, help me understand why you respond like that. Well, because she says this thing and it triggers me.
Okay, but do you have to be triggered? Is that something you could, you know, so, and I'm not trying to get into therapy here. I'm just saying empathic listening.
We care about these relationships at work in our personal lives. We'll truly seek first to understand.
Can you give us an example of some of the people that you've worked with that you've seen a breakthrough when doing these exercises? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
So someone will say, I will change the names to protect the innocent, but someone was frustrated that they weren't getting any recognition for the work they were doing. And they were on this project team and they said, you know, and I'll just use Joe as the leader.
Joe never calls me out. I helped put together that whole third hour of this work session, or I helped put together that spreadsheet.

And when the executive team was congratulating herself, Joe never said, well, I want you to know that, you know, Sam did a lot of this, too, and she was great at this.

And I say, OK, so do you think Joe was wanting to make them think that he did it all?

And this person, Joe, said, no, I don't think that.

I said, you are obviously a very thoughtful person. Do you think Joe is even aware that he's doing that? I don't know.
I said, have you ever had a conversation with Joe? Have you just told him, not in an angry way, but just say, hey, Joe, maybe I'm being too sensitive. But I kind of felt like when we met, no, I've never said that.
Would you be willing to say, I mean, I don't want you to feel uncomfortable, but is that something you'd feel comfortable doing? And this person would say to me, well, how would you say that? And I tell them. So that's just an example, just helping people come to their own, realizing that, you know, there aren't tons of bad people in the world.
Well, I don't know. Maybe there are, but I think most people have good intent.
They just may not be as self-aware as they'd like to be. So I will get out a T-chart all the time, and I'll say, okay, so in listening to you, here's what I understand is important to you.
What do you think is important to Fred? And so many people, mature, educated people would say, well, I don't know. I'm not Fred.
I know that. But if you were in Fred's role, what do you think would be important to Fred? Well, he'd want to make sure that the project's done on time.
Okay, let's put that down. What else? Well, we probably want to make sure that we do this with excellence.

And it's so interesting to coach people and get them in the mindset of thinking about the other person, putting themselves in the place of the other person. So those are some very real outcomes of taking time to guest each week.
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I ask you to try to find your passion. So powerful.
I was an assistant teacher at Harvard for a sales and leadership course. And the professor was teaching exactly what you're talking about right now.
I'm sure charging a lot more because they throw the name Harvard on it. But I'll tell you, it was exactly what we were discussing.
And it really was about sales, which I mean, to me, everybody's in sales anyways, but it's the most successful salespeople speak the less. And we looked at all the data points and they've studied this at length.
And you would see to your point of like speaking eight minutes and letting that other person, you know, speak 52, suddenly they feel heard. Suddenly they feel like you're the smartest person in the world.
Suddenly you close the deal. And it was just so interesting to me.
It all went back to this idea that we would just listen and ask more open-ended questions. Neuroscience shows people feel like dopamine hits from actually getting the opportunity to say what's on their mind.
I couldn't agree more, Heather. And you just caused me to think of, I remember somebody, a senior leader, when I was coaching this person on this, they said, well, my concern is if I just ask a couple of questions, let them talk the whole time while they're talking, I don't agree with them, Todd.
And so if I keep letting them talk, and I said, that's the part you got to be comfortable with. They're not thinking you agree with them.
You're just creating this safety, this space for them to express their opinion. But really listen, don't be thinking the whole time, I don't agree with you, be really hearing them out, ask some clarifying questions.
So I bring that up because I know a lot of people think, well, if I don't talk, they're going to think I'm agreeing with them. They're not.
They're just appreciative that you're hearing them out. And if you've truly heard them out and you say, okay, so you see it this way, gosh, I really respect that.
My take on it is this, but I heard you and I understand why you're seeing it that way. I want to think about this, but even in the end, if you end up going with, you know, against what the fact that you heard them out, you're going to have so much more buy-in and so much more of an engaged employee by doing that.
That's been my experience. So, so true.
So powerful and yet so incredibly simple, but most people just aren't doing it in the world. OK, so to that topic, how does trust continue to be the most valuable currency at work and how do you build it and maintain it? I love that because the whole thing about building effective relationships, I mean, you think about the most meaningful, impactful, effective relationships in your life.
I think about it in mind. Trust is kind of the foundation of those things, you know, and trust doesn't mean we see everything alike.
Trust doesn't mean that you always agree with me. Trust means that I hear you.
I respect you. I respect your opinion.
I don't sugarcoat things. I talk directly or talk straight with you, but I balance courage and consideration.
And so I think the greatest relationships, both in professional life and personal life, have this near perfect balance of courage and consideration. I can say anything to you as long as I say it with respect, true respect.
And I also can listen and ask you questions and have this considerate consideration as long as I'm doing it respectfully. So balancing courage and consideration, I think, is the key to building trust in our relationships.
And there's a really cool exercise we do in Seven Habits. It's called the emotional bank account and thinking about our emotional bank account with others.
Much like a financial bank account, in our emotional bank account, we make deposits and we take withdrawals. But unlike a financial bank account, we should never be making deposits in the emotional bank account with others with the intent of taking withdrawal.
I had this experience I wrote about in one of the books you cited, where this long lost friend, I hadn't talked to him for I can't remember how many years, and he called out of the blue. It was so awesome.
We've been such great friends. And he was talking for like 45 minutes, and we're just connecting.
We. We ought to go to lunch.
And towards the very end of the conversation, he said, hey, oh, by the way, do you guys still get discount tickets to that ski thing? And it was so funny, Heather, because I thought you took 45 minutes. I would have been okay if you'd called and said, hey, Todd, I feel so bad we haven't connected for years.
And I'd love to do that. I wanted to find out if you still get discount discount tickets and i also want to set up lunch but instead we do this dance so that would be an example of making a not a very sincere deposit emotional account with the intent of taking a withdrawal in the course we do this activity it's really powerful you think about an important relationship in your life professional or personal and then you go through on this document and you you document the last five interactions you had with that person whatever it was the last five interactions you got to really think about it and then you've got to think about how you think that person felt well for mine i picked my spouse many people pick professional relationships i picked my spouse because i had been traveling a lot i've been gone a lot and the last five interactions were like quick phone call quick goodbye and how did she feel dismissed rushed? Dismissed, rushed, whatever.
And boy, you look at that. And then we ask the question, this important relationship, what if we were to multiply those last five interactions, say, 50 times or 500 times? What would be the impact on that relationship? And so we talk all about this with the level of trust you have in a relationship and kind of putting the brakes on things and saying, I'm going to be a little bit more thoughtful about the interactions I have with the most important people in my life.
So trust is really, I think, the key to every one of the habits that we're talking about here. Oh, like you said, it's the foundation of everything.
And boy, that's scary when you play that game to actually think about what your relationship would look like if that went on for years. Exactly.
Exactly. We follow up by that.
I don't want to be giving the whole course here. I mean, I know we don't have time for that, but we follow that activity by in the class.
We say, okay, we're going to take five or 10 minutes right now. I want you to make a deposit in the emotional bank account of someone important to you.
It could be the person you just did the last five interactions. And so people take time with their smartphones and they'll send a text or an email to someone.
And this happens every time somebody in the class will say, okay, I just got a text back from my partner. And he said, has someone stolen your phone or who is this? So it's terrible.
And it's kind of humorous as well, but it's the wake up call for a lot of us, whether it's a colleague at work, whether it's someone in our personal lives, to just make sure we're being a little more meaningful

with those most important relationships in our life.

I love that.

All right.

Tell us a little bit about the course, because I know we've been talking a lot about the

book, and I'm sure for people listening, they're not really clear on exactly what the course

is.

Yeah.

The book is the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the best-selling, if not the best-selling business book of all time, 40 million copies sold. The course is two days worth of content.
So it's taking each of the habits. First, we start with some foundational principles, which we talked about, paradigms, and we dive deep into our paradigms and how they shape everything we do.
And then we go into the habits and we take hours, a couple of hours on each habit with understanding the habit, how to apply it in our current situations at work and at home. And it's taught over two days.
It's taught concentrated. You know, like I said, it can be two full days back to back live and in person.
It can be two full days virtually online. Like we're talking right now.
We'll have a whole class of, you know, 20. I just finished a class with 34 people for two days.
It can be dot spread out. Sometimes people take a habit a week.
We get together every week. There's an on-demand version.
So there are modules where I can just do it self-paced every which way. And so who is this course made for? Like for anybody listening right now, how do they know that this is the right thing? So organizations, we work primarily with organizations of really any size.
When I'm thinking of organizations I've worked with, we have about 70 consultants that do what I do. We also have a certification program where we will certify your own trainers, people in your company, employees of yours that can then continue to roll this out.
A lot of people make it part of their orientation program because seven habits is really can be a great framework for the culture of any organization. So people will usually choose to say, okay, I want to have this team go through seven habits and we'll pilot it here.
And then we might roll it out, you know, to other teams within the organization. So there's a lot of different ways that people decide to deploy this based on what they're trying to accomplish.
An organization may have a lot of turnover going on and people are understanding really the value that they contribute to the organization. Seven Happens is used a lot for that because we understand our personal worth and what we're doing for the organization.
So it's all about individual effectiveness. We have a role called a client partner.
We have people in the organization that can work with your organization to determine, you know, what is the best solution for what you're trying to achieve. It most, you know, seven habits is a great starting place, but it might be the speed of trust, which is another work session, five choices to extraordinary productivity, the four disciplines of execution.
We're big on numbers here. So we have a lot of numbers in our titles.
People go to learn more or if they want to actually take the course. Yeah.
Thank you for asking. If they'll go to just our website, which is simply our name, www.franklincovey.com.
There's a search engine there. They can look up anything and everything.
And there's a whole Alexis Pass care team that will respond to them and make sure that they get routed to the right people to find out what they want to accomplish. Well, Todd, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for all the work you're doing to help people be the best version of themselves. And thank you for taking this incredible work and making it so relevant today.
We appreciate you. Thank you for inviting me.
And thanks for those great ideas you shared that I'm going to start using now if they're

not copyrighted.

Make sure you give your girl, Heather Monaghan, a shout out.

I will do that.

All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence.

You know I will be.

We'll see you then. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear.
Start learning and growing.

Inevitably something will happen.

No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while.

You could miss it.

I'm on this journey with me.