Habit 7 is the habit of self-renewal, which maintains and improves the quality of all the other habits. You’re the instrument of your life and performance, and self-renewal is a form of the P/PC balance — your good habits and positive behavior are the P, and your physical, mental, and emotional ability to effectively carry them out is the PC. Just like you have to do maintenance on your car to keep it running at peak capacity, you need to take care of yourself to continue functioning at your best.
Imagine you came across someone sawing down a tree. She tells you she’s been working for hours and is exhausted by the hard labor. When you suggest she stops for a moment and sharpens her saw to make the work go faster, she insists she has no time to sharpen the saw — she’s too busy sawing!
Self-renewal requires a proactive mindset to commit time to self-care activities, which fall into Quadrant II: important but not urgent. It can be difficult to prioritize something like going to the gym or journaling when you have so many urgent tasks pulling at your attention; however, if you neglect it too long it will eventually become an urgent Quadrant I need, like developing urgent health problems because of lack of exercise.
Self-renewal also improves how efficiently and effectively you’re able to practice the other six habits; it creates an upward spiral of growth and self-improvement. Self-renewal nurtures your conscience, the small voice that pushes us toward what’s right and aligned with our principles. As you feed and strengthen your conscience, your conscience helps you stay disciplined and focused on a principle-centered path that fosters growth through the 7 Habits.
To continue performing at your peak, you need to prioritize self-renewal in all four dimensions of your nature: physical, spiritual, mental, and social/emotional.
First, take care of your body, which entails eating well, exercising, and getting enough sleep and relaxation. This not only benefits your physical being, but also reinforces Habit 1 by strengthening your proactivity; each time you get yourself to the gym or make a healthy meal choice, you increase your self-esteem, self-confidence, and integrity.
Second is spiritual renewal, which can take many forms, such as prayer, meditation, reading, writing, and spending time in nature. This form of self-renewal is vital to inspire and uplift you while reconnecting you to your center and your principles. Spiritual renewal supports with Habit 2 by keeping you closely tied to your personal mission and helping you to practice personal leadership.
Third, mental renewal means continuing your mental development and education after leaving school, especially by reading, writing, and exposing yourself to new information. The regular organizing and scheduling that Habits 2 and 3 call for requires a sharp mind, and is also a form of mental development and renewal in itself. Mental self-renewal helps you in examining your paradigms, opening your mind to others’ perspectives, and effectively communicating your own views, as we practice in Habit 5.
Finally, social/emotional renewal centers around public victories and happens in everyday interactions with other people because your emotional life is largely developed and expressed in your relationships with other people (whereas physical, spiritual, and mental renewal are essential to private victories and require you to set aside personal time). Practicing the principles of interpersonal leadership, empathic listening, and synergy discussed in Habits 4,5, and 6 improves your emotional well-being; these practices require a sense of personal security, while also reinforcing that sense of security by reassuring you that Win/Win solutions, synergy, and meaningful, productive relationships with others are possible.
Self-renewal needs to be balanced among all four dimensions; neglecting any aspect of self-renewal impedes the effectiveness of the rest. In this way, a balanced approach to self-renewal is synergistic because investing in one dimension raises your ability to improve the other dimensions.
Self-renewal also applies to organizations: In a business context, the physical dimension is economic success, the spiritual dimension is the company’s purpose or contribution to society, the mental dimension relates to developing and recognizing employees’ talents, and the social/emotional dimension deals with how employees and customers are treated. A company that focuses on making money to the exclusion of fostering good relationships with its customers and employees will suffer from high turnover rates and low customer loyalty. On the other hand, a company that is heavily invested in a social cause and in creating goodwill among its employees and customers also needs profits to make the business viable.
Self-renewal helps us attain inner peace and stability that improves our effective interdependent relationships. People’s relationships with others create a social mirror that reflects images of themselves back to them and affects their paradigms. This is essentially the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy.
You’re part of that social mirror, and how you react to others affects how they see themselves. Do you want to reflect back a clear, positive image that emphasizes a person’s potential, or a distorted one based on assumptions, stereotypes, and misunderstandings?
The Abundance Mentality assures that if you choose to reflect positive images back to the people around you — affirming their proactive behaviors or potentials, attesting to their principles, and holding them to high standards — it doesn’t take away from your own self-image and self-worth in any way. In fact, being a positive social mirror also benefits you because your positive reflection of others supports them in becoming more proactive, effective people with whom you can have productive interdependent interactions.
The effects of the social mirrors can be extreme: In one example, a glitch in a school computer in England mislabeled one class of “bright” students as “dumb,” and another class of “dumb” students as “bright.” As they started the school year, the teachers’ views of their students were based primarily on these wrong reports.
Several months later, administrators realized the error and tested the students to find out the impact of the mistake. IQ scores dropped for the students who were wrongly labeled as “dumb,” as teachers had treated them as incompetent, uncooperative, and difficult. But scores went up for the students who’d been labeled “bright”; although those teachers were perplexed at the beginning of the year when the supposedly “bright” students weren’t performing well, the teachers attributed the problem to their teaching methods and changed their approach until the students’ performance reflected the teachers’ expectations. It turned out, the biggest predictor of students’ performance was not their inherent ability or lack thereof, but teachers’ expectations and how they treated students as a result.