The Character Ethic and Paradigm Shifts
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This article is part of a series of articles that I'm writing as I go through the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I recommend you start your reading from the first article in the series to have the full context around this journey.
In the first part of the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey introduces some key concept that will serve as the foundation for understanding all the 7 Habits that he'll then describe in detail in the following chapters.
One of the first interestig concepts introduced by Covey in the book is the distinction between what he calls the Personality Ethics and the Character Ethics. In order to understand them and their differences, he literally reviewed the "success" literature of the past 200 years and made a very interesting discovery.
He noticed a shift that happened roughly around the end of World War I where most of the literature started to take a very superficial approach, focused on band-aid, quick-fix and social image consciousness techniques. This approach seemed to focus on treating the sympthoms while ignoring the underlying cronic problems and issues that were at the origin of them. This type of approach is what he refers to as Personality Ethic, and is characterised by promising tremendous results with very little effort, which unfortunately tends to lead people to apparent success while suffering from deep dissatisfaction, unhappines and a sense of void. The Personality Ethics focuses entirely on behaviours and techniques rather than on the profound nature of an individual. Success in this frame of reference is a function of personal image, personality and all sorts of skills and techniques that are supposed to improve human interactions.
In contrast to that approach, Covey noticed that all the literature prior to that period was focusing instead on what he calls the Character Ethic as the foundation of sustainable success coupled with a deeper sense of self-fulfillment and happiness. This literature focused on key principles and concepts such as integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty and the Golden Rule. In Covey's own words:
The Character Ethic thaugh that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.
Ultimately, we should not consider traits and elements of the Personality Ethic as absolutely non beneficial. They can be very beneficial, but only if adopted in conjunction with the principles that are the foundation of the Character Ethic. We could consisder them as secondary traits, whereas all the principles in the Character Ethic represent the primary traits that will eventually lead a person to true and deep success. Secondary traits alone would not lead to sustainable positive impact, since the lack of underlying trust and honesty will be very loud signals that will make our interactions with other people deteriorate in the long run.
With a good understanding of the differences between Personality and Character Ethic, we now need to understand another important concept related to Paradigms, Paradigm Shifts and the way we see the world.
A paradigm can be though of as a frame of reference through which we observe the word (or a specific aspect of it). Covey compares paradigms to maps. A map of a certain territory is not the actual territory, but rather a model, a representation of it that helps us intepret the surrounding environment. Using the wrong map for the place we're in will usually lead us to unpleasant results. All of us have our own mental maps, our paradigms, that have been programmend in our minds through years of deliberate or involuntary conditioning, and these paradigms literally dictate the way we see, or rather perceive, the world around us.
To give a clear and concrete exemple of the power of paradigms, Covey mentioned an exercise performed at Harvard Business School years before the publication of the book. The teacher split the class in two groups, and to the members of the first group gave a card with the following drawing representing a young woman:
To the second group he gave another card, this time representing an old woman:
He asked the students to concentrate on the picture for about 10 seconds, and then he projected in the class the following picture:
He then asked one student to explain what he was seeing. It ensued a debate across the classroom, with half of it insisting that the picture represented a young woman, while the other half was strongly supporting the idea that it was a picture of an old woman! At some point the misunderstanding was resolved, but what lasted was a key realisation: 10 seconds watching a picture were enough to condition students to recognise the initial image in the picture that was shown later to the entire class.
All the students where convinced they were looking at the picture objectively, ignoring the fact that they were looking at it though a map, a paradigm, that only took 10 seconds to be programmend in their mind. Corey conclusion on this experiment is very eloquent and fundamental to understand one of human's biggest limitations:
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 ast it is, but as we are — or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouth to describe what we see, we in effect we describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms.
A lot of the material in another seminal book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel E. Kahneman, also revolves around the notion that humans way too often live in the illusion of being objective and rational beings while in reality they're profoundly influenced by subjective thinking and points of view. That's another book I strongly recommend to anyone reading this article.
Covey explains also how the Personality Ethic is built on a paradigm that tends to put the problem of each individual on the outside, in other people around us, and proposes quick-fixes and magical solutions that promise miracles, but these aren't more than band-aids and aspirine type of fixes. They do help relieve the symptoms while ignoring the underlying issue.
To be able to address the underlying issues and achieve real effectiveness and success, one has to change paradigm and adopt the Charater Ethic that is built on universal principles and will help us change the way we see the problem. To achieve that we'll need to start working on ourselves, taking an inside-out approach, from the deepest part of ourselves: our paradigms, motives and character. A great quote from Albert Einstein summarises perfectly the need for such a change of paradigm:
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
In the next article I'll introduce another key concept that will help us thorough the rest of the book, the P/PC relationship, and then we'll start moving into the first of the 7 habits.
