Sharpen The Saw Analysis

The summaries of the chapter from Covey’s book The seventh habits described by Covey is named “Sharpen the Saw”. The author points out that to be effective and productive people need to renovate themselves. A person needs to renovate oneself in physical, mental, spiritual social, emotional dimensions. At the beginning of the chapter Covey tells the story about two men who were sawing a tree all day long. One of them sawed wood without any breaks; the second man did short pauses every hour. In the end of a it became clear that the first man who worked without any breaks sawed smaller piece of a tree in comparison to the second man who did many breaks. The reason why the second man sawed larger pieces of a tree was that this man sharpens …show more content…
Social/emotional renovation can occur on a daily basis when we communicate with our family, friends, colleagues and others. Social and emotional renovation is associated with skills of interpersonal leadership, empathetic communication and creative collaboration. So, renovation of social/ emotional dimension is associated with development of those skills with will make our communication, our social relationships more effective. According to Covey, empathy means ability and desire to understand the point of view of another person as best as possible. To be empathetic listeners we can propose to a person with whom we communicate to express his/her opinion first. We must listen to another person until that moment when we will be able to explain his/her opinion as good and clear as he/she does …show more content…
He travelled for a long time, but finally came back home without the woman he longed for. After his return to his village, he met a woman of his dreams. This woman had lived next door all her life. So Stengel once asked Mandela what the moral of this story: that people must to become more experienced and see the world to begin to appreciate what they had before; or that people often cannot recognize their happiness despite it is in front of them. Mandela answered that both interpretation can be applied to this story (“Why not both?”) Stengel in his book also indicates that Mandela used the principle of “It is always both” every day in different contexts. He saw different motives, features, sides of individuals, events, discussion. And such position allowed him to stay above any