Dr. Buckley's Self-Help Book Blog

How to Become More Effective

I'm about to talk to you about another oldie-but-goodie, business and leadership consultant Steven Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (2004, Simon and Schuster, Inc.)  Originally published in 1989, this book popularized some really annoying--yet somehow irreplaceable?-- buzzwords such as 'proactive', 'synergy', and 'win/win'.  Unlike psychology research, however, (most of which ages out at about 10 years), a really good self-help book written during the Me Decade is like an old Rolling Stones song.  Each time you re-experience it, it makes you want to stand up, shake the dust off your booty and move. 

That's how I felt about reading the Seven Habits recently, having for some reason only enjoyed it in the form of a page-a-day calendar previously.  Clearly this has been a highly influential book, promoting notions of work-life balance, the importance of good (empathic) listening skills, the idea that 'everyone is a leader', having a personal vision regardless of who you work for, walking your spiritual talk at work as well as everywhere else in your life, and organizing your activities according to a coherent set of principle-based priorities that you set on a daily basis.  The field of executive coaching owes a lot to Covey, whose powerful system has been restated a thousand times, but never outsold.

For me, as a psychologist, one of the most resonant ideas in the book is the notion of personal development from dependency, through independence, to interdependence.  You can't properly work as an equal beside others in the world until you accept responsibility for what happens to you.  And once you become independent, you have to begin to see yourself as part of a network of beings that rely on each other for service, and serve each other.  You can't fully succeed unless others succeed, and vice versa.  This is the course of a good relationship of equals, no matter the context: business, marriage, religious communities or the interface of the corporate and natural environments. Win/win... or no deal!  

'Proactive', of course, is business-speak for taking the initiative.  I noticed Covey reverts to the softer term 'initiative' in his forward to the 2004 edition of his book.  Since the forward addresses the increase in anxiety everywhere since the original publication of the book, this seems somehow reassuring.

'Synergy' refers to the blossoming of creative potential that happens when people function together from a place of awareness of their interdependent relationships with each other, intentionality, and good self-care.  It isn't Covey's fault if the term was bandied about in advertising for companies that weren't very good at communicating their true mission to the rest of us.

Like most self-help books, this one contains exercises to work through.  These are robust in their simplicity and take-to-work applicability.  I have been using his principle- and priority-based scheduling to rebalance my own time and energy.  I don't get everything that's on the list done every week, but as it is organized by the various 'roles' that I play throughout my life, I get something notable done for each role each week.  Covey admits it is hard work to follow his own program to the letter, and that he himself is very much a work-in-progress.  Perfectionism is not the object here, however: purposefully balancing where you put your energy is. 

Rick Blum's Gift to Therapists

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice: How to Best Serve Your Clients While Maximizing Your Professional Freedom (2011, The Paradoxical Press) is psychologist Rick Blum's testimonial on building and maintaining a successful cash practice during the managed-care era.  While this book is aimed at all licensed mental health professionals, it comes at a moment when many private-practice psychologists are in an existential crisis. Do we succumb to what seems like a gradual de-professionalization through drastically lowered insurance reimbursement rates? Should we fight/negotiate for more? Will we have to perhaps go to work in settings we are not as well suited to, to make ends meet?  Blum does not attack this environmental pressure directly.  He uses the force of its momentum to make a point about private practice psychotherapy: ultimately, you are in charge of how you practice.

This is really a book about working in our field with integrity and thriving because of it.  To do that, these days, you need to understand the true value of what you do by being in touch with your philosophical/spiritual essence.  Then, you have to act in all of your roles according to these real values, be it with clients, case managers, paperwork or fee setting.  He uses his own practice/metaphor of Aikido to illustrate this.  It is really a rare window into a practice that rests on deep caring, genuine knowledge, and coherent method.       

The book has another aspect to it that should appeal to graduate students and trainees not yet licensed, who may be considering a private practice career.  He goes into great detail about the quality of his interactions with clients, sharing more than many of one's clinical supervisors ever will.  Indeed, Blum has taught and supervised in a humanist vein for some time.  His approach is nonetheless more integrative than psychotherapy research is generally comfortable with.  But it is far more like what most clinicians actually do, and find works, in the real world. 

If you are just looking for some quick tips on how to shift to a cash practice--and you work in a region that is not too competitive--you can certainly skip to the last part of the book and try out some of his ideas. But deciding you are worth such a shift in your relationship to the psychotherapy market, and then behaving as though you are, involves an organic process that might be helped by examining Blum's successful example in its entirety.  

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice is available in paperback at Amazon.com.