Mr. Ameer Ahamed is the CEO (Sri Lanka, Maldives & Bangl.) for Franklin Covey South Asia. Master Trainer for 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Process & Leadership.

In the last few weeks we have been looking at principles, values paradigms and habits in our journey to Effectiveness.

Let's look at a driving force in our life which we can easily term as "Paradigms of Life". Besides having paradigms of ourselves and others [like we discussed in one of our earlier articles] we also have paradigms about the world in general. You can usually tell what your paradigm is by asking yourself:
What is the driving force of my life?

What do I spend my time thinking about?

Who or what is my obsession?

Whatever is most important to you will become your paradigm of life, your glasses through which you see the world, or as we call it in effectiveness process your life centre. Some of the more popular life- centres for teenagers include friends, stuff`, music, school, parents, sports/hobbies, heroes, enemies, and work too.

They each have their good points, but they are all incomplete in one way or another, and as I'm about to show you, they will mess you up if you centre your life on them. Luckily there is one centre that you can always count on. We'll save it for the last.

Friend centered

There is nothing better than belonging to a great group of friends and nothing worse than feeling like an outcast. Friends are important but should never become your centre. Why? Well, occasionally they are fickle. Now and then they are fake. Sometimes they talk behind your back or develop new friendships and forget yours. They have mood swings and they move too.

In addition, if you base your identity on having friends, being accepted and being popular, you may find yourself compromising your standards or changing them every weekend to accommodate your friends.
Believe it or not the day will come when friends will not be the biggest thing in your life. During school I too had a fabulous group of friends. We did everything together - you name it, like many of you all. I loved these people. I felt that we'd be friends forever.

After leaving school and moving away however, I've been amazed at how seldom we see each other.
We live far apart, some in different countries, and new relationships, jobs, and family takes up our time.
Make as many friends as you can, but don't build your life on them. It's an unstable foundation.

Stuff centered

Sometimes we see the world through the lens of possessions or 'STUFF". We live in a material world that teaches us that and all around us too. We have to have the fastest car, nicest clothes, the latest stereo, the best hairstyle, and many other things that are supposed to bring us happiness.
Possessions also come in the form of titles and accomplishments such as "Head Prefect" of the school, lead in the play, prefect, team captain etc.

There is nothing wrong with accomplishing and enjoying our 'stuff' but we should never centre our lives on Things, which in the end have no lasting value. Our confidence needs to come from within, not from without, from the quality of our hearts and not from the quantity of things we own. After all one who dies with the most amount of things …still dies.

Next week we will look at all other centres and the most important centre we MUST have to be a highly effective person in life.