Habit # 4 Think Win Win – Principles of Interpersonal Leadership
The moment you step from independence to interdependence in any capacity you step into a leadership role.
Many problems between businesses, marriages and relationships are at the root of a flawed paradign. The problem cannot be solved with an antidote, technique or quick fix program.
You cannot change the fruit without changing the root. Working on attitudes and behaviors is like hacking at the leaves.
The attitude of interpersonal relationships is think Win Win.
Think W/W is one of the 6 paradigms of human interaction. (1) W/W, (2) W/Lose, (3) Lose/W, (4) Lose/Lose, (5) W/Lose, (6) W/W or No Deal.
W/W is a frame of mind and heart. It constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interaction.
W/W is based on mutual respect. W/W means that mutual agreements are mutually beneficial and satisfying.
W/W sees life as cooperation not a competitive arena.
W/W is based on the paradign that there is plenty for everybody and one person’s success in not achieved at the expense of exclusion of the success of another.
It’s not your way or my way, but a better way.
Most of life is an interdependent not an independent reality. Most of the results you want are based on the cooperation of you and the cooperation of others.
The W/L mentality is dysfunctional to that cooperation.
Psychosomatic illnesses particularly of the respiratory, nervous and circulatory systems often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by a L/W mentality.
People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings towards higher meaning find it affects the quality of their self-esteem and eventually the quality of their relationship with others.
W/W or No Deal means that if we can find a mutual agreement that will benefit us both we agree to disagree mutually. Think mutual benefit.
CD #9 5-Dimensions of W/W
Think W/W is the habit of interpersonal leadership that involves the human endowments of (1) self-awareness, (2) imagination, (3) conscience, (4) independent will.
Think W/W embraces (5) independent dimensions of life
1st Dimension - Character – The foundation of W/W with three characteristics. Integrity, Maturity & abundance mentality.
Maturity = If a person can express his feelings and convictions balanced with consideration for the feelings and convictions of another person, he is mature
While courage may focus on getting the golden egg. Consideration deals with the long-term welfare of the stakeholders.
The true mark of maturity – If I have it, I can listen, I can empathically understand but I can couragesly confront.
Abundance mentality – This is the paradign that there is plenty out there for everybody. People with a scarcity mentality have a very difficult time showing recognition and credit. They also have a genuine hard time for being happy for the success of other people. Their sense of worth comes from being compared and someone else’s success somehow inwardly means their failure.
Often people with a scarcity mentality harbor secret feelings that others may suffer misfortunes. Not terrible misfortunes but acceptable misfortunes that would keep them in their place.
The abundance mentality recognizes the unlimited possibilities for unlimited interactive growth and development.
Public victory means success in mutual interaction that brings success to everyone involved.
2nd Dimension – Relationship dimension. From the foundation of character we build and maintain W/W relationships
3rd Dimension – Agreements – From the relationship flows the agreements that give definition and direction to W/W.
The same (5) structures in delegation are in W/W agreements. They circle an effective way to clarify and manage expectations between any people involved in an interdependent endeavor.
It is much more noble for the human spirit to let people judge themselves than for you to judge them. In many cases people know in their hearts how things are going better then the record does.
W/W Management Training and W/W performance Agreements
The focus is on results, not methods. Refer to the story of the bank trainees and how the training session was turned to the focus of what the desired result were in comparison to the training methods. The training program went from 6-months to 3-weeks by outlining and accomplishing the desired results.
Developing a W/W performance agreement is a central activity of management.
With an agreement in place employees can manage themselves within the framework of the agreement. The manager’s job is to act as a pace car in the beginning and then jump out of the way and to be there to suck up oil spills. To be the assistant to the employee. Therefore the manager can manage many employees instead of just one.
When a boss becomes his 1st assistant to each of his subordinates he can greatly increase his span of control.
In W/W performance agreements consequences become the natural or logical result of performance.
4-Kinds of Consequences or Reward Penalties that managers and parents can control.
1) Financial – Bonuses, stock options, income, allowances
- Psychological or Psyche – Recognition, respect, approval, credibility or the loss of them. Unless people are in the survival mood, psychological compensation is more motivating them financial.
- Opportunity – Training, perks, development and other benefits.
- Responsibility – Has to do with scope and authority.
It is also important to clearly identify what the natural organizational consequences are.
W/W agreements are tremendously liberating but as a product of isolated technique they will not hold up. There is no way to maintain them without personal integrity and a relationship of trust.
4th Dimension – Systems – If you talk W/W but reward W/L you have a loosing program on your hands.
If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement then you need to align the reward system with those goals and values.
You basically get what you reward.
Cooperation in the work place is as important as competition in the market place.
The spirit of W/W cannot survive in an environment with competition and contests.
Refer to the example of the manager and sales people in the department store and how you overlap the needs and goals of the managers with the needs and goals of the sales people. In this example they set up a W/W system where the managers only made money when the sales people made money.
Often the problem is the system, not the people. You put good people in a bad system and you get bad results.
You have to water the flowers that you want to grow.
In families for an example, parents can shift the focus from competitive to cooperation. An example would be bowling. The family can work to beat previous family scores.
5th Dimension – Processes There is no way to achieve W/W ends with W/L or L/W means. The ends and the means are inseparable.
The Principal Approach vs. The Positional Approach to Bargaining.
Good book – Getting to Yes.
The essence to principle approach is to separate the person from the problem.
In seeking a W/W there is a 4-step process
1st – See the problem from the other persons point of view. Really seek to understand and give expression to the others point of view as well as or better then they can themselves.
2nd – Identify the key issues and concerns, not positions.
3rd – Determine what results would constitute a fully exceptable solution.
4th – Identify possible new options that would achieve the results.
You can only achieve W/W solutions with W/W processes. The ends and the means are the same. In fact the ends preexist in the means.
W/W is not a personality technique; it is a total paradign of human interaction.
Application # 1: For Think W/W
Think about an upcoming interaction were you will be attempting to reach an agreement or negotiate a solution.
Application # 2:
Make a list of the obstacles that keep you from applying the W/W paradign more frequently. Determine what can be done in your circle of influence to eliminate some of those obstacles.
Application # 3:
Select a specific relationship where you would like to develop a W/W agreement. Try to put yourself in the other persons place and write down explicitly how you think the other person sees the solution. Then list from your own perspective what results constitute a win for you. Approach the other person and ask if he or she would be willing to communicate until you reach a point of agreement and mutually beneficial solution.
Application # 4:
Identify (3) key relationships in your life. Give some indication what you think the balance is in each of the emotional bank accounts. Write down some specific ways you can make some deposits in each of their bank accounts.
Application # 5:
Deeply consider your own scripting. Is it W/L. How does that scripting effect your interactions with other people. Can you identify the main source of that script. Determine whether or not those scripts serve well in the current reality.
Application # 6:
Try to identify a model of W/W thinking were even in hard situations really seeks mutual benefit. Determine now to closely watch and learn from this person’s example.
Habit # 5 Seek First to Understand, Then be Understood – Is the key to effective interpersonal; communication.
Pascal: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of”
How often do we diagnose before we prescribe in communication?
Seek first to understand then be understood is the key to effective interpersonal communication.
Character & Communication:
The (4) types of communication – Reading, writing, speaking and listening.
Communication without any question is the most important skill in life.
You spend years learning how to read and write. Years learning how to speak, but what about listening.
If you sense somebody using some type of a technique on you, you sense duplicity or manipulation.
The key to your influence on someone is your example, your character, the kind of person you are. It’s not what you say you are or what you want people to think you are.
Your character is always communicating or radiating and from that in the long run people will come to either trust you or mistrust you.
If your private performance does not square with your public performance it is very hard for people to open up to you.
You can only appreciate what you understand. You can’t appreciate another person unless you understand another person. You can’t understand another person unless you take the time to listen.
If you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skill of empathic listening.
Empathic listening upon the face of character inspires openness and trust and you have to build the emotional bank account that creates commerce of trust.
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply. They are either speaking or preparing to speak. They are filtering everything through their own paradign. They are reading their own autobiography into everyone’s lives. They are constantly projecting their own home movies on other people’s behavior. They prescribe their own pair of glasses to everyone from whom they interact.
Avoid mistaking introspection (examining one's own thoughts feelings) for observation. Looking inside your own head and thinking you know the world.
When we are talking with someone we are usually listening at one of four levels. (1) We are ignoring, we are pretending to listen, (2) selective listening or hearing only part of the conversation, (3) attentive listening or (4) paying attention and focusing on the words that are said.
Empathic listening is not active listening or reflective listening.
Reflective listening is essentially autobiographical. You may not project your autobiography in the act or listening, but your motive is autobiographical. You listen with reflective skills but you listen with intent to reply to control, to influence, to motivate or even manipulate.
Empathic listening means listening with the intent to understand. Seeking first to understand.
Communication Ratio – 10% words, 30% sounds, 60% body language.
Empathic listening to another person is like sacred ground. It involves deep reverence but is the gateway to someone else’s heart. You’re listening to understand, your focused on receiving the deep communication of another sole. It requires deep reverence, humility, courage as well as skill.
Empathic listening is the key to making deposits into the emotional bank account of others.
Satisfied needs do not motivate. Only unsatisfied needs motivate.
Next to physical survival the greatest need to human beings is psychological survival. To be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.
When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. After that vital need is met you can then focus on influencing or problem solving.
With empathic listening in order to influence you need to be influenced. You need to deeply understand.
Habits 1,2 & 3 give you the principle core foundation from witch you can handle the outward mobility of habits 4 & 5 with peace and strength.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe.
If you don’t have confidence on the diagnoses, you wouldn’t have confidence in the prescription.
In sales, the amateur sells products, the professional sells needs and solutions. You first need to understand the problem or issue before you sell the customer.
The professional learns how to relate people’s needs to his products and services. He also has the integrity to say my products wouldn’t meet that need or service or wouldn’t hold up.
Seek first to understand is a correct principle that is evident in all areas of life.
4-Autobiographical Responses. – Because we listen autobiographically we tend to respond in one of 4-ways.
We evaluate, we either agree or disagree.
We probe or we ask questions from our own frame of reference.
We advise or we counsel based on our own experiences.
We interpret; we try to figure people out to explain their motives and behavior based on our own motives and behavior.
Constant probing is one of the main reasons that parents do not get close to their children. Why would a teenager share if every time he opens up or exposes the soft tissue of the underbelly you advise with autobiographical responses and “I told you so’s”.
We are so deeply scripted in these responses that we don’t realize we use them.
CD 10 track # 3 3-minutes, 30-seconds – conversation with a father and son. Autobiographical responses.
You’ll never be able to truly step inside another person to see the world as he see’s it until you develop the pure desire, strength of personal character and the positive emotional bank account as well as the empathic listening skills to do it.
The skills of empathic listening involve 4-steps
The first and least effective is to mimic content. You essentially repeat back what is said without advising, probing or evaluating.
To rephrase the content. This way you put someone else’s meaning into your own words.
You reflect meaning. Your not paying attention as much to what they are saying as you are to what you feel they are saying.
The fourth stage involves both the second and third stage. To rephrase the content along with reflecting the feeling.
Example of reflective empathic listening CD 10, track # 3 14-minutes.
In the example of the father and son, seek first to understand, the father turned a transactional opportunity into a transformational opportunity.
As long as the son’s response is logical, the father can ask questions and give counsel. The moment the son’s response becomes emotional the father needs to return to empathic listening.
There are times when transformation requires outside counsel. Often when people are really given the chance to open up they unravel their own problems and the solutions become obvious. In a way it is like opening up an onion. Many layers until you get to the core.
Many times people do need outside wisdom and help, but they are only open to it when they feel they are being understood.
Children desperately want to open up to their parents and they will if they feel that their parents will be faithful to them afterwards and they wouldn’t judge or ridicule them. Unconditional love.
People will resent any attempt to manipulate them.
Understanding and Perception
Seek first to understand and then to be understood, being understood is the other half to habit # 5.
Seeking to understand involves courtesy, seeking to be understood involves courage.
Ethos, Pathos, Logos – Greek
Ethos – Personal credibility, the faith people have in your integrity and competency.
Pathos – Empathic side, the feeling. It means you’re in alignment with the emotional thrust of another person’s communication.
Logos – The logic, the reasoning part of the communication.
Notice the sequence… Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Your character, your relationship then the logic of your presentation.
Being influencable is the key to influencing others. The more deeply you understand other people the more you appreciate them, the more reverent you will feel about them.
To touch the sole of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Look at your child’s school life and home life through their eyes.
The time you invest to deeply understand the people you love brings tremendous dividends and open communication. Many of the problems that plague marriages and family relationships don’t have the time to fester and develop.
Communication becomes so open that potential problems can be nipped in the but and there are great reserves in the emotional bank account to handle problems that do arise.
Make the human element as important as the financial or technical element.
When you listen you learn and you also give the people that work for you psychological air.
To succeed in the market place you first have to succeed on the work place.
When you really deeply understand each other we open the door to creative solutions and third alternatives.
Application # 1: For Habit # 5
Select a relationship in witch you sense the emotional bank account is in the red. Try to understand and write down the situation from the other person’s point of view. In your next interaction listen for understanding comparing what you are hearing with what you have done. How valid are your assumptions? Did you understand from that person’s perspective?
Application # 2:
Chat a concept of empathy with someone close to you. Tell him or her that you really want to work on really listening to others. Ask for feedback in a week. How did you do? How did you make that person feel?
Application # 3:
The next time you have the opportunity to watch people communicate, cover your ears for just a few minutes and watch. What emotions are being communicated that may not come across in word alone?
Application # 4:
Next time you catch yourself inappropriately using one of the autobiographical responses, probing, evaluating, advising or interpreting try to turn the situation into a deposit by acknowledgement with an apology. “I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to understand, can we start again.”
Application # 5:
Make your next presentation on empathy. Describe the others point of view as well as or better than it’s proponents. Then seek to have your point of view understood from their frame of reference.
Habit # 6 Synergize – Principle of creative cooperation.
The exercise of all the habits prepares us for the exercise of synergy.
The highest form of synergy focuses on the four unique human endowments.
We literally create new alternatives. Something that as not there before.
Synergy the whole is greater then the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship that the parts have together is a part in and of itself.
If you put two pieces of wood together the whole will hold more weight then the sum of its parts.
One plus one equals three or more.
The challenge is to apply the principles of creative cooperation.
The essence of synergy is to value the differences. To build on strengths and to compensate for the weaknesses through the strength of others.
You begin with the belief that the parties involved create a mutual insight and the energies of momentum of that insight create more and more mutual insights and growth.
Ineffective people live day to day with unused potential. They experience very small synergies in their life.
The more authentic you become, the more genuine you are in your expressions. Particularly involving personal experiences and even self-doubt, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer they feel to express their self-doubt. That expression alone feeds back on the other person’s spirit and genuine creative empathy takes place producing new insights and learning and a sense of adventure that keeps the process going.
Synergy and Communication.
The lowest level of communication comes out of low trust situations
Compromise means 1+1= 1 ½. Both parties give and take.
Compromise is cooperative but not creative. It’s transactional, but not transformational.
Synergy means that 1+1=11 or 50 or 1,000.
The synergetic solution of high trust produces better solutions.
Negative Synergy
The problem is when highly dependent people are trying to succeed in an interdependent reality.
Sameness is not oneness. Uniformity is not unity.
Insecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradign. They have a high need to clone others and mold them over into their own thinking. They don’t realize that the very strength of the relationship is having another point of view.
Unity of ones is complementariness. The essence of synergy is to value or celebrate the differences.
When a person has access to both intuitive, visual and creative right brain and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain the whole brain is working. In other words there is psychic synergy taking place in our heads.
Life is not just logical, it is emotional. Value the differences.
The key to valuing the differences is to realize that all people see the world not as it is, but as they are.
A person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize has own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the heart and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge.
When we are left to our own experiences we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.
Force Field Analysis
The 7-Habits are not piece meal techniques they are all interrelated.
The 7-habits themselves are an example or model of synergy
When you see two alternatives to a problem. Yours and a wrong one, you can always look for a third or a synergetic one. And if you work with a W/W philosophy and you truly seek to understand, you can usually find a solution that is better for everybody.
Application # 1: Synergize
Think about a person who typically sees things differently than you do. Consider ways in which those differences might be used as a stepping-stone to a third alternative solution. Perhaps you can seek out his or hers views on a current project or problem valuing the different views you are likely to hear.
Application # 2:
Make a list of people who irritate you. Do they represent different views that could lead to synergy if you had greater intrinsic security and valued the difference?
Application # 3:
Identify a situation in which you desire greater teamwork and synergy. What conditions would need to exist to support this synergy. What can you do to create those conditions?
Application # 4:
The next time you have a disagreement or confrontation with someone, attempt to address the concerns underlying that person’s position. Address those concerns in a creative and mutually benefitual way.
CD #10
Habit # 7 – Sharpen The Saw – Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal.
Habit # 7 is taking the time to sharpen the saw. It is the habit that makes all the others possible.
Habit # 7 is personal PC the 4-dimensions of renewal. It’s preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have. You.
It’s renewing the 4-dimensions of your nature. Physical, spiritual, mental and social / emotional.
Physical – Exercise, nutrition and stress management
Spiritual – Value clarification, commitment, study and meditation.
Mental – Reading, visualizing, planning and writing
Social / emotional – Service, empathy, synergy and intrinsic security.
Sharpen the saw means exercising all 4-dimensions of our nature. Regularly and consistently in a wise and balanced ways.
Sharpen the saw is a personal PC quadrant #2 activity that must be acted on by us until it becomes second nature. This is the single most powerful investment we can make in life.
We are the instruments of our performance.
A good exercise program will build your body with endurance, flexibility and strength.
Your spiritual dimension is your core, your center, your commitment to your value system.
The spiritual dimension inspires and uplifts you and ties you to the timeless truths of all humanity.
When your able to leave the noise and the discarding voices of the city and give yourself up to the harmony and noises of nature you come back to renewed.
The story of the four prescriptions taken in the place your most comfortable.
9:00 Listen carefully
12:00 Try to reach back. Remember the past, the memories, childhood, the warm times.
3:00 Examine your motives. Once motives are wrong, nothing can be right.
6:00 Write your worries in the sand.
Spiritual renewal takes an investment of time. Martin Luther “ I have so mush to do today, I must spend another hour on my knees.”
The idea is if we take time to draw on the leadership center of our lives, on what’s ultimately most important, it spreads like an umbrella over everything that we do. It renews us, it refreshes us particularly if we recommitted to it. That is why a mission statement is so important.
When we have a deep understanding of our center or our purpose, we can continually renew and re-committee to it.
Reading, writing and journaling are all ways to sharpen the saw.
Spending 1-hour each day sharpening the saw mentally, physically, and spiritually.
Social / emotional dimension focus on habits 4,5 & 6.
If our personal security comes from sources within ourselves then we have the strength to practice public victory.
If we are emotionally insecure than practicing habits 4,5, & 6 with people thinking differently than we do on jugular issues can be threatening.
Emotional security comes from within, from having the correct principles and paradigms
A life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth.
Self-esteem is not a product of attitude or other people’s favorable opinions.
A long and healthy and happy life is the result of making contributions, working on meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.
Earn the neighbors love.
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.
Scripting Others
Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is, treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.
Balance and Renewal
The self-renewal process must include balance and renewal in all 4-dimensions of our nature. Physical, spiritual, mental and social / emotional.
Although renewal is important in any dimension, we receive optimal benefit when we deal with all 4-dimentions in a wise and balanced way. To neglect any one area in a negative way impacts the rest.
Organizations and individuals that give recognition to each of the 4-dimensions in their mission statement provide a powerful framework for balanced renewal.
Synergy and Renewal
The things you do to sharpen the saw in any one dimension have positive impact in all of the other dimensions because they are so highly related.
Your physical health affects your mental health. Your spiritual strength affects your emotional strength.
Improving in one habit synergetically increases your ability to improve in the rest. Ex. The more proactive you area (habit # 1) the more effectively you can exercise leadership 9habit # 2) and personal management (habit # 3).
The more you improve in any of the independent habits 1, 2, & 3 the more effective you will be in an interdependent situation habits 4, 5, & 6.
True financial independence is not having wealth; it is having the power to produce wealth.
The Upward Spiral
Renewal is a principle and process that empowers us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change of continuous improvement.
To make meaningful progress on an upward spiral we need one more dimension, conscience.
“The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to sniffle it but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.”
Conscience is the endowment that sets our congruence (coming together) or disparity (differences) with the correct principles and lifts us towards them when it is achieved.
Conscience is vital to the truly proactive highly effective person. Training and educating the conscience however requires even greater concentration, more balanced discipline, more consistent honest living. It requires regular feasting in inspiring literature, thinking noble thoughts, and above all living in harmony with the still small voice.
C S Lewis “ The more we obey our conscience, the more our conscience demands of us.”
Those things that are obese, crude or pornographic that bread an inner darkness that numbs our higher sensibilities, that substitute the social conscience of “will I be found out” with the natural or divine conscience of ‘what is right and what is wrong.”
“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensibility of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.”
Once we are self-aware we must choose principles and purposes to live by, otherwise the vacuum will be filled and we will loose our self-awareness.
We will always reap what we sow, no more, no less.
The closer we align ourselves to the correct principles, the better our judgment about how the world operates will be and the more accurate our paradigms, our maps of the territory will be.
An increasingly educated conscience will propel us along the path of personal freedom, security, wisdom and power.
Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, to commit and to increasingly do on an upward plane.
Learn – Commit – Do.
Application # 1: Sharpen The Saw
Make a list of activities that will help you keep in good physical shape that fit your lifestyle and that you will enjoy over time.
Application # 2:
Select one of the activities and list it as a goal in your personal role area for the coming week. At the end of the week evaluate your performance. If you did not make your goal, is it because you subordinated it to a genuinely high value or did you fail to act with integrity to your values.
Application # 3:
Make a similar list to renew activities in your spiritual and mental dimensions. In your social / emotional area list relationships you would like to improve or specific circumstances in witch public victories will bring greater effectiveness. Select one item in each area to list as a goal for the week. Implement and evaluate.
Application # 4:
Commit to write down specific sharpen the saw activities in all 4-dimensions every week. Do them and evaluate your performance and results.
CD # 11
Inside Out Approach
Bensen “ The Lord works from the inside out, the world works from the outside in. The world will take people out of the slums, Christ takes the slums out of people and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment; Christ changes men who then change their environment. The world will shape human behavior but Christ can change human nature.
Between stimulus and response is a space. In that space lays our freedom and power to choices our response. In those choices lay our growth and happiness.
Self-determination is defined as free choice of one’s own acts without external compulsion. In other words, it is the right of the people of a certain nation to decide how they want to be governed without the influence of any other country.
Even seemingly trivial things often have roots in deep emotional experiences. To deal only with superficial trivia without seeing the more deeper issues is to trample on sacred ground of another’s heart.
Intergenerational Living:
Until you work and communicate on a level of your essential paradigms the chronic underlying problems will still be there.
When you begin to work from the inside out you begin to build a relationship of trust and openness and begin to resolve dysfunctional differences in a meaningful and lasting way that could never come from working from the outside in.
The delicious fruits of a rich win / win relationship of deep understanding of each other and a marvelous synergy though the roots you nurtured as you examine your programs, re-scripted yourself and manage your lives so you can create time for the important quadrant two activity of communicating deeply with each other.
CD#12
Track # 2 Scripting, family, intergenerational scripting and how it effects family living.
There are only two lasting bequest you can give your children, One is roots and the other is wings.
Becoming a transition person.
Giving wings to our children means to empower them to rise above negative scripting that has been past down to us.
Instead of transferring negative scripts to the next generation, we can change them.
He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality and therefore will never progress.
Achieving unity, oneness with our selves, with our loved ones, with our friends and working associates is the highest best and most delicious fruit of the 7-Habits. By centering our lives and correct principles and creating a balanced focus between doing and increasing our ability to do we become empowered in the task of creating an effective, useful and peaceful lives for ourselves and for our posterity
Covey “ I believe that correct principles are natural laws and that God the creator and father of us all is the source of them and also the source of our conscience. I believe that to the degree that people live by this inspired conscience they will grow to fulfill their natures. To the degree they do not they will not rise above the animal plain. I believe there are parts of human nature that cannot be reached by either legislation or education that require the power of God to deal with. I believe that as human beings we cannot perfect ourselves. To the degree to which we align ourselves with correct principles divine endowments will be reached within our nature in enabling us to fulfill the major of our creation.” We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
T.S. Elliot “ We must not cease from exploration; and after all of exploring is to arrive at the place were we began and to see it for the very first time.”