The 8th Habit

One of the major points in Stephen R. Covey’s global bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” was that in today’s day and age, working together has become more valuable than competing with one another.

Back in the Industrial Age, when work was mostly physical, differences in individual people’s productivity were marginal, as no one man could cut 100x logs more per day than another. But now that we live in the Information Age, where knowledge is our main skill, a great programmer can indeed be 1000x more valuable than an average one.

Find your Voice:

Discover your voice – Unopened Birth- Gifts, your freedom to choose is the biggest gift you were born with. Build trust by being friendly, knowing when to say sorry and following through on your promises. Live by principles or natural laws rather than going along with today’s culture or quick fixes.
Express your voice – Through Vision for mental intelligences, Discipline for physical, Passion for emotional and Conscience for spiritual being the highest manifestations. Conscience profoundly alters vision, discipline and passion by introducing us to the world of relationships, taking us to interdependent state, transforming passion into compassion. Help experience internal integrity and peace of mind. People who do not live by their conscience will find their ego attempting to control relationships. Even though they might pretend or feign kindness and empathy from time to time, they will use subtle forms of manipulations and will even go so far as to engage in kind by dictatorial behavior. The private victory of integrity is the foundation for expressing voice.
Inspire Others to Find Their Voice – The Leadership Challenge
Focus - modelling and pathfinding : Modeling is the sprit and center of any leadership effort. It begins with Finding Your Voice-developing the four intelligences and expressing your voice in vision, discipline, passion and conscience. Choose to use the voice of Influence, trustworthiness. Blend voices and search for Third alternative (Synergy) and come to one voice – shared vision. Be a Trim-Tab leader who exercise initiative within his or her own circle of influence, however small it may be. Even though values control behavior, principles control the consequences of behavior. Moral authority requires the sacrifice of short-term selfish interests and the exercise of courage in subordinating social values to principles. And our conscience is the repository of those principles.
Execution – Aligning and Empowering : The voice and disciplie of execution is aligning goals and systems for results. Empower others by giving up control and handing them responsibility, this will help release passion and talent.


Natural laws (like gravity), and principles (like respect, honesty, kindness, integrity, service and fairness) controls the consequences of our choices. Moral authority is the principled use of our freedom and power to choose.

Do you want to set yourself up for a successful career in a post-Industrial Age world? Then let’s cultivate the 8th habit together!

Visionary leader thinks big, thinks new, thinks ahead – and most important, is in touch with the deep structure of human consciousness and creative potential.

Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.

Life is a mission and not a career, and the purpose of all our education and knowledge is so that we can better represent the divine and serve that mission of life in thy name and toward thy purpose.

Five cancerous behaviors are criticizing, complaining, comparing, competing and contending.

The 8th habit is the sweet spot of

Personal Greatness : Vision, Discipline, passion, Conscience (The 7 Habits)

Leadership Greatness: The 4 roles of leadership – Modelling (7H), Pathfinding, Aligning, Empowering

Organizational Greatness: Vision, Mission, Values – Clarity, Commitment, Translation, Synergy, Enabling, Accountability.

Consider further the comprehensive power of this whole person (body, mind, heart and spirit) model. It deals with the four intelligences/capacities – IQ, EQ, PQ and SQ. It represents the four basic motivations/needs of life – to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. It represents the four attributes of personal leadership – vision, discipline, passion, governed by conscience. Finally, it represents these four attributes at large in the form of four roles – modeling, pathfinding, aligning and empowering.



4 Intelligences

4 Attributes

4 Roles



S P I R I T

(To Leave a Legacy)

Spiritual Intelligence

Conscience

Modeling

Focus

M I N D

(To Learn)

Mental Intelligence

Vision

Pathfinding

B O D Y

(To Live)

Physical Intelligence

Discipline

Aligning

Execution

H E A R T

(To Love)

Emotional Intelligence

Passion

Empowering



Finding your voice is a synergistic concept of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, so when you respect, develop, integrate and balance the four parts of your nature, you’re lead to realize your full potential and lasting fulfillment.

As a person engages in the sequential 8th Habit process of finding one’s own voice, making the choice to expand her influence by inspiring others to find their voice, she increases her freedon and power of choice to solve her greatest challenges and serve human needs; she learns how leadership can eventually become a choice not a position , so that leadership, the enabling art, is widely distributed throughout organizations and society, and therefore, while we manage or control things, we lead (empower) people.

Regarding the people paradigm, we have learned that every human being is precious in his or her own right, endowed with enormous, almost infinite potential and capacity. We’ve learned that the pathway to enlarging that capacity is magnifying our present gifts and talents. Then, almost like a flower blooming in the spring, additional gifts and talents are given or opened up to us and our “hardwired” capacities in all four areas are unleashed to lead a balanced, integrated, powerful life. The opposite is also the case. If we neglect our gifts and talents, they like an unused muscle, will atrophy and waste away. The command-and-control Industrial Age software has driven he workplace to believe that the greatest source of wealth lies in capital and equipment, not in people. We have the hardwiered power to rewrite that software, this power inspires us to lead (empower) people, who have the power of choice, and manage things, which do not.

The developmental process paradigm answers the “how” and “when” questions and teach us to conquer ourselves first by subordinating what we want now for what we want later. The process is increasingly exciting because it is increasingly powerful in expanding our choices and capacities. If we follow principles (symbolized by a compass) that always point north, we gradually develop moral authority; people trust us, and if we truly respect them, see their worth and potential, and involve them, we can come to share a common vision. If, through our moral authority (primary greatness), we earn formal authority, or position (secondary greatness), we can together institutionalize these principles so that body and spirit are being constantly nourished, leading to unbelievable kinds of freedom and power to expand and deepen our service. In short, the kind of leadership that inspires followership comes only when we put service above self.

Organizations, both private and public, learn that they are only sustainable when they serve human needs. Again, service above self. This is the true DNA of success. It is not about, “What’s in it for me,” but about “ What can I contribute?’