The Eight Habit is of another order of magnitude than the famous ‘Seven Habits’. The Eight Habit
is not about ‘being effective’, but about fully expressing one’s potential . It is in the real on being,
not doing. The opposite of being fulfilled and fully expressing ourselves, is a feeling of
psychological emptiness, the knowingness that ‘something’ is missing. We often try to fill that
emptiness with things like being very busy, watching television, etc. The Eight Habit implies a
fully conscious choice to live from our unknown potential rather than from our known past. It is
also about, as a leader, a parent, a teacher, helping others to reach their full potential. In
organizational life, it comes down to finding the entrepreneurial spirit in our associates, the same
passion and urge to create, that is found in those who start companies and organisations.
Stephen Covey calls this ‘helping people to find their real voice’: the voice of ‘who they really are’
i.e. an unlimited potential. We are all born with a special and unique gift and it really matters that
we unwrap the gift and bring it to the world. Covey sees 3 dimensions to the ‘gift’ of being alive
as a human being:
1. Our free will, the ability to choose the life we really want to live
2. Our capacity to cooperate with the laws and principles of life and nature
3. Our fourfold human nature: mental, physical, emotional (social) and spiritual.
Free will, the ability to make conscious choices is the key difference between us and other
organisms. The wisest choice is to freely choose to submit our will to ‘The Will’, the natural order
of things, the laws and principles. This is the easiest and fastest way to develop our potential in
the 4 mentioned dimensions (mental, physical, emotional and spiritual).
Mental: vision
See Habit 2 in ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’
Physical: discipline
Discipline helps us to do whatever it takes to make our vision come true.
Emotional: passion
Passion keeps us going, passion gives us energy.
Spiritual: awareness
Awareness is needed for vision, passion and discipline. Our limited ego is driven by self-interest
and survival, our spiritual nature is about the greater good, it transcends self-interest and pure
survival: it is about Life itself. By transcending our limited ego we also for the first time can have
real relationship, rather than ‘bargaining between egos’.
Awareness is also about ‘meaning’, the WHY. Vision is about the WHAT. Discipline is about the
HOW and passion is the drive behind the WHY, WHAT and HOW.
The leadership challenge: helping others to find ‘their voice’.
We can ‘manage’ things but not people. If free will is our essence as humans, we can not
manage people; we instead need to confirm their power, we literally need to ‘empower’ them.
Organisations seem to consist of people, but the truth is, they are networks of relationships
between people. It follows that the critical factor for the power of an organisation is the
connection between people, the quality of the relationships. At the heart of this stands one key
factor: TRUST. One way to raise trust as a leader is to be a role model, to walk your talk. A way
to have more trust between people is that we prove to each other that we really can be counted
upon: this implies the letting go of excuses and all victimhood attitudes. A major result of ‘more
trust’ is that we learn to work in synergy and that we then are able to do many times more than
what we could without synergy.
‘Voice’ and ‘influence’
Influence is a combination of ‘ethos’ (character, integrity), ‘pathos’ (passion) and ‘logos’
(awareness and reason). The roots of influence are in truly living the 4 dimensions of our human
nature: vision, discipline, passion and awareness. Add to that the factor ‘initiative’. The next thing
is to awaken those things in followers. ‘Initiative’ itself is rooted in ‘self empowerment’. Covey
indicates 7 rings of ‘self empowerment’:
7: waiting to be told
6: asking what to do
5: suggesting what to do
4: intending to do something
3: doing something and informing others immediately
2: independent action while coordinating periodically
1: interdependence: freedom with respect of the freedom of others
Trust
Whatever precedes is impossible when trust is absent. Trust is the ‘glue’ that keeps organisations
from falling apart. Trust is a two-way street: one can not ask it without giving it. Trust is also
rooted in character, in being a person of principles. Character has 3 dimensions: integrity
(integrating the universal principles), maturity (being proactive even under stress and duress)
and abundance consciousness (when there is plenty, one does not need to compete or cheat).
Trust also makes communication go so much smoother and easier. Also: a person who makes a
lot of deposits on our emotional bank account (see The 7 Habits), for instance by keeping his
word and by abiding by principles like respect and win-win, has ‘credit’ with us: they can make a
mistake here and there without the relationship immediately falling apart.
Win-win
In the context of the Eight Habit, win-win means ‘bringing the voices together’. We then develop
a win – win, in dialogue with each other. We look for a ‘third’ solution.
We co-create it.
Communication
Communication is the most important leadership skill, especially real listening. Communication is
to an organization what a lubricant is for a motor.
A common vision, a common strategy and common values command a new type of
leadership
Not top down and also not ‘asking their input for your decisions’, but deciding together and
thinking together from the very start of a project. This is the only way to build a culture of trust.
Engaging people in more cooperation, in many cases also means changing reward systems from
purely individual to a mixture of individual and collective features. To avoid killing passion we
should not fall into the other extreme – we need to leave space for individual expression.
From information and knowledge to wisdom
The Information Age is going over into the Creation Age, the Consciousness Age. This implies
getting access to something deeper and greater than just information i.e. our deeper being. Only
there will we find wisdom. We could call wisdom the child of integrity built on principles. Integrity
implies being humble, humble enough to realise that we are part of something greater than our
limited selves. Humility is the mother of wisdom and courage the father. To live a life of
principles takes courage. It is not very common…

Sumber (Source) : http://www.nieuwedimensies.nl/Documenten/A_Brief_Summary_of_The_Eight_Habit.pdf