The 8th Habit

Voice is unique personal significance—significance that is revealed as we face our greatest challenges and which makes us equal to them.

There is a deep, innate, almost inexpressible yearning within each one of us to find our voice in life.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

The fundamental reality is, human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled; they are four dimensional—body, mind, heart and spirit.

If you want to make minor, incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvement, work on paradigms.

All of us can consciously decide to leave behind a life of mediocrity and to live a life of greatness—at home, at work and in the community.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is one’s self-knowledge, self-awareness, social sensitivity, empathy and ability to communicate successfully with others.

The key to maintaining high moral authority is to continually follow “true north” principles.

Passion is the fire, the desire, the strength of conviction and the drive that sustains the discipline to achieve the vision.

There is great power in viewing people separately from their behavior, for as we do, we affirm their fundamental, unconditional worth.

Only the disciplined are truly free. The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions.

When you engage in work (professional, community, family) that taps your talent and fuels your passion—that rises out of a great need in the world that you feel drawn by conscience to meet—therein lies your voice, your calling, your soul’s code.

My promise: if you will apply these four capacities— talent (discipline), need (vision), passion and conscience—to any role of your life, you can find your voice in that role.

Conscience profoundly alters vision, discipline and passion by introducing us into the world of relationships. It moves us from an independent to an interdependent state.

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

The highest challenge inside organizations, including families, is to set them up and run them in a way that enables each person to inwardly sense his or her innate worth and potential for greatness.

The truth is you can never succeed with stockholders until you first succeed in the marketplace, and you can never succeed in the marketplace until you first succeed in the workplace.

Personal development precedes the building of trusting relationships, and trusting relationships are an absolute prerequisite to developing an organization characterized by teamwork, cooperation and contribution to the wider community.

Any time you think the problem is out there, that very thought is the problem.

The key to influence is always to first be influenced, that is to first be open and seek understanding.

By exercising initiative and empathy, by building ethos, by focusing and working on those things that are within your ability to influence, you can become a change catalyst in any situation.

Discipline is paying the price to bring that vision into reality. It’s dealing with the hard, pragmatic, brutal facts of reality and doing what it takes to make things happen.

I realized that my stewardship to my children involved more than just providing for their physical, financial and emotional needs. It also involved providing healthy role models on which they could pattern their lives.

The moral imperative of life is grow or die.

You empower yourself based on the issue or the problem or the challenge at hand. You exercise the appropriate level of initiative or self-empowerment. The key question is always, What is the best thing I can do under these circumstances?

When you wisely use initiative through all 7 Levels of Initiative, you’ll find that your Circle of Influence will get larger and larger until it encompasses your entire job.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Relationships and trust do not remain constant. They are maintained and deepened only as you actively nurture and build them with regular acts of kindness, consideration, appreciation and service.

People in authority should make pushing back and giving feedback legitimate.

Communication is without question the most important skill in life. There are basically four modes of communication: reading, writing, speaking and listening. And most people spend two-thirds to three-fourths of their waking hours doing those four things.

Nothing destroys trust faster than making and breaking a promise. Conversely, nothing builds and strengthens trust more than keeping a promise you make.

Feeling understood is the equivalent of psychological air.

Such attitudinal synergy is a magnificent expression of mature love.

One of the deepest needs of the human soul is to be understood. Once that need is met, the personal focus can shift to interdependent problem solving.

Remember, the process is as important and powerful as the product itself if you want to get emotional connection.

Successful organizations are a product of the organizational trait. They are not personality dependent. They are system and culture dependent.

The human need to feel understood is like the lungs’ need for air.

When you understand someone, you redefine what win-win is.

Most transactions between people end in compromise, win-lose, or lose-win. But Third Alternative solutions are illustrations of transformation.

The essence of good business, therefore, is the quality of the relationship between customer and supplier.

Systems will override rhetoric every day of the week.

The essence of effectiveness is achieving the results you want in a way that enables you to get even more of these results in the future.

You simply have to decide what matters most to you. What are your highest values? What vision do you have for your life?

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. - Goethe

Most people have never even decided what matters most to them. They haven’t developed the criteria that will inform and govern all other decisions, and now we’re trying to do it for an entire group, team or organization.

The call and need of a new era is for greatness. It’s for fulfillment, passionate execution, and significant contribution.

One word expresses the pathway to greatness. Voice. Those on this path find their voice and inspire others to find theirs. The rest never do.

Deep within each one of us there is an inner longing to live a life of greatness and contribution—to really matter, to really make a difference.

To know and not to do, is really not to know. To learn and not to do is not to learn. In other words, to understand something but not apply it is really not to understand it.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.

The greatest risk of all is the risk of riskless living.

It’s amazing to me how small adjustments in one’s life along the lines of vision, discipline, passion and conscience can have such huge consequences.

These four roles are for everyone, regardless of position. They are simply the pathway to increasing your influence and the influence of your team and organization.

There is great power in the idea of taking responsibility and just doing it—making it happen.

Trust is the glue of life. It is the glue that holds organizations, cultures and relationships together.

To learn to say 'I was wrong, I’m sorry,' or 'I was on an ego trip, I overreacted, I ignored you, and I temporarily put loyalty above integrity'—and then to live accordingly is one of the most powerful forms of apology you can make.

Giving negative feedback is one of the most difficult communications there is. It is also one of the most needed.

Trust becomes a verb when you communicate to others their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.

Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values.

The best way to develop integrity is to start small, and to make and keep promises.

The first and most demanding form of personal growth also takes place in the family and provides the greatest contribution to society.

True forgiveness involves forgetting, letting it go, and moving on.

To watch minds become open and hearts become softened and positions melt into a higher, synergistic Third Alternative is a thrilling experience.

It takes the ability to be a participant and an observer or third-party facilitifier at the same time. This takes a lot of mental and emotional discipline, but if you have faith in the principles and sufficient internal courage and integrity, you can do it.

You must grapple with four realities—market realities, core competencies, stakeholder wants and needs, and values—before you will fully comprehend and be prepared to execute the pathfinding role.

The key to unleashing the power of the workforce is what I call co- missioning. It’s clarifying the mission, vision and values of the organization in a way that overlaps the four needs of the individuals with the four needs of the organization.

The key to the principle of alignment is to always begin with the results. What kind of results are you getting in the marketplace?

The best way to inspire people to a superior performance is to convince them by everything you do and by your everyday attitude that you are wholeheartedly supporting them. - Harold S. Geneen

Aligning structures and systems with values and strategy is one of the toughest of all leadership and management challenges, simply because structures and systems represent the past—tradition, expectations and assumptions.

You have within you the power to make choices. You can be responsible.

Team building is fundamental, particularly in developing complementary teams where people’s strengths are made productive and their weaknesses are made irrelevant by the strengths of others.

Empowerment is the fruit of the other three. It is the natural result of both personal and organizational trustworthiness, which enables people to identify and unleash their human potential.

The key is, don’t artificially force interdependency—it has to come naturally through people’s getting to know and understand and trust each other.

This is the essence of the FranklinCovey approach: translating organizational capabilities into specific results again and again, resulting in a winning organization.

We help organizations focus on and deliver specific results. We also help them build more capability—leaders and individual contributors that can have the capability to perform at new levels.

Knowledge work leverages all of the other investments that an organization or a family has already made.

People make choices. Consciously or subconsciously, people decide how much of themselves they will give to their work depending on how they are treated and on their opportunities to use all four parts of their nature.

Silence is also a key to Indian Talking Stick communication with others. We must be quiet, even silent, to begin to deeply empathize with others.

The people who are involved, who will be evaluated, need to participate in establishing a compelling performance scoreboard that reflects the criteria built into the mission, values and strategy of an organization so that they can continuously stay aligned with the process and be both responsible and accountable.

All lasting results are produced in a sequence, are governed by principles and are grown from the inside out.

The 7 Habits are about becoming highly effective. They represent a complete framework of universal, timeless principles of character and human effectiveness.

The power lies in your ability to be vulnerable, because deep down, your integrity to your value system based on principles makes you invulnerable and secure.