Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Greatness and a Whole Person Model

One lesson I find interesting from Covey's "8th Habit" is that Greatness is actually quite simple and not that special. Greatness could be viewed as living by paying attention to our whole self. Being great means being a "normal", Whole Person human being. What I mean normal is in the sense that it is perfectly normal for us to fulfill our needs for our spiritual side, mental, social, physical and the rest of our self.

When you deny someone from fulfilling his greatness is like denying someone to eat and breath. When you deny yourself to be great it is like willingly choose to be 40 % human. Allowing ourselves to be less than great means we allow some part of our self to suffer, lack of nutrition and fulfillment.

However, in this model, Greatness has nothing to do with relative achievement/ownership. It has more to do with knowing yourself and knowing how to care and fulfill every side of it (including those nagging inner voice that we are trained/conditioned to ignore). It is self-defined. Other people condition/opinion then become the context in which you express yourself rather than a standard into which you judge/value yourself.

Greatness definition will vary a lot in it's detail, but it seems quite accurate to see it as a result coming from fulfillment of our whole self.

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