Thots
Recently I bought the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” written by Stephen R Covey. It’s truly meaningful and of great application to real life. The writer identifies the key things in life, and I tink he did a great job cos he was able to bring forth his ideas very well and at the same time provide many examples that relate to everyday life, making it rather simple to understand some rather tedious principles.I have decided to pen down some of my thoughts when I was reading the book today.
There was a part on personal growth. The author mentioned this term called “The Maturity Continuum”, which refers to the progress from Dependence to Independence to Interdependence.
According to the author, this process can be related to the development of a person from young to maturity. E.g. in his child years, a person is dependent on his parents and hence is in the Dependence stage. In the teenage years, he learns to be independent and when he becomes an adult, he is in the Independence stage. However, if I understood the author correctly, not everyone gets to the Interdependence stage. Cos many people can be independent and hence work well alone, but when it comes to working with other people, which is part of the interdependence stage, many would encounter problems, such as conflicts or inability to cooperate well, which results in low productivity.
From my own understanding, The Maturity Continuum can be directly linked to the Chinese principle, or saying, of 修身齐家治国平天下.
The Dependence stage may not be explained by this Chinese principle. Nonetheless, it may be included, together with the Independence stage, under “修身”.
To “修身” means to start or fix from within oneself, and what this means is to correct yourself in areas such as personality, character, attitude, discipline etc. within yourself. In the book, Stephen R Covey emphasises “Inside Out”, as he believes by doin right from within will ensure that the fundamentals are right. This henceforth provides the platform for us to perform on and the fundamentals that we base on, when we are put in a situation to do bigger things. So we修身by working from within ourselves and improve on our personality, character, discipline, attitude and self-control, which defines the progress from the dependence stage to the independence stage., before we can go onto the next stage – Interdependence.
From my understanding, interdependence is to trust and rely on oneself and other people, and hence bring both parties to greater achievements that couldn’t have been achieved alone. So the interdependence stage refers to the “齐家治国平天下” stage. 齐家 is to work on the family, 治国 is for the country, and 天下 is for everywhere under the sky. This is the stage in which we can help to straighten the family, the country and the world, but the prerequisite is that we have already修身. And this stage is where not many people are able to qualify to be in.
Some of my basic understandings, I wont say that they are correct or wrong, just my understandings. Great book cos it brings great insights into life.
posted by Leo @ 7:22 PM
