Habit 6: synergize TM

Today I will discuss habit 6 – synergize TM from the book “7 habits of highly effective people”. This principle is about synergy as the cooperation that produces the combined effects greater than the sum of the individual contributions. According to Covey, synergy is the essence of the universe: the nature is truly synergetic. In human life, synergy is the essence of principle-centred leadership and parenting.

When you communicate synergistically, you are simply opening your mind and heart and expressions to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options. Many people haven’t experienced synergistic communications as they have been trained and scripted into defensive and protective communications or into believing that life or other people can’t be trusted.

To engage in creative and complex tasks, we need to embrace uncertainty. To experience ambiguity with confidence, we need to have inner values that guide us. In many bureaucratic organizations the opposite is happening: administrators set up more and more stringent rules limiting freedom and creative possibilities for employees. These rules along with legalistic and mechanical language of managers kill the whole spirit of creativity and enterprise.

Synergy should be based on trust and not fixed rules.

Here are a few inspirational quotes:

“The essence of synergy is to value the differences”

“When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative, and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working”

“Your own internal synergy is completely within your circle. You can respect both sides of your own nature – the analytical side and the creative side. You can value the difference between them and use that difference to catalyze creativity”

“Insecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradigms”