Maturity Continuum Quotes

On the maturity continuum, dependence is the paradigm of you—you take care of me; you come through for me; you didn’t come through; I blame you for the results. Independence is the paradigm of I—I can do it; I am responsible; I am self-reliant; I can choose. Interdependence is the paradigm of we—we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together. Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.

Going digital is more like a journey than a destination. Predicting and preparing the next level of digitalization is an iterative learning and doing continuum.

Often these approaches reflect the inverse of the habits of effective people. In fact, my brother, John Covey, who is a master teacher, sometimes refers to them as the seven habits of ineffective people: Be reactive: doubt yourself and blame others. Work without any clear end in mind. Do the urgent thing first. Think win/lose. Seek first to be understood. If you can’t win, compromise. Fear change and put off improvement. Just as personal victories precede public victories when effective people progress along the maturity continuum, so also do private failures portend embarrassing public failures when ineffective people regress along an

The actions that accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation. This trajectory is no linear sequence of "stages" through which we "progress." We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy. All four activities are part of a single continuum of action. Dharma practice cannot be reduced to any one of them; it is configured from them all. As soon as understanding is isolated from letting go, it degrades into mere intellectuality. As soon as letting go is isolated from understanding, it declines into spiritual posturing. The fabric of dharma practice is woven from the threads of these interrelated activities, each of which is defined through its relation to the others.

Practice using these two unique human capacities: first, see yourself going to the office this afternoon, or home tonight, and finding it in a terrible situation. The house is a total disaster. No one has done his or her job; all the commitments made have been unfulfilled. And you’re tired and beat up. Now, imagine yourself responding to that reality in a mature, wise, self-controlled manner. See the effect that has on someone else. You didn’t confess their sins. You started to pitch in. You were cheerful, helpful, pleasant. And your behavior will prick the conscience of others and allow the consequences agreed upon to happen. You just used two unique human capacities: imagination and conscience. You didn’t rely on memory; if you had relied on memory or history, you might have lost your cool, made judgments of other people, and exacerbated conditions. Memory is built into your past responses to the same or similar stimuli. Memory ties you to your past. Imagination points you to your future. Your potential is unlimited, but to potentiate is to actualize your capabilities no matter what the conditions. In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany in World War II, tells how he exercised the power to choose his response to his terrible conditions. One day he was subjected to experiments on his body. And he discovered, “I have the power to choose.” And he looked for meaning. He believed that if you have a meaning (purpose or cause), if you have a why, you can live with any what. The development of his professional life came out of that one insight. He was raised in the Freudian tradition of psychic determinism. He learned it was a lie. It wasn’t based on science. It came from the study of sick people—neurotics and psychotics—not from the study of healthy, creative, effective people. He didn’t go to his memory, he went to his imagination and conscience. You, too, can progress along the continuum from futility and old habits to faith, hope, and inner security through the exercise of conscience and imagination.

The ability to listen first requires restraint, respect, and reverence. And the ability to make yourself understood requires courage and consideration. On the continuum, you go from fight and flight instincts to mature two-way communication where courage is balanced with consideration.

In his mature works from Ideas I, notably the Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl presented his approach as a radicalization of Descartes’ project that sought to return knowledge to a foundation in the certainty of subjective experience (cogito ergo sum).

They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence.

On the maturity continuum, dependence is the paradigm of you—you take care of me; you come through for me; you didn’t come through; I blame you for the results.

THE MATURITY CONTINUUM The Seven Habits are not a set of separate or piecemeal psych-up formulas.

It is noteworthy that the Indian subcontinent is not the natural habitat of the horse. There never have been wild horses in the subcontinent. No horse bones have been found in the earliest occupancy layers at Mehrgarh, even when wild animals were an important food item. If the horse came to India from outside, so must have its tamers and riders. The horse appears in India only towards the very end of the mature Harappan phase or in the late Harappan phase, at sites like Surkotada in Kutch. It can thus be asserted with confidence that the cultural continuum from Mehrgarh to the closure of the urban Harappan phase, extending from c. 7000 BC to c. 2000 BC, owed its existence to people not familiar with the horse, and that the horse and its riders first entered the scene in c. 2000 BC to co-found the late Harappan cultures.

The reign of goodness is only possible in the four-dimensional continuum; it will make us understand the universality of love. Doubt is indeed a virtue of maturity for civilizations as for men; it engenders indulgence and disinclination to action; it should be a motive for discouragement for the ignorant, but the crown of all science for those who have learned everything. Now, the reign of goodness will not be possible on Earth until the day when the language of the soul has replaced the provisional deception of formulas and words. And on that day alone will the profound and universal meaning be revealed of love: a symbol still infinitely relative and restricted today, but which will become the formidable continuous reality of the future world of four dimensions, as pain is that of the engendered world of three dimensions.

On the maturity continuum, dependence is the paradigm of you—you take care of me; you come through for me; you didn’t come through; I blame you for the results. Independence is the paradigm of I—I can do it; I am responsible; I am self-reliant; I can choose. Interdependence is the paradigm of we—we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.