All individuals always have, whether they realize it or not, the power of choice: and this power is based on what Stephen Covey has described as the four endowments of personal freedom.
- Self-awareness – the ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your personal feelings and standards, and your ability to react and initiate actions on the basis of this awareness.
- Conscience – how your actions, thoughts, or emotions refer to and are influenced by your internal sense of what’s right and wrong.
- Independent will – your capacity to initiate actions based on principle and intention rather than reacting only on impulse and conditioned response.
- Creative imagination – the capacity to take actions based on your envisioning of alternative and emergent goals, ideals, and possibilities, “things” that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
The four endowments are empowering because they remind us of our personal freedom and the potentials we all have to improve ourselves and to live better lives through the choices we make.
Getting Personal
Select an important choice you have made in your life or that you are considering to make, and evaluate it in terms of the four endowments of freedom described above. In what ways has this choice of yours illustrated any of the “four endowments?”
SELF-AWARENESS. “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” (Roy Disney, American businessman)
CONSCIENCE. “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” Martin Luther King Jr.
INDEPENDENT WILL. “You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control the way you think about all the events. You always have a choice. You can choose to face them with a positive mental attitude.” (Roy T. Bennett, American author)
CREATIVE IMAGINATION. “To say you have no choice is a failure of imagination.” (Jean-Luc Picard , character in Star Trek)
….Top of post image, Fork in Road, by Damian Siodlak, from unsplash.com
