Over the past week we started our discussions of Lōkahi with some thoughts as to the agreements we make, and how they can be those which become mana‘o lōkahi for us; agreements we feel very good about, feeling they do not betray those things we believe most deeply.
When I think of the word ‘agreement’ there are three different authors who come immediately to mind for me in what they have taught. They are;
1. Stephen Covey, best known as the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, specifically within his description of synergy as a creative process. In my own mana‘o lōkahi agreement with his teaching, I have captured his description in MWA within the chapter on Kākou, in regard to the “Language of We.”
2. Second and most recently productivity guru David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. Allen speaks of three different options we have with our agreements, under the premise that no agreement is set in stone, and we always have the option of renegotiating them. The problem is that we often neglect to take advantage of the possibility, and we live with the “grief” of disappointing others, and disappointing ourselves, creating the ‘stuff’ of unnecessary stress we carry around with us.
3. Third is Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements, a book which resulted from what he came to learn within his fascinating personal story. Today he is a nagual (one who guides an individual to personal freedom) dedicated to sharing his knowledge of the teachings of the ancient Toltec; thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout southern Mexico as women and men of knowledge.
In today’s Sunday Mālama I would like to capture these three teachings for the pages of Managing with Aloha Coaching, for I suspect we may return to them often in the future as convenient reference points. If you have not read them before, I hope you will find them as meaningful as I have, especially when viewed from the desire to learn more about Lōkahi, and the harmony which well-made agreements can bring.
If you are a newly arriving reader, I recommend you start your reading with the following link, and then return to this article: Ho‘olōkahi and Rethinking our Agreements (there will be a trackback there so you can return easily).
Let’s read the words of these authors individually. First, I offer you the definition of synergy as I first learned it from the 7 Habits guru Stephen Covey: Synergy is the concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The easy definition is when 1 + 1 equals not 2, but 3. Synergize is Covey’s Habit No.6, and he calls it the “habit of creation.”
