Stephen Covey in his classic book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," describes four human endowments. Independent will is the fourth one and is the ability to make choices and decisions accordingly.

Independent will enhance human powers and let them act according to their will and choices. Here's how independence will boost human lives.

Independent Will Lets You Act Rather than React

Independent will is the capacity to act on principles, to do something independently, let you write or think of your own free will. While it doesn't make you reactive to emotions, moods, or circumstances, having independence will let you act according to the situation by taking responsibility for your acts instead of blaming situations.

Gives You Empowerment

This endowment helps you in doing effective self-management. Moreover, you learn to put your independent will in your daily life choices and decisions to make them accordingly, and this learning gives you empowerment.

Offer Insights on Personal Integrity

Integrity is all about giving value to yourself, your choices, and your decisions. You can measure your personal independent will from your daily basis personal integration. For instance, it's all about having promises to yourself, committing something to you, and then fulfilling those commitments to feel more personally integrated. The more personally integrated you are, the more you will get independent will.

Independent Will Teach You Effective Leadership and Management

By having a sense of personal integrity, you may become effective in managing your personal tasks, but with an endowment of independent will, you can manage important things effectively and put them in the hierarchy of important to unimportant wisely. For instance, independence will let you think about what things should come first, and people make this hierarchy according to their will.

This article is part of our Business Coaching blog series. At Dataczar we talk to a lot of small businesses. We’ve found a few books that we keep recommending time and again. To better help our customers, we’ve added a Reading List for Small Businesses to our website. We encourage every small business owner to read and keep these timeless business books on their office shelf.

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