Satinder Dhiman, PhD, EdD is a professor of management, an associate dean, and the director of the MBA program at Woodbury University School of Business. Dr. Dhiman has been preparing leaders in higher education for the last 30 years in various settings on two continents. He has presented his work in national and international conferences for the last 20 years and has published his research in both scholarly and popular publications, including Organizational Development Journal, Journal of Social Change, Journal of Human Resources and Adult Learning. He is the co-editor and co-author of From Me to We, Managing in the 21st Century, Spirituality in the Workplace, and The Workplace and Spirituality. He lives in North Hills, California.

Seven Habits of Highly Fulfilled People

Journey from Success to Significance

By Satinder Dhiman

Personhood Press

Copyright © 2012 Satinder Dhiman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932181-91-3

Contents

PROLOGUE: Living Profoundly Significant Lives!,
CHAPTER ONE: The Journey of Self-Discovery,
CHAPTER TWO: The Pursuit of Happiness and Fulfillment,
CHAPTER THREE: The Journey from Success to Significance,
CHAPTER FOUR: Living Our Highest Purpose through the Gift of Pure Motivation,
CHAPTER FIVE: The Gift of Gratitude,
CHAPTER SIX: The Gift of Generosity,
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Gift of Harmlessness,
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Gift of Selfless Service,
CHAPTER NINE: The Gift of Total Acceptance,
CHAPTER TEN: The Gift of Presence,
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Universal Quest for Significance,
APPENDIX: Art of Leadership and Teaching Stories: A Brief Guide to Resources,
END NOTES,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR,

CHAPTER 1

THE JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY

Most of our lives are lived in empty agitation.

~ Sri Aurobindo

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

If you have known how to compose your life, you have accomplished more than a person who knows how to compose a book.

~ Montaigne

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

~ Carl Jung

Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself. … His task was to discover his own destiny — not an arbitrary one — and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.

~ Hermann Hesse

This Is Not a “How-to” Book!

This is not a “how-to” book. No universal recipes for success or happiness are intended or implied. Rather, this book seeks to help the reader find fulfillment by taking an existential approach to the “slings and arrows” of ordinary day-to-day life. Instead of merely suggesting what to do about fulfillment, it takes us to the very heart of “existential vacuum,” to use Viktor Frankl’s phrase, and asks us to re-examine our most cherished beliefs, expectations, and assumptions about life in general and human life in particular. “An unexamined life,” said Plato, “is not worth living.”

This book assumes that its readers have a willingness

1. to undertake an impartial survey of their assumptions and expectations about life;

2. to recognize and appreciate the most obvious, the most natural, and the simplest in life;

4. to view fulfillment in the larger context of the transformative art of living wisely; and

5. to seek fulfillment through self-knowledge.

A good place to start the journey of self-discovery is to realize that we often have false ideas about ourselves and our expectations about life. Montaigne, a 16th century French author, wrote: “My life has been full of tragedies, most of which never happened.” Not much has changed during the intervening 400 years! We still often live most of our lives in what may be called voluntarily self-engendered anguish. While much physical pain is unavoidable, most psychological suffering seems to be optional. This book makes the felicitous assumption that right self-