5 Habits to Lead from Your Heart. Johnny Covey
process of choosing your own experience is the same, regardless of the experience. Besides learning from someone else’s experience, you can choose to blend it with your own experience. Learning the process takes time, since there are many levels of experiencing it. So, be patient with yourself. Where you are now is where you are—just take the next step.
We each have the ability to choose our experience, but we need to nurture it. We need to grow in each of the 5 habits to produce and harvest the fruit of our experiences.
Are you willing to be patient with the process?
Christine: I am willing to be patient. I think it will actually help me in my relationships, which is what I really want to improve on.
Do vs. Be
Habits are formed by shifting how we think and feel over and over, so that we act (do) out of habit. I focus on being (what we think and feel) because what you are constantly doing is a result of who you are consistently being.
This shift enables us to focus on what we can choose rather than on what we want. When we have experiences that align how we think and feel with what we want to do, we can easily do it. Usually we need to experience being who we need to be in order to do what we need to do. We need to choose a new way of thinking and feeling over and over to do something new.
Your conscience will tell you what to do if you listen. It communicates with you through your feelings. It sends feelings that you must learn to decipher in order to be who you really are. It helps you examine your thoughts and feelings, to learn from experience (yours and others), to choose your experience and to consciously create from potential.
For decades, you have been choosing your present experience, so don’t expect your life to change overnight or feel disappointed if more of the same is what you want to choose. You may think that you’re failing or that this makeover is not working fast enough. Or, you might think that this is hard work and you are in this for the long run.
All it takes is one new thought to change what you experience. Celebrate every time you choose a new experience. As you do, you will stay invested in the process until it becomes part of your life. It becomes a part of you that you recognize because it’s always been part of you.
This is not my process—it is our process. We’ve all been doing it for years whether it has been in healthy or unhealthy ways. I’ll point out to you the ways that you are already doing it. I hope that you will make this process your own and mentor others to do the same.
I am just one messenger who is teaching other messengers to listen to the messenger—the conscience: the greatest gift each of us has been given. And no matter how much we have gone against it in the past, we can experience a restoration of it.
Have you ever had an experience where you felt you were restored?
Christine: I feel restored when I am outside. I love my bare feet touching the grass. It reminds me of when I was little and would run around with fewer cares in the world than today.
These habits outline how to use your conscience as a compass. The best way to use your conscience compass is by personally experiencing using it through plays.
Development via Progress and Experience
My progressive development format is captured in the head-to-heart framework, which is used to explain how to choose our experience by following our conscience. The two primary paths of development are progress and experience.
3 P’s of Progress: Previous, Present and Possible. The top of the head-toheart framework outlines the 3 P’s of progress. As you personally experience the 5 Habits to Lead from Your Heart, you will progress by reflecting on your previous experience—what you used to think, feel and do—then recognizing your present experience and choosing to experience what you will think, feel and do to create a new possibility.
3 Phases of Experience: Think, Feel and Do. Our conscience influences what we experience—what we think, feel and do.
Think is receiving information—what we need to learn or know and why it’s important.
Feel is making that information personal so we can experience how it feels. We can memorize that feeling so that we can recognize it and trust it and make it part of our habit. We can learn to recognize our feelings and accurately interpret what they mean. Our feelings are the most personal things we can share with others. And the deepest connection we can have is to feel something together—not just verbally describe a feeling to someone else. Although others are not with you physically, they can feel what you feel—and you can feel what they feel. This emotional empathy enables you to make their experience your own. Even when you have not had the same experience, you can experience their feelings vicariously.
Do is a natural result of what you think and feel. The key to doing something new is not to force it but to change how you think and feel about it. Most information is geared toward convincing you to change what you are doing, pleading a case as to why what you are doing is wrong and figuring out the best way possible to do it. We focus so much on changing what we do, but you can more easily change what you do when you think and feel differently about it.
As you go from a previous way of experiencing something (the old way of thinking, feeling and doing) to a possible way of experiencing something (a new way of thinking, feeling and doing) you are likely following promptings from your conscience.
I don’t presume to tell you what to do because I don’t know what you should do. I don’t know what you are thinking and feeling. I don’t know what you have experienced; hence, anything I prescribe as the specific solution would be off. However, I can give you a principle-based playbook that works. You don’t need to know the specifics of what to do—the principles enable you to listen to your conscience so that you come out a winner, every single time.
Pyramid of Experiential Learning
As seen on the learning pyramid below, or cone of experience, how we actually learn best in life is inverse to how we typically prioritize and practice learning activities in homes, schools and workplaces.
As you see here, we remember the least in the ways our society teaches the most. Our children are sitting in classrooms, reading and listening to lectures about information. The greatest retention is showcased on the bottom of the cone: experience. We see that we learn most and best by doing, by having experiences, especially by proactively choosing our experiences.
Plays for Thinking, Feeling and Doing Differently
You can read this book, or you can experience it. To help you experience this book, I give you plays that enable you and others to go from your head to your heart. The delivery of the head-to-heart experience comes from my think, feel and do method. Each habit uses information to change how you think and stories and examples to change how you feel. You then have a chance to do something to make it your own.
Mentoring questions and plays enable you to record the new way you think, feel and do and then share what you will think, feel and do with others using the 1,2,3 method:
1 Mentor yourself by exploring and expressing your experience.
2 Mentor one other person about what you discovered.
3 Implement it in a group of 3 or more. This could be in a work, family or social setting. This is where you choose a new experience.
Another way to say that is 1) teach yourself, 2) teach another person and 3) teach a group of 3 or more people.
The first step of the self-mentoring process is listening to your conscience and