5 Habits to Lead from Your Heart. Johnny Covey
If you want to see more improvement in your ability to choose your experience, make it a daily habit. I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much better I feel when I have committed myself to exploring, expressing and consistently choosing my experience. Christine and I are always reporting to each other, celebrating over our choices. This, this and this happened but it didn’t hurt like it has before because of this, this and this. After we can mentor ourselves, we are then able to mentor another person and eventually implement it within a group.
To hear the experiences and examples of others going through this process, go to www.5Habits.me to experience it for yourself.
SECTION 2
5 Habits to Lead from Your Heart
They Form a Development Sequence
“There are two distinct sorts of ideas—those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.”
~Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
HABIT 1
It’s the Universal Requirement
“There’s only one requirement of any of us, and that is to be courageous. Because courage defines all other human behavior. And, I believe—because I’ve done a little of this myself—that pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing.”
~David Letterman
Being Courageous is choosing your experience.
The arrows show the two pathways available when we have an experience. We can choose what we experience using our head or using our heart. What we experience is what we think, feel and do.
The dotted paths show the connections within the framework. In our head, we have the opportunity to choose to change. In our heart, we have the opportunity to choose to have courage. When you lead from your heart, you follow your conscience to be respectful and be your best.
Habit 1 uses the first phase of the head-to-heart framework as shown above.
In habit 1, we establish courage as the foundational principle and habit of the heart. Courage in response to our conscience, triggers progression.
Being courageous is a daily experience if we are to live in our heart. When we have experiences that don’t fit where we or others think they should, that is a common place we need courage. One of these experiences for my wife and me was when we decided to become foster parents. At the time we had four children, ages 5, 3, 2 and 7 months. So, understandably, it seemed like a crazy thing to do. Yet we felt strongly about it as we were listening to our conscience.
We had people very close to us disagree with our decision. They had either personal experiences or heard from others’ experiences and felt like it was not a good decision for our children. They were trying to protect us. They even questioned our motives because they felt so strongly about it. It took a lot of courage for Christine and me to talk through what they were experiencing, separating it from what we were experiencing.
It has ended up being an amazing experience for our family to expand to include children from other families. Our children have greatly benefitted from having older sisters. We have had so much progress because of it. As parents, we have had to really intentionally choose how we would parent teenagers who had not been raised in our family culture.
The most magnificent acts of courage have come from our teenage daughters. Their courage to stand up for themselves and choose a different experience than what they were raised in is incredible. Choosing to have courage to change is not easy and is very painful.
Some of the most courageous things they do would not be noticed by anyone except themselves: choosing to walk away when a relationship is one-sided, choosing to talk to a stranger, choosing to forgive. These are the silent, private victories that have brought powerful change to our teenagers.
You may not see the ways you are being courageous, just as our girls do not always recognize fully how courageous they are being. Each night in our home, we try to highlight one family member. We start with a game where they get to act out some sort of animal (think of the zoo we must live in with nine people, average age of thirteen!). We all try to guess what they will choose. Then the rest of the family members take the opportunity to share with that individual the characteristics and attributes that we love about them. Finally, they get to share what they love about themselves. Almost every time, I tell the teenaged girls how proud of them I am and how courageous they are. I do this because every week they are continually choosing courage.
CHAPTER 1
You Are Worthy and Accepted
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
~James Allen
All you need is one visit to the playground to observe the courage of children. The contrast would be even more relevant if, when you went to the playground, you imagined that each of the children were actually adults. Imagine the bravery, we would even consider it audacity, of one adult walking up to another and just starting to play beside them without saying a word. Or introducing themselves and picking up an extra shovel and starting to dig. Or screaming at the top of our lungs to defend an injustice. All children start out courageous, without the hesitancies and social norms we create as we grow older. We were all once children—and we still are children to someone. We all came into existence in the same way: tiny, frail, vulnerable—and perfect. Have you ever held a newborn baby? Smelled a newborn baby? We all started out so innocent and unblemished. And then life happens. We begin to have a choice.
I love my children. I know I was born to be a father—their father. I know that at times they won’t be doing what they should be doing, and that is part of the learning experience in life.
My children are constantly on my mind as I see them grow. I see wonderful experiences ahead for them, as well as challenges. This does not alarm me or make me panic because I know what to do—not that I know what to do for each child in each experience—but I know what to do as a father to show them how to choose for themselves and how to listen to their conscience because of the experiences I have had and questions I have asked.
For many years, I have sought to answer such questions as… Why do I know what to do and yet I do not do it? How do I change? Is what I am experiencing normal? Why would I feel this way? Why am I not doing my best?
Such questions prompted me to more questions. Questions are good things. I hope that you have questioning minds and that you aren’t scared when you don’t know the answers. Some questions have answers that come to you easily, intuitively. But the answer to some of the best questions is: I don’t know. When you get this answer, you open your mind to new possibilities, new ways of doing things that are better than the old ways.
Please don’t be afraid of thinking that you don’t know. Not knowing does not mean that you are stuck, stupid or wrong. Not knowing means that you’re ready to learn new things. Being able to say that I don’t know will serve you well for the rest of your life.
Above all, learn how to choose. Knowing how to choose your experience will guide you throughout your life because it will lead you to your conscience, which is all you need to experience what you want and everything you deserve to experience in this life.
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