5 Habits to Lead from Your Heart. Johnny Covey

go through painful experiences and we are persuaded to choose differently. We don’t need to experience the same thing for ourselves.

      We need to learn in both ways. If you have any regret in your life you need to know that there is always a way back to feeling worthy and accepted. You can choose to listen to your conscience and change at any time, and it will be as if you had not chosen otherwise.

       Worthy and Accepted

      There is nothing that makes one human being more important or more valuable or more necessary than another. I believe we all have this common potential within us with the chance to contribute incredibly to the world around us. No human has more purpose than another based on nationality, culture, creed or gender. We all start the same way. Why should our value change simply because time has passed? We discriminate based on accomplishment, pedigree, skin tone and personality. What if we lived, accepting others around us, acknowledging the worth of every individual?

      I believe that we are all worthy of being respected. When we are being respectful we accept our best effort and the best efforts of others. Accepting others includes being willing to see that there are reasons we all choose what we choose. We all have had experiences that bring us to where we are. When we stand in front of a person, we must remember that every person comes with experiences that have brought them to that point. Our efforts are acceptable because we are all trying our best with what we have to work with. We often think otherwise when we have experiences that leave us feeling wrong and alone.

      Once my wife, Christine, had an experience that left her feeling bad about herself. She asked a boy on a date to a Sadie Hawkins dance. The boy said no, and his rejection made her feel that she wasn’t good enough, pretty enough or fun enough to be with, and that she would never have a boyfriend. Of course, I think she is wonderful, gorgeous and fun to be with. And she has a great boyfriend now—me! But between those years of feeling rejected, she had to separate lies from the truth in order to live the life she lives today.

      The truth is that we are all worthy inherently because we all come from the same place, the same way. We all have equal footing with our common beginning. Everyone is born perfectly as babies. The lie is that some people are better than others because of what they produce, where they are from or who their parents are. Whether we believe we are better or not, it’s all false. It’s a lie.

      At the core of who you are, you are worthy. Where you are is acceptable if you are trying your best. Yes, it’s hard to understand someone else’s best effort because we have not walked in their shoes. But if we could slip into their life experiences and sense everything that ever happened to them, we would understand them and accept their efforts because we would see everything that went into them.

      Our conscience begs us to accept the truth of our worth. The reason we feel so terrible when we choose to not follow our conscience is because we go against what is true. We start living the lie that we are either less or more than others, going against what we know to be true.

      If we feel alone or lost and don’t know where to go or what to do, our brain tells us that we are in danger and need to find help fast. We become worried and afraid. These feelings come to us to prompt us to seek safety or to find our way out, to make a change so we are never lost again.

      Feeling that something is wrong and that you are alone is not telling you that you are wrong and alone. Your conscience is telling you to change in order to have a different experience.

       Hole in My Shirt

      Once I went to school wearing a shirt with a hole in it. I loved the shirt so much that I wanted to wear it regardless of the hole. At school, I started to worry if others would see the hole in my shirt and what they might think— that I had no money or that my parents didn’t care what I looked like. I was embarrassed to have someone think that I was poor. So, the rest of the day I focused on not letting people see the hole in my shirt. I no longer loved this shirt. In fact, the shirt was now a source of pain. Of course, in reality, I had caused myself the pain with what I was thinking. No one even noticed the hole in my shirt or said anything about it to me or treated me differently because of it. And yet, I still had a painful day.

       Have you ever been in your head, yet no one ever noticed?

       Christine: I freak out when I’m late to something and I’m trying to get everything out of my way – children, spouse, traffic – so that I can get there on time. But it rarely is the emergency I make it.

      When we have a thought that goes against the truth of who we are, we feel horrible, even if we are the only one who knows about it. It does not matter if it’s true. The pain is telling us to open our eyes, to examine what’s happening and make a change so the pain doesn’t become part of our daily experience. Anything that goes against the core of who we really are will feel horrible until we rediscover the truth.