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Talking about values is not a complicated or confusing thing. It’s quite simple. You do what you value. Many people claim to have some great values like honesty, health and fitness, or family, but when you look at their habits and behaviors there is very little to substantiate these claims.

We spend a lot of our lives making choices.  We choose a flat white rather than a latte; we choose a career; we choose to learn, not judge; we choose to be happy – all different categories of our experience that admit of choices.  Epictetus is right in the sense that the power of choice is within us and that we carry it with us.  He uses the term “reasoned choice” because for him, reason is the primary basis for all decisions. But in practice our choices derive from many motives.

We talk about the loop of ‘information, revelation, and transformation’, which is all underpinned by the ‘conversation’. When you attend a Leading with Heart program, you are given a lot of information. You will typically have a revelation of some kind. There will be something new that you have learnt, an ‘ah-ha’ moment, whether it is in reviewing your results on your PDG, or S+T=B, or simply learning something new about how others perceive you, that you did not know before. There is always some instance of revelation or new learning, which is great. However, the transformation side of it rarely happens in that room, in that session. We need the ‘back to everyday life and work’ to bring us real-time opportunities to practice. 

Sam Knowles, a data researcher (and a classicist with a doctorate in psychology) wrote Asking Smarter Questions in 2023 and in his final chapter has a list of those he considers to be the best.

Non-profit organization The Sozo Foundation, based in Cape Town, South Africa, has committed to creating opportunities for underprivileged young people in its township community called Vrygrond (free ground) through education, skills development, entrepreneurship, and social enterprise, since 2011. This “small” community of less than a square mile is home to more than 50 000 people with no high school, no clinic, no police station, and very little hope.

Did you know that there are 4 different types and ways of listening? From a Heartstyles perspective, active listening is an art that needs practicing not just in the workplace, but in our personal lives too. It is central to increasing engagement and building stronger, happier teams. It says, ‘I value and respect you’.

In Heartstyles language, not perceiving that we have enough, can be a symptom of living outside-in, where we seek approval and validation from others. This is a “below the line” place of competition and striving. The alternative is to live inside-out, knowing our value and worth. A place where we have moved “above the line” to a place of authenticity and achievement.Joseph Heller, an important and funny American writer (author of Catch-22) and his friend Kurt Vonnegut (both now dead) were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island in the northeast of the USA.

Kurt said: “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?”

In Swamplands of the Soul the psychologist James Hollis sets out what for many of us are the all too familiar places we might get bogged down: guilt, grief, loss, betrayal, doubt, loneliness, depression, despair, obsession, addiction, anger, fear, angst, and anxiety. That is quite a list, and yet it would be an unusual adult who has not passed through - at some stage in their life to date or to come - one or more of these “swamplands.”

In 1961 Joan Didion, an American journalist, wrote this in Vogue: “In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character… the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life…”

This advice comes from Marcus Aurelius (121-180), a Roman emperor, general and scholar. Marcus Aurelius’s writings – his Meditations - are part of the canon of Stoic thinking (including those of the Roman playwright Seneca and the former slave Epictetus).