Note: During the next three months on Monday morning, I will share with you my presentation called “Making A Commitment To A Path With Heart” which I gave at the Fall 2022 From Vision To Action Executive Roundtable on September 22, 2022. Here is the introduction to it.
It was a warm day in August of 2021, and my wife, Jane, and I were discussing my retirement from public speaking when I shared the following quote by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall from their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019):
“ ‘Something you are good at’ is not a strength; it is an ability…. A strength, on the other hand, is an ‘activity that makes you feel strong.’…. It is this combination of three distinct feelings - positive anticipation beforehand, flow during, and fulfillment afterward - that makes a certain activity a strength.”
Jane paused for a moment, and then said, “When an activity makes us feel strong, it is a path with heart.”
The minute she shared this with me, I remembered the following quote by Carlos Castaneda in his book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1968):
“This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
In a moment of deep reflection, my eyes filled up with tears because this pathway has been a path with heart. This morning I want to share with you the lessons I have learned while walking along a path with heart for 36 years.
Follow The Path
A long time ago when visiting northwest Iowa for the first time, I learned an important truth about life, family, and farming. The essence of this learning revolved around the following phrase: “What you feed, grows.” Most people focus on the word “grow” because it is an action oriented verb and a desired outcome. But over the course of many decades, I have come to value the word “feed.”
When one commits to a path with heart, one must trust the path. If it is a path with faith as the foundation, and a commitment to a faith-based mindset, namely “you lead and I will follow,” then I must feed my faith. I must keep learning about my faith in order to trust that the way will open.
Often now, people ask me about how I started the business and how to grow their business. In the beginning, I really wasn’t trying to start a business. I was just taking life one step at a time and it became a “business”. In simple terms, I was naive, patient, and faithful. I was willing to follow the path.
For example, many years ago I was sent to southwest Minnesota to assist a bank president with a struggling branch office. On the morning I arrived at the bank, I really questioned why I was there, and what I was supposed to do. I knew I did not have a complete picture of what was going on, and I did not know anyone in the bank other than the name given to me by the EVP who asked that I work with the bank president.
So on the morning I arrived, I walked in, introduced myself, and was guided to the president’s office. Once inside his office, I looked at the man and realized he was in horrible shape. He looked like “a deer in the headlights.”
“Are you okay? Do we need to call for medical assistance?”, I asked.
“No. No.”, he responded. “My wife just served me divorce papers about 30 minutes ago. When I got them, I raced home and she was gone. I didn’t even know we were having marriage problems. Where do I go from here?”
He was in complete shock, physically, emotionally, and mentally. So, we started exploring the question: “how do I get through this day?” It was a slow and painful process of reflection and re-evaluation. We had to figure out a short term plan and a long term plan. He had to do this work at the personal level and the professional level. He also had to build a team at his branch’s location that was clear, aligned and focused on the right things for the right reasons. As I walked out to my car at the end of the day and began my long drive for home, I realized that on this day there was a reason why I was in this spot at this time.
The challenge of walking a path with heart is to fully embrace a “you lead and I will follow” commitment. To be faithful to my faith is not an easy choice, but over time and multiple such experiences I know that it is always the right choice.
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