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FOREWORD

BY STEPHEN M. R. COVEY

My late father, Dr. Stephen R. Covey, made a strong case in his bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, for choosing our response to the conditions and conditioning of our lives. In fact, this principle, that we are free to choose and are responsible for our choices, is the basis for his first habit, be proactive. It also is the foundational principle for all the other habits.

In my book The Speed of Trust, I make the case for cultivating relationships of trust in order to accelerate desired outcomes and results. I believe that nothing is as fast as the speed of trust and that nothing is as profitable as the economics of trust. But to sustain relationships of trust with others, we must first begin by trusting ourselves. Trust is an inside-out process. For example, we’ll have a hard time sustaining trust with others if we don’t trust ourselves, because at some point that distrust of self will typically get projected out into our relationships. But with self-trust as our foundation, it becomes far more natural and abundant for us to create and sustain trust in our relationships, teams and organizations.

In this book 5 Habits to Lead from Your Heart, my cousin, Johnny Covey, has his own unique way of combining these two concepts. He focuses on the proactive behavior of choosing in a way that favors the heart without excluding the head. Learning to trust our heart is the most important thing each of us can do for ourselves, and Johnny shows us how we can do this intentionally. He shows us how we can exercise courage in being who we really are, how we can use our imagination and intelligence to consciously create our experience and how our choices profoundly affect what we think, feel and do.

I’ve known Johnny his entire life and I know him to be a remarkable, caring, creative person—and a force for good. He’s a person who from his early childhood, courageously chose to exercise his proactivity, creativity and authenticity, even when these choices incurred social or financial costs. He models well what he teaches in this book, and because of that, he can serve us well as a mentor in this process of conscious creation.

Johnny can help us move wisely from head to heart. He can help us learn how to be present. He can help us consciously and conscientiously create positive changes in our lives—to more fully express our talents, to realize our potential and to be restored to our real, authentic, best selves.

Johnny uses the metaphor of running, or executing, “plays” as a means of helping us in the process of conscious creation. Having had three sons who each were all-state football quarterbacks in high school, I know the purpose and value of running a well-designed play to get desired outcomes on the field. Similarly, Johnny has given us numerous well-designed plays we can run to help us get desired outcomes in our lives. In fact, I see this book as an extensive playbook for proactive quarterbacks—each of us—who seek to lead meaningful, worthwhile lives of purpose and contribution.

So, for our own benefit, I hope we might apply the principles in this book to become more proactive and deliberate in our choices. As this is a book we experience, and not just read, I predict many of us will benefit so much from this that we’ll desire to recommend it to others who may also benefit. They will thank us for our thinking of them.

We can experience being restored to our true and best selves by choosing how we think and feel and then doing the plays to exercise our conscience and explore new possibilities. Johnny shows us how to do this in the most intentional way possible—by leading from the heart.