What Is Heart Development?

My Last Blog entry has prompted several inquiries into what I meant by heart development as a method of developing courage and humility. I can sum up the last blog by saying I did not think the field of Psychology would be truly advanced by any new theories of neuroses. I may be wrong here due to a lack of vision or imagination, but I believe that the only genuinely important advancements would have be in the area of personal change and would need to involve methods of changing one's conscious behaviors. As in the field of medicine, diagnosis without cure is useless. It might be interesting to understand the workings of a particular neurosis or pathology, but without an applicable solution, it would still be useless. I suggested that heart development/awakening (achieving a "Braveheart") was the most straightforward way to prepare an individual to have the courage and humility to take on the difficult task of deep personal change so I want to explain the concept of heart development in a practical way.

Most of my Executive Coaching sessions are very problem focused: Here is my problem, how do I fix it? The next level of work is: "is this going to happen again if I do not change something about myself?" If the answer is "yes" then the next level of work appears. This is usually as far as work goes for people looking for Executive Coaching. Clients seeking Personal Coaching, looking at personal and relationship issues, are usually more open to exploring the deeper issues around one's life and the root causes of them. Heart development is the conscious work on building a strong foundation in oneself that allows courageous mastery of emotion in one's life. It is the mastery of emotion that determines the flexibility, presence, and quality of relationship we experience with everything/everyone in our life. The quality of the level of your emotional mastery determines the quality of your life. Emotional Mastery is attained through Heart development/awakening.

So what would this look like? The good news is that I will not be writing some book in the future entitled, "Seven Easy Steps to a Brave Heart," though that is what everyone does these days to get rich. This work is uniquely individual and everyone works at different levels with different areas of their life to begin doing this work. Developing/awakening one's heart is extremely personal and vulnerable and deserves more care and attention than some "easy steps" because it is NOT easy. That is why I said it takes a brave heart to develop a brave heart. So what would this work look like behaviorally? I have to admit, explaining this is much harder than you would think because we have such few models out there to show us what it looks like. At the feeling level, it would be the moment in one's life when the emotion running through you is not frightening at all and you feel a simultaneous sense of both absolute confidence and vulnerability. It is a feeling of both fullness and emptiness, a sense in that moment of both wonder and knowing. The closest most people get to this is when they feel a rush of adrenaline, but that is the power feeling without the simultaneous vulnerability. Again describing this often turns discussion to poetry, but that is why it is so elusive: the more practically you describe it the more mundane it appears and the more descriptively you describe it the more paradoxical it seems.

Here is a quick behavioral way to test where you are or are not in heart development and emotional mastery:

1) How often do you verbalize your heart-felt, genuine love to your wife/husband/partner? To your children? To your friends? How often are you physically affectionate with your loved ones and family?
2) How often do you express vulnerability to your loved ones such as expressions of Fear, Worry, Weakness? How often do you apologize when you are wrong? How often can you identify making a mistake before being told?
3) How often can you express your positive feelings to loved ones and friends or express your difficult feelings with people without blame or judgement?
4) How often can you show tears to people? Do you feel comfortable crying in front of your loved ones or family? How about strangers or in movie theatres?
5) How often are you honest with people in a caring way?
6) How often are you genuinely interested in what others are telling you about their lives?
7) How often are you genuinely joyous over other people's good fortune in their lives? How often do you give positive compliments to people or give positive acclaim about their achievements?
8) How often do you make it important to make others feel safe (socially or physically) in your presence?
9) How often are you able to give genuine forgiveness to those who have hurt you or your loved ones?

People who have greatly developed their hearts, those few Bravehearts out there, do all of these things regularly and often. It is not a complete list of course, but it is a easy guide to what heart development would look like in someone else's behavior. I chose these examples because they relate to everyone and they demand the most courage and humility to accomplish. As you can see, emotional mastery involves the use of one's personal emotions and the awareness of other's emotional needs to build and strengthen all relationships. Emotional mastery, then, is not, as is commonly thought, the use of the intellect to overcome emotion, it is the use of emotions themselves to empower oneself and others. That can only be accomplished by individual work on heart development.