Here we sit in the wake of Valentine’s Day, a.k.a. the celebration of the heart. Funny how no such celebration is required for the mind. I’m guessing it’s because we seem to be celebrating that one every day in our hyper-rational world of formal education, credentials, IQ’s, SAT scores, etc.  But one day is all we give the most useful navigational tool that we have for guiding us toward our right lives? Hardly seems right that a single silly 24-hour period of candy, flowers and greeting cards could adequately honor this incredibly under-understood organ, which ironically seems to be at the root of most all human triumph.

I recently had a reader who posed the question, “How do you know when what our heart tells us, lines up with what our mind says?” Well, I got to thinking, sorry, feeling that we just might have the hierarchy all wrong. Since the heart doesn’t speak in our native tongue, it doesn’t figure that it can lie to, or manipulate us like the mind can. On that alone it might become clear which is the more reliable source of counsel. Leadership expert Robin Sharma offers that “the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master,” yet we’re obligated to flip this truth in the name of protecting ourselves from the foolishness of our hearts.

So, alignment of the two might be less important than the balance of power that we afford them through choice. If your heart aches to paint, listen and then use your mind to find the art store. If your heart aches to play the tuba, listen and use your mind to take lessons. The heart still knows what you’ve perhaps forgotten. Sure we’ve blamed it for things like gambling losses and disastrous romances, but if you look back at all the things you told yourself about these ill-fated decisions, you just might see that behind it all were stories fabricated by our minds. Follow your much vaunted brain and you’ll, at very best, end up with many many masters, i.e. everyone who’s ever filled your head with erroneous information. But follow your heart and your life, at the very least, will be your own.

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In honor of this weekend’s Super Bowl 44, here’s some X’s and O’s. Pretty simple really. The O’s have someplace special that they want to get to and the X’s want to stop them from doing so. The advantage for the O’s is that they have a secret idea of how they’re gonna do it. The X’s, well they have to guess.

When we obsessively focus on our obstacles, it’s like the O’s telling the X’s, “by the way, here’s what we wanna do, so please stop us!” That gives the X’s a whole bunch of power and advantage over the O’s. But if the O’s were to instead create a crystal clear picture of where it is they want to get to and develop an executable plan on how they’d like to get there, well then, they’ve got their power back and then some.

Stop empowering the things that are standing in your way by giving them your focus. Instead, be clear with your vision and bold with your actions — Super Bold.

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Today the groundhog came out, saw his shadow and then high-tailed it back into his burrow with the message, “don’t be shedding your Snuggie just yet.” According to folklore, this signifies six more weeks of the cold and the dank. And if he hadn’t seen his shadow? Well then, bring on the thaw.

While most won’t rearrange their lives around this prognostication, this fable does serve to illustrate a concept that we implement in coaching called transparency. It simply refers to being open and authentic about who you are and what you want. I suppose it’s this very simplicity that would account for why we don’t do it all that much. But if we look to the groundhog tale, we see that the inability to create a shadow, i.e. to be transparent, allows us to emerge much sooner from our self-imposed winter and all of its discontents. Not that our shadow selves don’t serve a purpose, they do, but when they eclipse and devour us, we greatly compromise what we offer the world and consequently, what we receive in return.

A caution: one needn’t be transparent to the point of being rude or harmful. True transparency is about US, not others. So, if you’re somewhere near ready to stop living the same predictably unsatisfying day over and over again, try to resist being obligated to who you’re not, gently escort your truths out of their burrow and, well — bring on the thaw.

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