by Bridgett Hart | HOPE
If anxiety and negative thinking have left you feeling hopeless, you are here on purpose, and I have a message especially for you.
I Called Bullshit
As I was developing The Hart Habits, I came across a verse that said "love always hopes." I'd personally been in plenty of places where love, specifically, had left me feeling especially hopeless.
Before anything else: if you're feeling hopeless right now, I understand. I've been there. And you matter, that's why I'm here, writing this. If you need support right now, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available anytime, call or text 988. We want you here. I want you here.
Hope is a skill you can actually learn, practice, and get better at. But it turns out hope is also, scientifically, an outcome of practicing the other nine Hart Habits. I didn't know that when I started this process. It just turned out to be true.
Hart Habit Ten: Hope
The tenth and final Hart Habit is Hope. The declaration: I maintain or find hope, even when it's not easy.
It's easy to say "just find hope, just hold onto it," as if that's all there is to it. I've personally been in places where I couldn't have found hope if I wanted to. I did want to, and I couldn't find it anywhere. I had to reach for practical tools that felt safe, the same system I'm sharing with you now. They worked. They got me through those hopeless stretches. That doesn't mean I never go through hopelessness or anxiety anymore. It means I now have tools to get through it, and to actively build more hope in my life overall.
Hope Is a Thinking Process
Hope has been studied by scientists, what it is, how it works, what it actually does for people. The clearest framework for this comes from psychologist C.R. Snyder's Hope Theory, first published in 1991 and later expanded in his book The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here. What Snyder found is that hope is a thinking process made up of three parts: goals, pathways, and agency.
If it's a thinking process, that means it's something we can apply for ourselves. If we can become conscious of our thoughts, we can apply this process to them.
Goals
The first element is goals. This loops back to Hart Habit one, Self, knowing and understanding who you are, what matters to you, your boundaries, your visions. It also pulls in a bit of Habit seven, Show, putting your visions into written, audible, artistic, or any other tangible format.
The first part of hope is having goals of your own, taking the time to actually know yourself and what you want. If you're feeling hopeless, start there: what do you want? What are your goals?
Pathways
The second element is pathways, how you can actually reach those goals. What's distinct about this part of the research is that it isn't pie-in-the-sky fantasy thinking. It's about realistic pathways, the routes that genuinely exist for you to get there. Scientifically, this is about facing the truth, Hart Habit two, head-on, not blind positive thinking.
Agency
The third part is agency, your actual ability to travel those pathways and reach those goals. I break this into two pieces.
Internal agency is about your thoughts. Yes, physical agency matters too, and it varies a lot for each of us, but what doesn't vary much is our ability to access our conscious thoughts, Hart Habit four. We often blame our capacity to hope, or not, on outside circumstances. But science shows hope has more to do with how we align our thoughts toward our goals, and endure the difficulties that inevitably come up, which is Endure, Hart Habit nine. By practicing the Hart Habits consistently, you build the capacity to access hope, because you've built the tools to tap into your own manifesting agency. You can ask and answer: what's the goal? What's the realistic path? What resources are around me? How can I move toward that goal, even a little?
External agency is the final, most crucial piece, and the one that ties hope to the people around you in a way none of the other nine Habits quite do. Everything up to this point has been internal work. Hope is the Habit that reaches outward.
Hope Requires Community
Connecting to community is how we find the pathways we can't generate alone. We don't have every pathway inside ourselves. We need people, support, and resources around us to help us find and actually use them. As we understand what those pathways look like, we understand our own agency better too, because now we know what our team looks like.
I love Pamela Slim's book The Widest Net, because a wide enough net catches plenty for all of us. We each have a real net of people in our lives, and as we strengthen our connections to each other, hope rises, and it gets easier for all of us, because we can lean on each other when we need to.
All the other Hart Habits feed into this. When you practice them regularly, you build relationships with room for people to be themselves, room for you to be yourself, trusting and edifying relationships you build together, not alone.
Wrap Up
If you're struggling with Hope specifically, you'll likely feel resigned to your circumstances, pessimistic, expecting the worst. If that's where you are, there's help. See above.
If you're not quite there, and just want to build this Habit intentionally, these steps will help, and so will practicing the whole framework together.
There's one more piece: an overview of how the whole Hart Habits framework fits together, which you can find on the Hart Habits Framework page.
When you practice Hope consistently, you'll start to feel optimistically expectant, regardless of circumstances. You'll be able to hold the full truth and weight of what we're dealing with, and still know that better things are coming, and that we'll work toward that better good together.
Recommended resources:
The Widest Net by Pamela Slim
The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here by C.R. Snyder
Question of the day: What goals do you focus on that give you hope?
by Bridgett Hart | ENDURE
A lot of my anxiety and negative thoughts came from unrealistic expectations of myself and my timeline, and from feeling like I gave up on things too soon.
Hart Habit Nine: Endure
Today's Habit is Endure. The declaration: I consistently implement realistic small steps toward my vision.
When I started developing what became The Hart Habits, I came across the phrase "love always endures." At the time, that felt like nonsense to me. A lot of people had cheated on me by that point, and love hadn't endured for me in any of those situations. So either I had no idea what love actually was, or "real" love was supposed to last forever no matter what.
The truth is simpler than either of those. We're human. We get tired. Sometimes we should quit things that aren't good for us. Sometimes we should quit people that aren't good for us, even if we love them, especially if we love them, and especially if we love ourselves.
The Tortoise and the Hare
I like to use The Tortoise and the Hare to illustrate how this Habit actually works.
If you watch the Disney cartoon version, there's an interesting difference between the two characters right from the start: the need for external validation versus internal. The tortoise wore a jacket that said "Slow but sure," fully at peace with his own pace. The hare, meanwhile, called himself The Blue Streak, focused on what everyone else would see when he blew past them.
That's the first real lesson in learning to endure: know and love yourself first. Understand your strengths, your so-called weaknesses, your boundaries, your connection to spirit. You have to start with Hart Habit number one, Self.
You also have to know the race you're actually running. Get clear on your vision and your goals. I've talked before about recording and documenting the hopes you have for your future, it's a brain hack, a manifestation hack, and it's genuinely therapeutic too. If you let yourself focus too much on external validation and everyone else's circumstances, it's much easier to wear yourself out and lose the thread on your way to your own goal.
Pace Yourself and Stay Focused
Endurance has nothing to do with how fast or slow you reach a goal. A sprinter's timeline looks different from a marathoner's, and that's fine. It's not about the clock, it's about knowing the goal, staying focused on it, and pacing yourself in a way you can actually sustain. Going too fast can undo the work you've already put in.
You'll hit obstacles. Circumstances will change. Sometimes you'll feel completely knocked off track. The key is keeping your eyes on the prize, and getting back on when you can. It's okay that you had to step off for a while. Just refocus and start moving again. One small step is enough.
Use Your Strengths Strategically
The third piece loops back to knowing yourself. If you want to endure, using your actual strengths strategically will get you there with far less wasted effort. I walked through how to figure out your strengths back in the Clifton StrengthsFinder post. Now you know why I keep coming back to it; your strengths show up in nearly every other part of building a life that works. If you want endurance to come easily, choose projects, work, and a life path that lets you use your strengths most of the time, not against the grain of them.
Wrap Up
If you find yourself often afraid and unsure of what's coming, that's exactly how my own anxiety used to show up. This is the Habit to work on.
Metaphysically and scientifically, when we apply energy to something consistently, things change. We just have to apply it in the right amount, at the right consistency, to get the outcome we actually want. Sometimes it takes a few tries to find that mix. Sometimes it just takes longer than you thought it would. Give yourself realistic goals, and push through until you hit them, proving to yourself that you have what it takes.
When you live this Habit consistently, across every part of your life, people start seeing you as powerful and inspired. They'll want to know how you got where you are, when really, all you did was put small steps in place and keep moving toward the goal.
You've probably noticed how often the other Hart Habits keep showing up as I talk about this one. That's because they build on each other. There's one Habit left, Hope, and after that, a look at how the whole system fits together.
Question of the day: How do you keep moving forward when your motivation is lacking?
by Bridgett Hart | PROTECT
Maybe one of the reasons you're feeling so much anxiety and negative thoughts is that you're not doing the main thing you can do to protect yourself, and your loved ones, regardless of your circumstances.
Hart Habit Eight: Protect
This comes from the eighth Hart Habit, Protect. It started with a sentence I read: love bears all, or love always protects, depending on the translation. When I looked into the Greek word actually used, I found there's no direct English equivalent. Protect was the closest translators could get, but it's worth understanding how it works both internally and externally.
The declaration: I protect myself and others from my feelings and judgments, and I protect my secrets and theirs from the rest of the world.
Who to Trust With Your Secrets
Protecting your secrets doesn't mean locking everything up inside yourself alone. We all need to talk about what we're carrying, and we all need someone to share it with. The real question is who's actually safe to share it with.
Some people are legally designated as safe: therapists, attorneys, doctors. They have a legal obligation to confidentiality. Coaches should offer the same, and I do. But your best friend, your cousin, the person next to you at a bar, none of them are obligated to keep your secrets. They also might not be equipped to hold the weight you're handing them. Loving you doesn't automatically mean knowing how to help you heal.
It matters to be thoughtful about who hears your innermost things, because not everyone is worthy of your vulnerability. Some people will use your secrets against you, either because they mean to, or because they're hurting, and hurt people hurt people.
When it comes to protecting other people's secrets, one option is to avoid getting close enough for people to share them with you in the first place. If you don't have close relationships, nobody hands you their secrets to carry. I'm assuming that's not the life you actually want, so if someone does entrust you with theirs, honor it. Be a vault. It's not your place to share someone else's story with anyone else. The only exception: if a vulnerable person is in real danger, report it, specifically to non-police adult or child protective services.
Protect Everyone From Your Snap Judgments
The second part of Protect is protecting people, including yourself, from your snap judgments and feelings. That doesn't mean your judgments or feelings are bad. They're not. But they're sometimes subconscious, and can be brought into conscious awareness for a second look before you share them with anyone.
Protecting others and yourself from those unexamined moments gives everyone room to actually be who they are.
How to Do It
Start with what I talked about last post, Non-Verbal behavior. One way to protect people from your snap judgments is to stay conscious of your non-verbal behaviors, and take a moment to process before letting anything, verbal or non-verbal, out into the room.
Then check your actual thoughts in the moment. Are they focused on what you want, or what you don't want? Are they open to both subjective and objective truth? Are they trusting people to be who they really are? Are they honoring your Self, your boundaries, what your Spirit and Shadow are telling you, and where your strengths lie?
All of that is the Hart Habits at work, and each one plays into how well you can protect others, and yourself. Protecting others from yourself isn't about staying quiet and holding back who you are. It's about being conscious enough of who you are and where you're headed that you can send exactly the message you mean to send, when you mean to send it, with the impact you actually intend.
Be the Vault
This circles back to the first point: be the vault. This comes from Brené Brown's research. She's spent over a decade studying shame, vulnerability, and how we relate to ourselves and each other. In Braving the Wilderness, she lays out seven elements of trust using the acronym BRAVING, and the V stands for Vault.
Being a vault means that when someone shares something personal, confidential, or vulnerable with you, you hold it. You don't pass along stories that aren't yours to tell. When you become the vault, you're perceived as trustworthy, and you actually are, because you're not out there gossiping. If you're not gossiping about other people, nobody has to wonder whether you're gossiping about them.
Wrap Up
That's the eighth Hart Habit: Protect. Share your secrets only with people who are safe, whether legally bound to confidentiality or proven safe over time, and be a vault for what other people entrust to you. Protect everyone, including yourself, from unexamined snap judgments by using the Hart Habits to get more conscious of your thoughts, words, and non-verbal behavior.
As you practice this, you might notice a shift, from being seen as guarded or unpredictable to being seen as unshakeable and reliable, especially in the hard moments. If that's who you want to be, Protect is a Habit worth practicing on purpose.
Recommended resources:
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Question of the day: How do you protect yourself and others from your snap judgments and feelings?
by Bridgett Hart | NON-VERBALS
Sometimes our anxiety and negative thoughts are a result of our non-verbal behaviors sending messages we can't even hear ourselves send.
What Non-Verbal Communication Actually Is
Verbal communication is the words we use. Everything else, tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, is non-verbal. Our non-verbal communication is always talking for us, and it doesn't always back up the words coming out of our mouth.
Non-verbal communication comes directly from the brain, and it doesn't always check in with our conscious mind first. It pulls straight from our Reticular Activating System, and from our actual, sometimes subconscious, thoughts, to decide how to act. So your words might be coming out carefully chosen, while your non-verbals send a completely different message, because your thoughts underneath are different.
If you've ever had someone pick up on a message you didn't feel like you sent, that might be your non-verbals telling on you.
Hart Habit Six: Non-Verbals
The Ideal State Declaration is: I keep myself cool physically when faced with a tough situation. It gives me time to process before I respond.
How Non-Verbals Are a Tattletale
Our non-verbal communication comes from what our RAS tells our body to do, based on the conscious and subconscious thoughts we're having in the moment. Even deeper than that, it comes from a whole lifetime of things our amygdala has learned to keep us safe, the values and social norms we grew up with, and every layered detail that makes us exactly who we are.
That makes it complicated, and genuinely hard to just control. This isn't a simple fix. If you find it especially difficult, therapy with the right therapist can help you understand why managing your non-verbal communication feels so hard.
The Power of Pause
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." I don't actually know who said this first, it's widely misattributed to Viktor Frankl, but the idea holds up regardless of who said it.
Here's the simple tool: next time someone comes to you with information big enough to trigger an immediate reaction, take a moment and count to ten before you let yourself respond, physically or verbally.
If you need to, close your eyes. Take a breath. Count to ten. Then do whatever you need to do next.
I'm not going to tell you how to handle every situation, but if the information is genuinely hard, give yourself a way to calm down after that count. Walk away for a moment. Or say something like, "pause this for a minute, I hear you, and I need a second to process it, I'll be right back to you, thank you for telling me."
Use whatever gets you into a grounded, thought-out place before you respond. This does two things: it keeps your non-verbals from telling on you before you're ready to say something on purpose, and it gives the other person room to exist exactly as they are, without your immediate reaction crowding them out.
A Story About the Pause
I grew up in a very Christian environment where homosexuality was talked about as one of the worst things in the world. I disagree with that completely, for the record, but that's how it was.
Early on, thinking about this Ideal State Declaration and what it could look like in practice, I thought about people I knew in the LGBTQIA community whose parents were pastors or church leaders. It was common for those leaders to publicly denounce LGBTQIA people from the pulpit. I heard stories constantly about what friends went through when they came out to their families, how nerve-wracking it was to share something so personal with people almost guaranteed to reject them.
I imagined what it might look like if those same pastors, preachers, and parents, reading 1 Corinthians and the line that love does not act unbecomingly, applied it here. What if their child came to them and said, "I'm gay," and instead of reacting immediately, they took a moment. Breathed. Walked away if they needed to. Thought about how much they loved that child, how much they wanted them happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Then came back into the room and did something different.
I'm not saying one Habit would rewrite the course of these young people's lives. But I imagined it could help. Taking that moment opens space for the real questions: What's the truth of this situation? What are my boundaries, and how am I actually involved? How is my Shadow or my Spirit shaping how I'm seeing this?
Once you understand how they work, you realize all the Hart Habits show up here, and Non-Verbals becomes a tool, one more intentional way to communicate exactly the message you mean to send.
Imagine if that pastor, that parent, took the pause instead, breathed, and responded with nothing but a hug. They wouldn't have to decide their moral stance in that instant, or what scripture demands, or how to reconcile it all. In that moment, they could just express love. Imagine what that single small act could do for everything that came after it.
Using Non-Verbals as a Tool
Non-verbals aren't only something to manage, they're also something you can use. If you're feeling down and choose to smile anyway, it can genuinely shift how you feel. If you choose to dance, it wakes your whole body up. Notice what happens to your heart and mind when you let yourself move freely. It has real power to shift your emotional state.
Once you're conscious of how your body communicates, you can see it working both outward, toward other people, and inward, back into you.
If people keep misinterpreting what you think you've said, and it's feeding your anxiety, it might be time to pause. You don't have to understand it all yet, just notice that your non-verbals are speaking. If you don't want to say anything yet, you don't have to. Step back. Breathe. Don't let your body answer for you until you're ready to use it on purpose.
One of the best examples of this in action is Amy Cuddy's TED Talk on how body language can communicate power and confidence, even when you're faking it at first. The science shows your emotions genuinely follow your body's lead, if you let them.
Recommended resources:
Amy Cuddy, TED Talk on body language and power posing
Question of the day: How do you manage your non-verbal behaviors?
by Bridgett Hart | TRUST
If all the people who've betrayed you over and over are a source of your anxiety and negative thoughts, this post will show you how to reverse that trend, and become what you actually want in relationships.
A Story About Choosing Trust
Early in the process of creating The Hart Habits, I was going through a real situation. A person from leadership in my life, someone I trusted a lot, was accused of cheating on his wife with a coworker. It happened inside a church setting, and if you've ever been in that kind of setting, you know the gossip flies and the judgments come fast. Everyone had an opinion about what they'd seen, what they thought, whether he was telling the truth.
At the time I was going through my own catharsis, and I kept thinking, I don't want this anymore. One of the principles from the original text I was working from was "love always trusts." I sat with that. In this situation, it meant I chose to trust the individual when he told me it wasn't true. I decided to believe him and move forward as if that was the case, even with a fair amount of evidence stacking up against him.
One consequence: I got pushed out of the gossip circle, which honestly, I was glad about. I thought, okay, good, one excellent side effect of choosing trust.
Then a few months later, the truth came out. He had cheated. The whole thing was true, a sordid affair, all the juicy details. I had to face what my choice actually meant. I'd chosen to trust him, and he'd lied to me.
At the time, it was a low-stakes experiment for me, I wasn't deeply invested either way. I'd decided how I was going to approach it, and I wanted to see what the result would be. And the result was my peace of mind. Through all six months of the gossip, the meetings, the little pieces of "evidence" people kept bringing me, I wasn't concerned with any of it. I told people what I believed, left it there, and walked away from the situation without walking away from the people in it. I stayed connected to everyone involved without getting embroiled in the slander behind the scenes. Good thing too, because here we are years later, and he's still married to his wife. They worked it out.
Choose Trust as Your Default
The solution to having been betrayed over and over, and the way to reverse that pattern and stop letting it feed your anxiety, is to choose trust as your default. Scary, right?
This is the third Hart Habit. The word is Trust. The statement: "I choose to trust as a default because I listen to my inner voice and I know how to see and carry truth."
If you've been following along, you'll notice that declarative statement leans on Habit 1 and Habit 2, Self and Truth. In the last post, I talked about how everyone gets to hold their own truth, even when it conflicts with yours, and how we can still celebrate it. That's the foundation for everything I'm about to say about defaulting to trust.
To be clear, I'm not recommending you run around blindly trusting everyone, throwing caution to the wind, and letting anyone take whatever they want from you. That's not what defaulting to trust means.
Trust and Verify
The first tool: trust and verify. You've probably heard this phrase before. It's okay to trust someone by default, but if their actions, or your belief in them, are going to affect your life, it's also okay to verify what they're telling you. Trusting someone and verifying what they say aren't opposites.
In business, we call this a contract. You might trust a good friend completely on a deal you're doing together, but that doesn't mean you skip the paperwork. You still get it in writing, and you both sign and date it.
I think about the men I dated before my husband. Early in our relationship, I had to be honest with him: every single man I'd dated before that point had cheated on me. Snuck around, lied about it, spent their time and energy on other women while we were together. Hurt and untrusting would be an understatement.
Trust and verify, for me back then, meant checking his phone. Looking through call logs. Trying to find out what was really going on. What I learned was that I found whatever I was looking for. If I was convinced he'd been calling some woman the night before, I'd find a phone number that seemed to confirm it. So I chose trust, and then I verified that he wasn't trustworthy. Of course I did. That's what happens when verification is really just confirmation bias with extra steps.
Choosing to trust also means being prepared to deal with whatever the truth turns out to be. Love celebrates truth, so I had to actually look at what was true. Was he showing me, with his time and effort, that he wanted to be in this relationship? He called every day. Asked what I was doing. Invited me to his place. Was genuinely interested in my life. That was true. He'd also been honest from the start that he wasn't ready to be monogamous yet, and that we should just be friends for a while. As his friend, I had a lot less say over what he did with his time. So the actual truth was: all I had to do was ask him directly if he was seeing someone else. And every time, he told me the truth.
I'm not suggesting that always happens. What I am saying is that when you bring truth, self-respect, and real trust together, trusting people stops being able to hurt you. It can only help you. Trust and verify doesn't mean digging for "the truth" you already expect to find. It means learning more, gathering real information, understanding your own belief system's role in the situation, building better boundaries, and honoring Spirit, Shadow, and your strengths as you go. Ask what's true for you? What could be true for someone else? How you can celebrate both?
If you're dating someone and you're not sure whether they're monogamous with you, have that conversation. If they're not, you don't have to be either. Good, bad, or neutral, that's not for me to say. That's where your own boundaries and values come into the conversation. Verify. Take every reasonable step to make sure your trust is placed somewhere worthy of it. Then give it freely.
Close the Loop With Systems
The second piece: trust, then build systems that close the loop naturally. Verification stops feeling like suspicion when it's just a built-in part of how you operate.
In business, this is quality assurance, checks and balances. In the group home business I ran, part of our process was a shift-completion form, checked every time, so we always knew things had actually been done, with independent verification built in. Timesheets, clear policies, structured corrective actions, duty checklists, performance reviews, all the same idea.
In personal life, this looks like an accountability partner, or a prenuptial agreement, or simply strong personal boundaries.
The Triangle of Trust
There's a framework I like here, sometimes called the triangle of trust, from Frances Frei's TED Talk on building and rebuilding trust. It has three corners: Empathy, Logic, and Authenticity.
Empathy means really hearing what someone's saying, seeing the situation from their side, celebrating their truth. Logic means applying objective truth: what's actually data-based or evidence-based here, not just what it feels like subjectively. Being cheated on 100% of the time in the past didn't objectively mean my husband would cheat too. It might have felt that way, but it wasn't objectively true.
Authenticity sits at the top, and it's the most important corner. Empathy and logic mean nothing if you're not trustworthy yourself. Put all three together, and it looks like contracts, accountability partners, prenups, assessing a situation honestly, and accepting that objective and subjective truths can conflict, and that's okay.
Wrap Up
The way to stop being betrayed repeatedly, is to choose to trust people, and build systems to verify that trust is well placed. Know yourself. Hold good boundaries. Honor your strengths, your Shadow, your Spirit. Accept that different truths can coexist, even in conflict, and find ways to celebrate them anyway. That's the recipe for choosing trust.
As you trust people and give that to them, they start giving it back. This might be the most pivotal piece of The Hart Habits for actually changing your life, because we're not taught to trust in this society. We're taught to be cautious, critical, always looking for how someone's trying to take from us. In a capitalist society, that fear is well-founded, it was designed that way. So how do we celebrate that truth? By admitting it, and then asking: how do I live my own truth, honoring myself and my boundaries, inside a society built like this?
The answer is disruptive: choose trust as your default anyway. As you do, while still verifying and closing the loop with real systems, other people start believing they can trust you too. The loop grows. We get stronger together. Synergy, look that word up. That's what happens when we trust each other more deeply, even knowing we're all a little bit of a mess sometimes. We do messed-up stuff. That's the truth. But when we choose to trust each other anyway, with verification and systems in place, things can change fast.
Choose trust. Trust and verify. Close the loop with systems. But choose trust. It will help you stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life. You'll go from feeling guarded and victimized to feeling trustworthy, and trusted in return.
Recommended resources:
The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman
How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust, Frances Frei
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Mastering the Skill of Trust by Angus Reid
Question of the day: How have you learned to trust others?
by Bridgett Hart | TRUTH
Have you heard the verse "the truth will make you free"?
Have you wondered why it hasn't made you feel free from your anxiety and negative thoughts yet?
I'm going to share the secret about truth that the people in charge never wanted us to know.
Why Some Truths Create Anxiety
Our white American society was built on hiding and avoiding the truth of slavery. We enslaved human beings to hoard, build, and generate wealth for ourselves, and we excluded everybody else from it, even the people who actually did the building. We did that for 400 years. How many generations do you think happen in 400 years?
What do you think that many years of hiding and avoiding the visible truth does to a society? What happens when we shrink all of that down into our daily lives? The fact that we don't know how to celebrate truth is chilling, but it also explains a lot about why we suffer so much anxiety and negative thinking.
Love Celebrates Truth
At the beginning of what became The Hart Habits, I came across the phrase "love celebrates truth." I had to sit with the word celebrate. What do we actually do when we celebrate something? We put it on a stage. We shine light on it. We put up billboards. We make a big deal. We highlight the good in it. We take the time to notice it, and pay attention to it.
Objective Truth vs. Subjective Truth
I like to talk about two kinds of truth: objective and subjective.
Objective truths are the ones we'd generally agree on as a group, usually based on facts, data, evidence, and statistics. The speed of light. The sky is blue. The grass is green. In reality, though, there are very few completely objective truths. Most things become subjective the moment we receive and process them for ourselves.
Subjective truths are the ones subject to our personal interpretation. They come through our eyes, ears, and senses, get processed by our brain, and are interpreted by our heart, soul, or spirit as true. I've talked before about the Reticular Activating System, and how the brain can lie to us to keep our reality matching what we expect. If you want fun, concrete examples of this, watch Brain Games on National Geographic.
Here's a subjective truth: I think I'm a tall woman. I'm five foot eight, which is tall compared to a lot of women. I'm often one of the taller women in a room. But if I'm standing next to a girlfriend who's six foot seven, she might look at me and think, you are not tall, you're small. That's true for both of us. It's true for me that I'm tall, because in most rooms I'm looking over people's heads. It's also true for her that I'm small.
How can I be both tall and small at the same time? Subjective truth. The truth has to come through my filter first, and through hers. Both are still true, even though they conflict.
The Plurality of Truth
You could search this as duality of truth, but I like to call it the plurality of truth, because every truth has more than two ways of looking at it. It's not just my way and their way. There are many different perspectives on any given situation.
Think about the four Gospels. Same story, four different people, different times, different perspectives, different messages. They tell the same story in different ways, and all of them are still true (according to believers), just shaped by whoever is telling it.
Here's the Point
Even when someone's truth is the opposite of yours, love celebrates truth. When you let other people hold their truth and choose to celebrate it instead of fighting it, everything works better.
That's their truth. You're not going to change it. Trying to is what's causing you the anxiety and negative thinking. Instead: shine a light on it. Pay attention to it. Highlight it. Understand it. Make your own decisions with it in mind.
You're free now. You get your freedom from letting them have their truth. You don't have to change them. You don't have to change their mind. You don't have to persuade anyone toward a different point of view. You're here to experience your own perspective and enjoy it as fully as possible, in service of your highest purpose. Gratitude helps with that.
What This Opens Up
Their truth being different from yours isn't a problem. When you can look at it honestly and celebrate it, meaning really pay attention to it, there are real benefits. You get to make better, more informed decisions about how you move forward, what you do or don't do, what your boundaries are, what Spirit is telling you, what your shadow or inner child wants, and how your strengths play into all of it.
You might notice that's the four components of the first Hart Habit, Self, the ones I walked through in the last several posts of this series. Truth is number two on the list instead of number one for a reason. You have to know yourself, love yourself, and embrace your own subjective truths before you can really embrace what other people believe is true too.
Soon, you'll get to a place where you can hold someone else's truth as true for them, and worth celebrating, simply because you want to live a life aligned with love. You'll make better decisions about how you move forward with people, and you'll find yourself more open-minded, more able to hold all the different truths, good, bad, and ugly, that exist in the connections and Spirit around you.
Recommended resources:
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
The Reticular Activating System
Brain Games (National Geographic)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Question of the day: What truths are you avoiding, hiding, or trying to hide from? What would it look like to celebrate them instead?
