Giving Voice to Values

SELF-KNOWLEDGE, SELF-IMAGE, AND ALIGNMENT: Generate a “self-story” or personal narrative about the decision to voice and act on your values that is consistent with who you already are and that builds on the strengths and preferences that you already recognize in yourself. There are many ways to align your unique strengths and style with your values. If you view yourself as a “pragmatist,” for example, find a way to see voicing your values as pragmatic.

One of the most powerful lenses through which to view values in the workplace—and one of the most powerful sources of the strength and confidence to act on those values—is the lens of self-knowledge. A knowledge of oneself allows the crafting and embracing of a desired self-image. Managers at all levels in their firms report that a significant enabler of values-based action is the clarity, commitment, and courage that is born of acting from our true center, finding alignment between who we already are and what we say and do. Some people say they are able to voice and act on their values because they have always had a strong sense of right and wrong and a need to act on this conviction. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut describes this kind of moral courage as a person’s commitment to “shape the pattern of his life—his thoughts, deeds, and attitudes—in accordance with the design of his nuclear self.”¹

Not all people see themselves this way, however. Let’s borrow a taxonomy from Gregory Dees and Peter Crampton’s discussion of ethical negotiations.² They argue that most people categorize themselves as “idealists” (who attempt to act on their moral ideals no matter what), “pragmatists” (who seek a balance between their material welfare and their moral ideals), or “opportunists” (who are driven exclusively by their own material welfare). Dees and Crampton point out that most people fall into more than one of these categories at different times and depending on the issue, but in our experience with business students and practitioners, the largest group is those who self-identify as pragmatists. They want to act on their values but do not wish to place themselves at a “systematic disadvantage” by doing so. This does not mean that they would never pay a price for voicing and acting on their values, but rather that they believe it may be credibly possible that they could be successful.³

This seems a profoundly hopeful observation, because it suggests that there are many who would voice and act on their values if they believed they had a reasonable chance of effectiveness. This observation supports our primary starting assumption for Giving Voice to Values: that most of us want to find ways to voice and act on our values in the workplace and do so effectively. After all, to create and preserve ethical organizational cultures, not everyone has to voice and enact our deepest shared values—just enough of us do.

So if we can derive strength and energy from acting in a way that aligns with our values, it seems we can create that alignment and thereby enhance our willingness and ability to voice and act on our values by finding a way to view ourselves—by developing a “self-story,” if you will—that integrates acting on our values with our (already held) sense of who we truly are.⁴ If we see ourselves as pragmatists, for example, let’s find a way to view voicing our values as pragmatic, as opposed to idealistic or even naive. And let’s come up with a life narrative that organizes our past experiences, as well as our current and expected future choices, around a version of our own abilities, preferences, and strengths that can be aligned with voicing and acting on our deepest moral values.

Let’s look at an example. We often assume that voicing and acting on our values involves an act of courage. Interestingly, however, some managers report that their ability to voice their values was driven more by fear than courage. Their fear of violating a particular code or incurring some external punishment outweighed the fear of bucking the crowd or refusing their boss’s direction.

In one sense, this seems obvious, but it illuminates a relevant debate. There are some companies and business schools that approach their ethics and compliance with a sort of “scared straight” model. They will hire someone who served time for a white-collar offense to lecture on how easy it is to start down that slippery slope and how terrible the consequences are. I have always been skeptical of such efforts, believing it is more effective to tap into people’s positive desires to excel (in this case, at implementing their values) than to feed their fears of punishment.

However, listening to an extraordinarily self-reflec-tive and candid woman describe her ability to voice her values as a result of being risk averse and fear driven gave me pause. An analyst for a leading investment bank, she was asked by a close friend to share some proprietary research: “I experienced his request as scary and wrong, but he cajoled, saying, ‘It’s only me. No one will ever know.’ After I refused, he said, ‘I’ve never seen you be that firm with anyone. I guess you’ve sold your soul to that company.’” Later the analyst commented, “I hate to say ‘no’ to anyone and I’m basically a non-confrontational person, but I guess I belong to this place for a while and want to be loyal.”

This remark about belonging to her employer may elicit a gasp from readers (it did from the interviewer), who may fear that it sounds as if she is an unquestioning follower who would do anything that was asked. However, the analyst proceeded to share other instances when she had raised questions and voiced her values inside the firm, calling the organization to task when she felt employees were not living up to the espoused company policies and values. These decisions illustrated that for this woman, fear and loyalty actually provided her with the strength to speak up, both inside and outside the organization. Fear and loyalty raised her expectations and her standards for the firm as well as for herself and her colleagues. It seemed that for someone who viewed herself as nonconfrontational, the trick was to frame her values-driven choice in such a way that the confrontation to be avoided was one with the keeper of the values (as opposed to the person who challenged those values).

Other managers interviewed described their decision to voice their values as an expression of their risk-taking and assertive personalities. It appears that one person’s fear is another person’s courage and that it can be useful to frame the mindsets and predispositions for ethical action as explicitly multiple. If some individuals are convinced that they are fearful, for example, maybe helping them find a way to consciously use that fear to serve a purpose they value would be more effective than preaching courage to them.

In conversations with managers who have acted on their values in the workplace, again and again people describe their ability to voice their values as deriving from some personal identity traits, and many of those traits are not necessarily linked with ethics or morality. Whether it is their personal confidence, their tendency to be contrarian, their risk-averse nature, their risk-taking nature, their need for clarity, or their desire for autonomy and independence, what is interesting is that the trait enabling one individual may be the opposite of what works for another.

Therefore, it becomes important for us to create our own narrative about who we are and how being this particular person enables us to act on our values, as well as what particular risks we face due to this identity. Using the self-assessment in this chapter as well as the lists of enablers and disablers generated from the “tale of two stories” in Chapter 3, we can construct a personal-professional profile that is based not only on what is important to us but also on our particular strengths and risk factors when it comes to acting on those values. (See Appendix D for a sample personal-profile survey.) Our familiarity with what we already believe enables and disables voicing our values allows us to name and frame any current challenge in a way that taps into our existing power.

Additionally, we can place a customized network of individuals and resources in place to serve our intention to act on our values. Professor Linda Hill of the Harvard Business School uses self-assessment in her leadership curriculum not merely as a tool to identify areas for personal growth but also as a way to clarify where one may need to build in checks and balances. If we know that we tend to defer to authority, for instance, we might seek out a respected contrarian as an adviser on major decisions. This approach is built on the normalizing of personal challenges, just as the discussion in Chapter 4 was built on the normalizing of ethical challenges.

Each of these measures is about making it more likely that we will, in fact, be empowered to act on our values when we confront challenges and that we will be more likely to act skillfully and effectively because we are playing to our strengths and preferences rather than trying to browbeat ourselves into doing something we are not comfortable with or being someone we do not believe we are.

So what are some of the key self-assessment questions to consider when we develop our personal-professional profile? The stories of individuals who have actually voiced their values revealed five areas that, if they are aligned with the way a person frames a conflict, can make it more feasible to voice and act on one’s values. These include:

Table 1 offers a list of self-assessment questions in these five areas to consider when constructing a personal-professional profile, such as: What impact do you want to have through your work? Are you a risk taker, or are you risk averse? Do you communicate better in person or in writing? Are you most loyal to your family, colleagues, or employer? Is your self-image idealistic, pragmatic, or opportunistic?

Table 1

Key Self-Assessment Questions

Questions of Personal Purpose

• What are your personal goals?

• Your professional goals?

• What is your personal purpose for your business career?

• What impact do you want to have through your work? On whom?

• How do you define your impact as an auditor, investor, manager, product developer, marketer, senior executive, and so on?

• Whom do you want to know you benefited, and in what ways?

• What do you hope to accomplish?

• What will make your professional life worthwhile?

• How do you want to feel about yourself and your work, both while you are doing it and in the end?

Questions of Risk

• What is your risk profile?

• Are you a risk taker, or are you risk averse?

• What are the greatest risks you face in your line of work?

• Are they personal (livelihood, deportation, legal punishment); professional (harms to customers, employees, the firm); or societal (impact on environment, profession, industry, nation)?

• What levels of risk can and can’t you live with?

Questions of Personal Communication Style and Preference

• Do you deal well with conflict, or are you nonconfrontational? Under what circumstances?

• Do you prefer communicating in person or in writing?

• Do you respond best from the gut and in the moment, or do you need to take time out to reflect and craft your communications?

• Do you assert your position with statements, or do you ask questions in order to communicate and get your points across?

Questions of Loyalty

• Do you tend to feel the greatest loyalty to family, work colleagues, your employer, or other stakeholders, such as customers?

• How do different conditions and different stakes affect your sense of loyalty?

Questions of Self-Image

• Generally speaking, do you consider yourself shrewd or naive?

• Do you identify as primarily idealistic, opportunistic, or pragmatic?

• Are you most comfortable in the role of a learner or of a teacher?

• Are you most comfortable in the role of an autonomous, individual contributor or a team member?

• Can you think of circumstances where you have surprised yourself?

• What may have been unique or different about those circumstances, such that they drew out a different side of yourself?

It was pretty clear that I was an annoying “interruption” in his day. In a very transaction-oriented environment where time was money, meeting with me was an investment for which he expected little return. He was distracted and adopted a no-nonsense, “I’m going to tell you things you don’t want to hear” sort of stance with me. But I plunged into the interview anyway.

I asked Jim some opening questions about his area of responsibility and about the demographics of his large team of managers, salespeople and analysts. When he explained they were predominantly white males, I asked why he thought that was so—and that’s when he seemed to finally become engaged in the conversation. He leaned forward and looking directly and intently at me, said: “Let me tell you something, Cecilia. I have tried over the years to encourage a more diverse workforce of young managers in my area. And it’s really not fair that the firm starts criticizing us directors now for not doing enough, because we are the ones who suffer when these efforts don’t work out. I remember making a real push to hire and develop a young African American manager a couple years ago in my department—I was the first one in my area to do so—but he didn’t fare well in the firm. We had to let him go. And I paid a price for that experience.” Jim uttered this last line with real feeling, adding: “So now I just keep my mouth shut and my head down and try not to say much about diversity.”

Well I must say that I felt a bit useless. Jim’s frustration was exactly the kind of response I was supposed to identify and help address. And I knew that although his experience was deeply felt, there were also many assumptions in his story that I should point out and hopefully dispel—for example, that one unsuccessful hire was a reason to ignore all other candidates, or even that the performance of the hire he described was necessarily fairly assessed.

But I felt frozen. How could I argue with this very senior manager who sat there absolutely convinced that his story was an airtight argument against my efforts? After all, he knew his business better than I could ever hope to and I was acutely aware that, in his eyes, I was just the “diversity lady.” I am not a very confrontational person and frankly he intimidated me. I think that at one level, he was trying to. And although I know I am smart enough, my words tend to fly out of my head and I become tongue-tied when I feel I am expected to assume the role of an aggressive and even brash cross-examining attorney. My strength is in dialogue, not argument. I was tempted to just feebly end the interview and withdraw, but I felt I would not only be failing in my professional role, I would be failing to practice my own values around speaking out about diversity in the workplace.

After a long moment, I very seriously asked him: “Gee, so what price did you pay, when that guy you hired didn’t succeed?” Although in one sense, I was just trying to buy time to figure out how to respond to his arguments, another part of me—the part of my brain that was still functioning—really wanted to know.

And I’ll never forget Jim’s reaction because it was not at all what I expected. First, he looked startled at what I had said. He sat back in his chair, crossed his arms, and then slowly began to smile ruefully. And he said: “You know, I’ve told this story many times before, complaining, but no one has ever asked me that question before. They just listen and nod with understanding. And you know in reality, now that I really think about it, I actually didn’t pay a price … but damned if I didn’t truly believe that I had!”

My first reaction at this response was to think “Gotcha!” But then I looked at Jim’s face. I saw that rather than trying to mislead me, he genuinely had believed that he was paying a price for his hire. Now upon reflection, he began to recognize that most of the price he had paid was one that he had imagined or just expected… or maybe one he had exacted from himself. And this was the first moment in the interview when Jim and I had the opportunity to really connect to constructively think about the way differences played out in that firm.

In this example, Cecilia accidentally found a self-story to tell about her own style and abilities that enabled her to voice her values in a way that felt reasonable and feasible. Rather than continuing to believe that her preference for dialogue and her discomfort with confrontation meant that she would never be able to stand up for her beliefs, she learned to use her open, nonjudgmental, questioning style to make topics discussable that previously had not been—and by so doing to make real differences with her clients. This was a kind of turning point for her, as it enabled her to embrace her preferences and comforts and consciously use them in the service of her values. She learned that being nonconfrontational and somewhat introverted was not a barrier to values-based action; it simply dictated a different approach. Every conflict became an opportunity to learn something, both for her and importantly for the person with whom she disagreed. And rather than that person—Jim, for example—being framed as the adversary or even a villain, he could be seen as a partner in uncovering the truth and a better way of acting.

Or let’s take another example. Denise Foley was facing the most difficult professional challenge of her life, and the irony was that its source was the very same man who had changed her career sixteen months earlier—dramatically, forever, and, she had thought then, for the better.⁶ After the previous CEO had been fired from the major regional hospital where Foley had worked for several years, a new executive had assumed leadership. After only a month and a half, he plucked Foley from her position as chief of nursing and named her senior vice president and chief operating officer.

Foley embraced her new responsibilities with relish and commitment. She felt the hospital had given her so much: career opportunities, the chance to complete her MBA, and strong mentors. This was an opportunity not only to grow and face new challenges, but also to give back to the institution. Just over a year into her new role, however, she found herself in the midst of a professional crisis.

After taking a serious look at the situation he had inherited from the previous chief, her new CEO had contracted with a consultant who painted a bleak financial picture for the institution. The consultant advised, and the CEO agreed, that the best course of action would be to sell the hospital to a for-profit institution. This was not an entirely surprising proposal; in fact, it was the path that many nonprofit hospitals were taking to try to solve their financial difficulties. Foley’s CEO was entirely behind the strategy.

The problem was, however, that Foley thought the consultant’s assessment was incorrect. She didn’t know if he was consciously manipulating the numbers or if, seeing hefty fees coming his way, he actually came to believe his own counsel. Meanwhile, the CEO did not have other sources of good information; lacking confidence in the hospital CFO, he had kept him out of the analysis.

The stakes were high for all involved. The CEO needed to solve his institution’s financial problems and felt the sale was his best shot. However, he needed unwavering support from his COO to make the strategy work, and Foley had many concerns. She didn’t believe the consultant’s numbers. Beyond that she was convinced that if the sale went through, the new parent would ultimately close the hospital and sell the assets. She believed this would hurt the consumer: the closing of her institution would leave the community with only one local provider, and price and service suffer when hospitals do not face competition.

Even if she was wrong about the eventual fate of the hospital, Foley was concerned that the hospital service array would be cut: her hospital was the only source of mental health care in the area, for example, but this was traditionally a less profitable offering. And Foley knew that some of her institution’s community service and charitable offerings would be cut as well. Based on the local government’s past performance, she was not confident that other public funds would be well spent in making up for these losses.

On the other hand, Foley was acutely aware that the CEO was counting on her support. She feared that he would see her challenge as a defection, or a narrowly motivated concern about her own job. He had made a big commitment to her when he promoted her, and she felt a strong sense of loyalty and obligation.

The personal stakes were very high for Foley, too. If she had to leave the hospital, she would need to relocate to find another position, and such a disruption would take a high toll on her family—especially her high-school-age son. And this potential loss to her family was compounded by the thought of losing a highly valued colleague in her CEO. She really wanted to agree with him.

Foley knew that some might say she was being overly scrupulous in her soul searching and needlessly tormenting herself. After all, the CEO was the ultimate arbiter, and perhaps he and his consultant had information that she did not. She was still new to the C-suite, and one could argue that the ink on her MBA was still damp. Did she really have to take on the responsibility for this decision? Couldn’t she just do her best to make the CEO’s preferred course of action work out?

Foley experienced her decision as very stressful, and she talked it over with her husband at length. She wanted to get a perspective from someone she trusted but who was outside the organization. They decided not to talk to their son because they didn’t want him to feel the burden of her decision or to worry unnecessarily. She also looked to a network of past and present colleagues within the hospital as she checked and rechecked her numbers and looked for insight. She remembered the example of an early mentor—an executive nurse—whom Foley had observed on numerous occasions taking difficult stands to uphold her high standards in the face of reports and vocal complaints from her peers. In the end, Foley and her husband concluded that she would not be able to live with herself or continue to take satisfaction in the career she loved if she didn’t act on her best judgment.

She decided to put her arguments in writing before she met with the CEO, in order to clarify her thinking and ensure that he could hear her with less emotionality from either of them. Then she took her memo to the CEO and verbally outlined her position. After presenting why she felt the consultant’s assessment was inaccurate, she concluded by explaining that she would not be able to do her job effectively if the sale proceeded because she was confident that her peers and the managers who reported to her would be able to “read” her true thoughts, thereby raising their own doubts.

It was a difficult decision but the CEO decided to look into Foley’s analysis. He read her memo and then called the consultant, Foley, and the CFO into a meeting together where they had a frank discussion. It turned out that the CEO was surprised when he really looked deeply at the numbers; he had taken much of he consultant’s argument on faith and had not done the kind of close checking that Foley had done. Ultimately, the CEO decided not to sell. He and Foley remained good colleagues and managed to turn the hospital around.

Reflecting on her decision, Foley does not downplay the toll this conflict took on her, but she says she found confidence in her recognition that she was actually unable to support a different decision. This belief, that she really had no choice, helped her to deal with the fear that her actions might cause pain for her family or others. She simply didn’t believe that following the CEO’s original directive was something she could convincingly do.

Another way to express this would be to say that she had a strongly held self-story that portrayed her as someone who could not act contrary to her own best assessment. This story was based both in her moral values but also very importantly in her belief that she was unable to dissemble or to hide her true thoughts and feelings. This story gave her strength, and it probably was part of the reason that others—her husband, her CEO—took her concerns so seriously. They saw her the same way as she saw herself. She framed her decision in a way that was consistent with the way she viewed herself.

But the story does not end there. Foley had the occasion to revisit her self-story in a very interesting way. Shortly after the decision not to sell her hospital, Foley was nominated and selected to participate in a prestigious global leadership development program, which brought together young business leaders for a series of dialogues and educational experiences. She found herself in a room with twenty or so extremely talented young leaders, deeply immersed in a case discussion about what they would do if their own values were in conflict with a decision their employer or their client wanted them to take.

One by one the members of the group coalesced around the conclusion that, under such pressure, they would not speak out. Although their apparent candor was impressive, Foley found their position staggering. She was stunned that individuals who, by her assessment, were in such privileged positions with little or no financial pressure—after all, it was only a case discussion—would feel that they had no choice to voice or act on their values. Finally, Foley just blurted out that she thought it would be critical to take a stand.

Foley remembers feeling tense as she voiced her position. She believed that, in some ways, she was already seen as a bit of an “outsider” by the group and she felt that way herself. After all, most of them were highly successful leaders in the private sector. She, on the other hand, was from a nursing background and she worked in a nonprofit hospital; she thought she might seem naive or a bit of a goody two-shoes.

So the question became: Was she naive, or was she bold—even bolder than a group of high-powered executives? In retrospect, she recognized that her decision to speak out to her CEO at the hospital—and her ability to do so effectively—was far from naive. Her financial analysis turned out to be correct and her careful strategy for raising the issue enabled her boss to hear her nondefensively. But when asked why she felt she had no choice but to voice her values while her experienced and highly esteemed companions in a leadership development program felt they had no choice but to silence themselves in the face of values conflicts, she still had to pause.

Was it her status as an “outsider” that allowed her to maintain more perspective, both in the hospital and in the leadership program? Was it her commitment to a larger professional purpose, linked to serving the health-care needs of her community, that spurred her to look a second and third time at numbers that were driven more by short-term changes in profitability than by long-term institutional sustainability? Was it her good fortune to have strong values-driven mentors and a supportive family that enabled her positions?

Or was it her willingness to embrace her own self-story? Sometimes the hardest part of voicing our values is, ironically, accepting the image of ourselves that such efforts trigger. Of course, this may seem counterintuitive. We may think that the version of our life story we would squirm over is the one where we fail to act on our values. After all, isn’t that the heart of the so-called Wall Street Journal test of ethics: that we should never do anything we would feel uncomfortable seeing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (or the New York Times, or telling our parents, or… )?

And to a certain degree, the assumption this test is based on is valid. That is, if we consider whether our actions are defensible to the wider public—or if we think of someone whose respect we value and consider how they would react—we will find a helpful reality check on our decision making. It’s a way of proactively creating a social context from which we may derive constructive “social proof” for our best instincts.⁷ And this is precisely what Foley did when she talked to her husband and respected colleagues at the hospital.

There are a couple of limitations to this test, however. First, people who take actions that violate their values rarely expect to get caught or to have their decision reported in the paper: this is the phenomenon research refers to as our tendency toward “overoptimism.”⁸ But second, and more to the point here, despite our proactive efforts to create a positive social context and network among family, friends, or trusted colleagues for identifying the right thing to do, we are also still strongly drawn to acceptance from the folks we rely on for our position, or with whom we spend the most time, or to whom we must defend our choice: in Foley’s case, her CEO, and in the context of her leadership program, her cohort.

And this acceptance—the perspectives that we hear or assume are prevalent from our professional colleagues—can have a very powerful impact on how we view our own decision to voice our values. Ironically, we may fear that a decision to voice our values—and therefore, not pursue an unethical but tempting course of action—will tag us as “naive” or “unwilling to make the difficult calls” or “not committed to the firm” or “not driven to succeed.” Sometimes it is precisely our act of values-based courage that can be labeled negatively by our peers and even raise doubts within ourselves. Even when we have carefully determined what we think the right thing to do may be, we can still find it difficult to act if we don’t have a story to tell about our choices with which we are comfortable.

Therefore, it can be important to find a way to frame this decision to voice our values—and a story about who we are—that we can feel comfortable with, not only in the Wall Street Journal or at home or among our support network, but also in the office and with those with whom we disagree. And in some ways, this self-story is a choice. So what are some useful ways to tell Foley’s story as something other than “naive”?

Often people will label a decision naive if they cannot imagine a way to act on it successfully. The fal-lacy here is the assumption that the limits of one’s own imagination are a true reflection of the available choice options. Generating and reflecting on all the times when we or others have acted on our values can counter this assumption.

Or, some may label a choice naive because they think the actor has not accepted the “reality” that values-based decision making is an indulgence that cannot coincide with business success. Foley’s story illustrates that this assumption is not always true. However, it is not always false either, and therefore it becomes important to consider one’s purpose and definition of success.

If we have defined our goals or purpose more narrowly than is optimal, as discussed in Chapter 5—short-term success rather than sustainable success, for example, or career success equated solely with financial success—voicing our values can seem naive or unrealistic. But if we craft a compelling story about our goals that allows for short-term trade-offs to attain or maintain longer-term or deeper values, we may counter, or at least weather, this label more comfortably.

Sometimes the individual who decides to act on his or her values is criticized as unwilling to make the difficult calls, or not committed to the firm, because other employees may see the action as disloyal. They may believe a decision to act on values hurts them or the firm, or it may activate their own guilt that they did not do likewise. Therefore, they try to isolate or punish the person for not participating in the “groupthink” and group action.⁹

One way of responding to such labeling is to craft a story about the choices that is also framed in terms of “loyalty,” but loyalty to a different vision of the group (such as to a group that is successful and honest), or one that tells of efforts to protect the group from a different set of threats or dangers (a deteriorating corporate culture instead of a slightly lower monthly bonus, for example). It is a way of positing a different group identity that folks can identify with if they choose. The main point here is that we don’t need to accept the labels if we do not choose to do so; we can define our own “story.”¹⁰

Foley found a story that worked for her. She chose to embrace a view of herself as unable to act in a way that was out of alignment with her convictions and to use that view to her advantage. Rather than seeing herself as weak, unrealistic, unsophisticated, or not tough enough—all possible ways to frame her responses—she chose to view herself as simply consistent and values-driven.

Some may read the preceding pages and ask: if it is possible to take control of the self-story we craft for our lives, wouldn’t it be possible to simply reframe our life narrative so that it justifies any decision we choose to make? And I would respond: yes. But the focus and the intent here is not to persuade folks to act on their values; rather, it is to suggest mechanisms and tools that, if we want to voice and enact our values, can help us do so. As Mary Catherine Bateson writes: “In the postmodern environment in which we live, it is easy to say that no version [of our lives] is fixed, no version is completely true. I want to push beyond that awareness and encourage you to think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context” [emphasis added].¹¹ If there is a “creative responsibility” in the self-story we create and tell, there can also be a source of creative potential, of empowerment, in that story that can fuel and support our values-based decisions. The invitation here is to use it.

CHAPTER SIX

Playing to My Strengths

SELF-KNOWLEDGE, SELF-IMAGE, AND ALIGNMENT