Twice a year the John Maxwell Team hosts an event to certify coaches, teachers, and speakers, and I always speak as part of that process. Over the years, I’ve taught on a lot of different subjects, depending on what I’m learning at the time. But there’s one session that I always teach to every group, and I will continue teaching it no matter what: a session on values. Why do I do that? Because our values determine our character, and our character determines the direction we will go in life. I want the certified coaches who carry my name to demonstrate good character and go in a positive direction.
At nearly seventy years old, I’m finding that my values are probably deeper and stronger than they have ever been in my life. I rely less and less on beliefs, which I seem to have fewer of as I age. What’s the difference? Values don’t change, but beliefs do—all the time. Every time you learn something new, your beliefs adjust. In my lifetime I’ve let go of dozens and dozens of beliefs that I once possessed just because I learned more or experienced more.
For example, when I was in my twenties, I strongly believed that environment was the most important factor in the upbringing of a child. I was certain that DNA was less important. Then Margaret and I adopted two children: Elizabeth and then Joel. It didn’t take long for us to recognize the strength of genetics. I looked at the children of my brother, Larry, and my sister, Trish, and I could tell exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. They were Maxwell through and through. But when I watched Elizabeth and Joel, I often couldn’t tell why they were doing what they were doing. And I learned that certain traits and behaviors were hardwired into them, and nothing Margaret and I did would alter them.
Both of our children are now in their thirties, married, and successful. They have children of their own. And Margaret and I no longer believe that environment is the main factor in parenting. That’s a belief we let go of due to our life experience.
Today I am far less interested in certainty about many things and much more interested in clarity about the few things that matter. And though I am certain about fewer things, I have more clarity than I have ever had before in my life. The things that are crystal clear are my values.
Why do I put so much emphasis on values? Because values create the foundation of character, and character provides the foundation for success.
In the previous chapter, I talked about how responsibility isn’t a very exciting or sexy word. Neither is character. The idea of building character isn’t flashy or exciting. It’s not something we regularly add to our list of annual goals. But the results of developing character are life-changing. It’s one of only two or three things I can think of that are most important in life.
Here’s why character is so important, and why you should make the choices needed to develop your character capacity:
Stephen R. Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said, “As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people’s opinions or by comparisons to others.”1 What Covey’s describing is good character being formed by choices based on values.
Every day you either grow your good character or shrink it. When you choose to do the right thing based on a positive value, your character expands. With each right choice, you develop the strength to make other right choices, and more difficult right choices. In contrast, every time you choose to cut corners, compromise on your values, or turn your back on what you know to be right, it shrinks your character. The smaller and weaker it gets, the more difficult it is to make another right choice.
Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, used to say that your commitment to get better needs to be more important than your commitment to get bigger. He was speaking in the context of business, and that’s quite a statement, considering that the restaurant chain he created was worth more than $4.5 billion before he died.2 But his point was accurate: we should always focus more on choices that impact who we are on the inside.
What are you focused on day to day? Making your work more lucrative? Making your company bigger? Rising up in your organization? Or making your character better, deeper, stronger? The choices you make every day make you.
For several years, I had the privilege of being mentored by legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. He once said, “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
Who we are inside is much more important than how others see us. Abraham Lincoln said, “Character was like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree was the real thing.” Character represents who you really are on the inside: the moral and mental qualities that make you you. And that is what speaks to people. It speaks more loudly than your words or the words others say about you. Your character represents you to the world.
Recently I had dinner with my friend Linda Kaplan Thaler, the advertising executive who invented the AFLAC duck. Linda told me a story about her son, Michael, who is a highly skilled chess player. When he was six years old, he was competing in the finals of a national chess championship, and his opponent made the winning move, but he didn’t hit his clock, which was required for the move to count.
Michael looked at his opponent, and said, “You didn’t hit your clock.” The opponent hit the clock, and Michael lost the match.
Afterward, Linda said, “Michael, if you hadn’t told him to hit the clock, you could have won.”
Michael looked at her and replied, “Oh, Mom. That’s not winning.”
Michael might have lost the match that day, but his character is going to win him many more important things in the future.
When a person has good character, he or she has it in every area of life consistently, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the setting, and regardless of the context.
More than a decade ago, I went to dinner with Laurence J. Kirshbaum in New York City. At that time, he was the chairman and CEO of the Time Warner Book Group. During our conversation, he pitched an idea to me.
“John, I’ve been wanting one of our authors to write a book on a particular subject, and I think you would be the perfect person to do it. What would you think about writing a book on business ethics?”
“There’s no such thing,” I answered.
“What?” he asked. I could tell that wasn’t the response he expected. “What do you mean?”
I explained, “There’s no such thing as business ethics—there’s only ethics. People try to use one set of ethics for their professional life, another for their spiritual life, and still another at home with their family. That gets them into trouble. Ethics is ethics. If you desire to be ethical, you live it by one standard across the board.”
Good character uses the same standard in every situation. If something is right, it’s always right. If it’s wrong, it’s always wrong. People with good character are consistent. People who try to use multiple standards with different people and in different situations live fragmented lives.
When a person lives a fragmented life, people never know what to expect from them. They don’t know how the person will act in any given situation. In contract, a person of good character who lives by the same consistent standard invites trust. People know what they’re going to get. They know the person’s words and actions will line up. They can rely on that person and what he or she says.
Whenever you make a commitment to another person, you create hope. When you keep that commitment, you create trust. Good character helps you to follow through on that commitment and develop that trust. Why is that important? As mentioned in the chapter on people capacity, all relationships are built on trust. So by increasing character capacity, you build the trust needed to increase people capacity. That not only improves the quality of your life, but it also improves the qualities of your professional relationships, including your ability as a leader. Where trust is absent, leadership falters.
I once read a story about two men in their seventies named John and George. They had been friends since their high school days, but they both held strong opinions and were stubborn. As a result, they argued all the time and often went for weeks without speaking to one another.
One day after an especially heated argument over some trivial matter, they exchanged unkind words and went their separate ways. And they didn’t speak to each other for months.
But then George became critically ill. He summoned John to his hospital bed, saying that he wanted to heal their relationship before he died. He took John’s hand in his and whispered, “John, I forgive you. Will you forgive me?”
John was deeply moved by his friend’s final gesture, but before he could reply, George confided, “I have just one more thing: if I get well and don’t die after all, this doesn’t count!”
The story may be silly, but it reveals an important truth. Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it. It takes a person of good character to forgive and extend grace to another person. As Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
When you have good character, difficulty only makes you more determined. When your character is weak, difficulty makes you discouraged. What are you doing to build good character every day? Are you making right choices based on your values? Every time you do, it makes you stronger. Work on your character now. When the storm comes, it’s too late to prepare.
Most people want to treat others the way they’ve been treated. It’s human nature. I once heard a well-known businessman say, “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades” and “Go for the jugular so that people watching will not want to mess with you.” That’s not the way I want to live. I don’t want to treat others worse than they treat me. I want to treat others better than they treat me. I want to always take the high road, and I want to encourage you to do the same.
I learned this from my father, who modeled it every day. When he was the president of Ohio Christian University in the 1960s, I thought the university’s board didn’t treat him with the respect and consideration he had earned and deserved. But he never retaliated or said anything negative about them.
I remember a time when someone interviewed Dad and asked his opinion about a man who had been particularly nasty to him. When Dad said only nice things about the man, the interviewer proceeded to recount all the terrible things the man had said about Dad. My dad’s reply? “You didn’t ask me what he thought of me. You asked me what I thought of him.”
Taking the low road is easy. It doesn’t take any character at all. Low-road people…
• Seek revenge and retaliation when wronged,
• Play the same game that others do,
• Are guided by emotions that constantly go up and down,
• Are reactive, and
• Live no better than anyone else does.
High-road people are totally different. They…
• Extend unconditional love and forgiveness,
• Refuse to play games with people,
• Are guided by good character based on values,
• Are proactive, and
• Live exceptional lives.
I admit that I don’t always take the high road with everybody. But I try to. I work at it. When someone treats me poorly, I try to remember that it’s a reflection on them, not on me. When someone takes advantage of me, I try to remember that it’s the price one has to pay for letting others get close to them. When someone criticizes me, I try to remember that is the price of leadership.
I hope you’ll take a similar path. Sometimes you will be hurt. You will be treated unfairly. People will take advantage of you. But wouldn’t you rather make the world a better place and help other people?
Salesman and author Elmer G. Leterman said, “Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.” Why is that? Because character delivers. People with good character do what they say they’ll do. They follow through. People can depend on them.
When you say you’ll do something, do you follow through? Are you known as someone who delivers? Or do others sometimes worry that you may give up or not show up? Booker T. Washington said, “Character is power.” Make the most of it.
Scientist Marie Curie observed, “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity.” If you want to build your character, you need to try to align four things: your values, your thinking, your feelings, and your actions. If your values are good and you make the other three things consistent with them, there’s almost nothing you can’t improve in your life.
I recently learned about a fantastic example of what happens when people embrace good character and make a conscious choice to increase their character capacity. It happened in Guatemala. Back in 2013, my organizations worked together to pilot the roundtable training initiative that I told you about in chapter 9 on leadership capacity. In Guatemala City, we trained facilitators to lead a curriculum of thirty roundtables. Half of the roundtables were about personal growth. The other half were about developing character based on values, such as responsibility, humility, dependability, generosity, ethics, forgiveness, honesty, and hard work. We trained several thousand people in June, and they started leading roundtables immediately across the country. Now I believe more than two hundred thousand people have gone through roundtables.
By the end of 2013, we started hearing about the positive impact that character development was having on the country. For example, we learned that the second largest bank in Guatemala, which had asked about five thousand of their employees to go through the roundtables, was having its best year financially. And guess when the ramp-up began? In June, when their employees began learning about character. Their people’s increase in character capacity was having a direct impact on the company’s business capacity.
An even bigger story out of Guatemala was about the peaceful protests the people staged against the corruption in government. In September 2015, the people’s protests prompted the ousting of president Otto Pérez Molina for corruption. Soon afterward, an outsider candidate named Jimmy Morales, whose slogan was “neither corrupt nor a thief,” was elected as president.
Is there direct evidence to connect the peaceful protests to the character development we introduced in Guatemala? Not that I know of. But I can tell you this: Thelma Aldana, the attorney general of Guatemala, who led the corruption investigation that started the removal of the president, vice president, and others, had gone through the roundtables along with other judicial workers before being appointed to her post in 2014. Maybe the actions she took during those thirty weeks helped in some small way to inspire her.
Are you willing to do the mundane work of increasing your character capacity? It probably won’t receive any fanfare. You may in fact be the only person who’ll ever know what steps you’ve taken to grow in this area. But I guarantee that you will see positive results and live a better life.
1. Have you ever identified and defined your values and put them into writing? If not, do so now. If so, review them. Are they the same?
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself on consistency when it comes to acting on your values through character choices? If you didn’t give yourself a 10 (and who does?), what should you start doing differently to raise your score?
3. When dealing with others, do you most often take the low road, the middle road, or the high road? Why do you respond the way you do? What can you do to become more of a high-road person?