Amy Bloch - The Power of Heart: When and How to Get Out of Your Brain

The secret to a good and meaningful life is not what you think.

Literally. The good life comes from more than thinking, more than smarts, more than brainpower. No matter how devoted we are to the idea that the secret to getting ahead is thinking your way there, the truth is that the happiest and most fulfilled people I know add something else equally powerful to the mix. Luckily, that something is something we all havebut that a lot of us are out of touch with.

If youre like me, youve spent a lot of time proceeding as if you were going to handle everything by the hard work of your brain, powering through all challenges and opportunities that way, finding your success that way. And, if youre like me, that has brought successes. Maybe youve also found, as I have, that relying on brain this way can also come with a side of exhausting and paralyzing overanalysis, worry, insecurity, and indecision. Or, the opposite, leaping before you look, convinced of your rightness without seeing all the angles. You might have noticed the same things I have about how you can get mired in problems without ever getting similarly stuck on positives. Or, how much competition you engage in, with yourself and others, where even when you win there is a lot of stress, fear, and loneliness created that outweighs the benefit.

Its an overwrought life, with so much brain without any of the complementary force this book is about: heart. Its the combination of heart with brain that provides the key to a good and meaningful life.

Heart is the name Ive given to the collection of superpowers I first observed in my daughter Emily. Emily is an unlikely teacher for me, and Im the last person youd predict to be delivering a message emphasizing heart more than brain, as youll see. But understanding heart has changed my life, so here I am. Everything I need to know about success, happiness, and a life of meaning and purpose I learned from a girl who cant make change for a dollar, tie her shoes, or read this book. I learned more this way than I ever learned from my academic experience, training as a psychiatrist, or from any self-improvement campaign I ever tried.

Heart came into my life in a form in which it commonly first appears: profound heartbreak. To become aware of heart, I had to exhaust everything else in me, everything I knew. I had to reach desperation. When I felt heart, it was because I felt it had shattered and was beyond repairwhen I thought my life was ruined and I was beyond repair.

Over the last twenty years, Ive come to understand much more about heart and its immense power. To my surprise, the manifestation of heart that essentially saved my lifeheart showing up at a crisis pointis not even the only powerful or useful part of heart. As valuable is the way we can call on heart intentionally, if we know how. When we do, we uncork the secret to happiness and success, and to achievement, love, connection, purpose, and meaning. The secrets to a good life.

Of course, Im not talking about the physical, anatomical organs brain and heart, for most of this book, but using the terms metaphorically to describe patterns of how we think and behave and understand the world. Both heart and brain as I am using them would trace to the actual brain. If it helps you to think of it this way, heart is a metaphor for undervalued and underused brain capabilities. For myself, I define this kind of heart as simply as possible: heart is what Emily does.

In my hardest, darkest moments and months, heart was there. But heartbreak was not. Heart was not broken, not by a long shot. I know now this heart cant be broken. It is heart that steps forth when everything else fails, to pick us up and get things done and move us forward and keep us going. Evenespeciallywhen all that seems impossible. Thats how heart eventually pulled me through the most harrowing part of my life. Heart is good in a crisis.

Since then, Ive learned to find my way to heart even when Im not in dire straits. The more I accessed heart intentionally, the more I came to understand just how much heart can do. The true power of heart is revealed in ordinary, everyday moments, like the millions of times things are not going my way and I need more motivation, courage, patience, and/or confidence, to name just a few.

This realization created radical change in every aspect of my life. Id gone through most of my life with my standard operating procedure being about as opposite from heart as you can get. I led with my brain. And I found a lot of success that way. Enough so that I never really even considered there was any other way to be.

Then life proved to me that there was in fact another way. That there had to be another way, because my way eventually ran into a brick wall. The shocking thing was that this other way, the way of heart, did operating by brain alone one better. Adding the force of heart to my repertoire, using it in tandem with brain, felt like discovering and unleashing a personal superpower. Together, heart and brain allowed me a broader range of responses to a situation.