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Life’s Tough, YOU Can Be TOUGHER!


Apr 15, 2020

Dustin Plantholt’s “Life’s Tough—You Can Be Tougher” podcast this week features Stephen & Mara Klemich, founders of Heartstyles—a company that specializes in understanding human behaviors and developing strategies for individuals and organizations to alter their thinking towards making better decisions to achieve their goals quicker. Through its groundbreaking Heartstyles Indicator—an academically validated tool that measures a person’s character and behaviors—they build a Personal Development Guide, outlining the steps someone needs to take and optimize good behaviors to realize their goals. This transformative tool—now available in 25 languages—has positively impacted over 100,000 individuals around the world, from Russia to China and Romania to India, through different cultures, economies, and belief systems.

Stephen Klemich, CEO and co-founder of Heartstyles, is a longtime leadership consultant and speaker and has worked with teams across the globe, from small companies to multinational corporations such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Unilever, AMEX, and PwC. An avid mountain climber and guide who has summitted the Matterhorn, Mount Blanc, Mt Rosa, Eiger, Monch, Jungrfau, and peaks in the Himalayas and New Zealand, in 2019 Stephen climbed 6 peaks in the Italian Alps. He has always viewed mountaineering as an important part of his own character development journey, and has incorporated lessons he has learned in the mountains into many of the Heartstyles programs.

Mara Klemich, PhD, co-founder of Heartstyles, is a consulting psychologist, with degrees in clinical psychology and neuropsychology from the University of Sydney and the University of Paris. Her career began in hospital systems in those cities, and she spent more than ten years as a clinical neuropsychologist working in the areas of alcohol-related brain damage, neurology and neurosurgery, traumatic brain injuries, psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, eating disorders, pain management, and trauma counseling in emergency departments. She also practiced as a forensic neuropsychologist in the criminal system, working on some of the highest profile criminal cases in Australia.

“Have you ever wondered why you continue to make the same kinds of decisions over and over again, and with the same results? Have you ever regretted how you handled something, even though you knew what the proper response should have been? Have you ever had trouble getting through to someone, or felt misunderstood yourself?” In their pioneering book, released on January 7 of this year by HarperBusiness, Stephen & Mara Klemich detail the radical new approach they created to identifying what drives human behavior—why we do the things we do—and they have harnessed those principles into a new and unique approach geared towards steering away from self-limiting fear and ego-driven behaviors that hold us back, thus unlocking our true potential.

In ABOVE THE LINE: Living and Leading with Heart, they examine how the heart shapes our character, and they have identified four universal character principles—humility, love, pride and fear—which drive human behavior. For 30 years, Stephen and Mara have studied, coached, practiced and researched these four universal principles with the goal of helping people find the best versions of themselves in both their personal and professional life. The centerpiece of their approach is the Heartstyles Indicator that acts as a compass for life, steering us towards making better decisions using the above-the-line principles, while steering clear of undesirable, below-the-line behaviors:

Join Dustin, Stephen & Mara for a candid conversation on the behaviors that shape our everyday thinking and lives, and on their own personal journeys. “Every book on successful habits will tell you that we always have a choice in how we react or respond,” say Stephen & Mara. “We believe, though, that until you recognize why you do what you do, how the heart and the brain work together to shape your behavior, it will be hard to choose differently… and hope that our book will guide you through understanding the “why” and help point you toward discovering the answers to your own unique questions.”