Agreement 7 - Assist Others in Showing Up
I water the flowers, not the weeds. I speak to the possibilities, not the disappointments.
“Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.” — Stephen Covey
In Agreement 2, we talked about choosing to see the possibility of love and goodness in the people around us—trusting that it’s there, even when we can’t quite find it yet.
Agreement 7 takes that a step further. It’s not just about sensing the possibility of love. It’s about actively seeing someone’s excellence—their gifts, their potential, their real self—even before those things have fully surfaced. Even when the person is still hiding.
This is the Johnny Lingo move. And it turns out, you don’t have to be Johnny Lingo to make it. You just have to be willing to see people the way they actually are—underneath the fear, underneath the compromise, underneath whatever version of themselves they’ve been performing.
My senior year of high school, I made an impulsive decision: I signed up for drama. I had no idea what I was doing. Reading out loud in front of people. Trying to convincingly be someone else. It was terrifying.
The drama department put on a variety show every year, and I nervously auditioned for a couple of small skits. They went well enough that I started to feel, cautiously, like maybe I belonged there.
Our teacher was a woman named Mrs. Davies—one of those rare souls who seemed to be powered by genuine belief in other people. When a student showed even a spark of raw talent, she would actually weep. Not theatrically. Just… moved. It was remarkable to be in a room with someone who cared that much about what you might become.
One day after class, she pulled me aside. She told me that the big event for the year for the drama department was the variety show coming up in about a month. She told me that the key to the whole show was the emcee—the person who holds the night together—and that she wanted me to do it.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Davies,” I said. “I really don’t think I have the experience to pull that off.” Everyone else in that class had been in drama for years. I was a first-timer.
She looked at me with the kind of certainty that doesn’t leave room for argument. “I know you can do this,” she said. “You were made for this.”
I ended up doing three skits that night and emceeing the whole show. By the end of the evening, all I had to do was walk out onto the stage and the audience would start laughing in anticipation.
Mrs. Davies had seen something in me that I’d been keeping hidden—partly out of habit, partly because I’d gotten used to playing small, and partly because I wasn’t sure I could handle being fully seen and then rejected. Sound familiar, Mahana?
She held up a mirror and showed me who I actually was. And because she believed it so completely, something in me started to believe it too.
Here’s the thing about Mrs. Davies: she’s not here anymore. She’s been gone from this realm for a while. And the truth is, most of us never had a Mrs. Davies. But everyone needs one! Every husband, every wife, every child, every employee, every friend—everyone needs a Johnny Lingo. Everyone needs someone to be that mirror and say, "I see who you really are, and it’s extraordinary!"
So where do you find Johnny Lingo?