Today Kelly is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author, and business consultant. His books have been published in more than twenty-five languages, have appeared on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller lists, and have sold more than twenty-five million copies.

He is the founder and owner of Floyd Consulting, a corporate consulting firm that specializes in increasing employee engagement. Floyd offers a number of training experiences for businesses of all sizes along with a variety of coaching opportunities.

Kelly is also the founder of Dynamic Catholic, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit organization that is redefining the way Catholics are inspired and educated. Dynamic Catholic’s mission is to re-energize the Catholic Church in America.

In a time when traditional publishing is in transition and turmoil, he is also passionate about giving other authors a chance to pursue their dreams. He accomplishes this as the founder and CEO of Beacon Publishing.

His personal interests include golf, piano, literature, spirituality, and spending time with his family and friends.

We know this best when things stop working. It is amazing how a phone or computer that stops working can turn our lives upside down. We have a habit of appreciating things most when they are gone. When I was really sick, I resolved that I would never take my health for granted again, but of course I do.

And we have this great expectation that things will just work. Sure, there are things that are broken in our country and culture, but even the broken stuff works pretty well. Are health care and education broken? Absolutely, but let’s not take for granted the incredible good these systems are doing despite their brokenness. Is our political system in need of a good overhaul? Probably, but we still have remarkable order considering how broken it all seems at this time.

Visit any not so advanced country and you will very quickly realize that there are lots of places in this world where a great many things just don’t work. You will most likely leave wondering: How do people live in these places?

Perhaps that is why I have a bias toward the practical, a massive bias toward things that actually work. The point is: I like things that work. I love things that work.

People often ask me questions about the Rosary. Do you pray the Rosary? Why? How often? Did you pray it as a child with your family? Does the Rosary really matter? How much? Do Catholics worship Mary? Why do we pray to her?

How many things can you do that will achieve what I just described? Go back and read that short paragraph one more time. When I say “rare and beautiful,” I am not just using words. I very much mean what I say. And it has been my experience that the only people who do not value that kind of peace are those who have never tasted it. If that is you, I am so excited for you. The Rosary is going to change your life.

But here is my challenge: Don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Develop a habit of praying the Rosary.

I don’t expect that you will pray the Rosary once and say to yourself, “Matthew was absolutely right. Praying the Rosary really works. My heart and mind are settled. Everything is in perspective now! I can see clearly what matters most and what matters least. My soul is at ease, and I have this untouchable deep and abiding peace.”

No, it requires a habit. It may be something you pray every Wednesday night. That’s how I got started. It may be something you pray on the first Saturday of each month. It may be something you feel called to do every day. We will speak about how often to pray the Rosary, and the seasons of our spiritual lives, a little later. All I want to establish here is that to really experience the tremendous fruits of the Rosary, it has been my experience that you need to establish it as a spiritual habit in your life.

We live hectic lives in a chaotic world. All this can lead to a confusion that fogs the mind, unsettles the soul, and leads to poor decisions. Amid all this chaos and confusion, our souls yearn for peace and clarity. Are you at peace? I’m not. Right now, sitting here writing these lines, but also in my life at the moment, I don’t have that peace. I’ve had a bad day. We all do from time to time. It’s been a rough week. The wheels just seem to have fallen off in three or four situations, all at the same time. And it’s been a long month. I had to add a couple of trips unexpectedly to my schedule, my wife is seven months pregnant, one of my businesses is in transition, Dynamic Catholic continues to explode in a fabulous way but there are challenges with that, I haven’t been exercising, and I catch myself cutting corners in my prayer life.

So, no, I am not really at peace right at the moment. I have fallen into what seems to be a perennial problem for me: overcommitment. When life gets like this I know that some of the things I am busying myself with God doesn’t want me doing. Each time it happens I have to humble myself and go back and say to God, “Tell me again what you want me doing right now.” This is always a good time to pray the Rosary and allow God to fill me again with peace and clarity.

Most people think they are better at listening to others than they are. Research suggests that the average person listens with only 25 percent efficiency. That’s a lot we are missing. If I’m an average listener, that means I miss 75 percent of what my wife tells me. It’s astounding, really. If you have an adult child and you are an average listener, over the course of a lifetime you’ve missed three-quarters of what your son or daughter has been trying to say to you. Even if you are twice as good at listening than the average listener, you’ve still missed half of what your child has been trying to share with you. No wonder we have misunderstandings and disagreements.

If you want to be a better listener, I could tell you: Be empathetic, eliminate distractions so that you are present, remember that you are not perfect, ask questions to gain further insight, don’t run from being uncomfortable, don’t change the subject, try not to be judgmental, don’t interrupt, and pause before responding. But what it all comes down to is getting out of your own way.

Why are most people such poor listeners? What is the key to becoming a great listener? The answers to both of these questions are linked.

We get in the way. We think about ourselves, rather than thinking about the person speaking. We get absorbed in how what is being said relates to us, rather than trying to work out how it relates to the person we are listening to. When we are preoccupied with ourselves, we cannot hear what others are trying to say to us. When we are able to set our own needs aside and focus on the other person, our listening skills increase exponentially.

Listening to others is difficult; listening to God is even harder. Many things get in the way of hearing other people, and many things get in the way of hearing God. Our thoughts, feelings, experiences, fears, and ambitions all create noise and distractions that can prevent us from hearing the voice of God clearly in our lives.

Every spiritual exercise is designed to help us hear the voice of God more clearly. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Rosary helps us hear God’s voice with greater clarity. But in order to hear the voice of God clearly, we need to allow him to bring a new order to our lives. God loves order.

We may live hectic lives in a chaotic and confusing world, but we still yearn for peace and order. There is a natural order to things, and it is in that order that we find peace. Our lives can become disordered very easily. Our ancient Catholic spirituality is constantly inviting us to establish the deep roots of order in our lives.

When I walk into Mass on Sunday, I know God is going to try to rearrange my priorities. The question is, will I let him? Every Sunday when I listen to the Gospel, I realize, “I have to change my life,” or “I am still a long way from the person God wants me to be,” or “There is still a lot of work for me to do.” What I have realized over time is that God is constantly trying to rearrange our priorities.

When you fall in love with someone, your priorities change. Love rearranges our priorities. How much do you love? One way to measure that is by exploring how willing you are to rearrange your priorities. God wants to rearrange our priorities and put things in order. If we let him do this, we will be happier than we ever thought possible in this lifetime, and finally then we will come to know the peace that all men and women yearn for, but that so few ever really find.

But God will not force these priorities upon us. He invites us to choose them. So much of life comes down to the decisions we make. Since I spent five years of my life working on DECISION POINT: The Dynamic Catholic Confirmation Experience, decision making has been one of the central themes in my presentations. I am absolutely convinced that God wants us to become phenomenal decision makers. It is an essential life skill that greatly increases our chances of having a vibrant spiritual life and living an authentic life. Life is choices; we are constantly making them. Our lives are a collection of our choices and decisions.

I am equally convinced that it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of listening as a life skill and a spiritual discipline. A few weeks ago, a high school student asked me, “If you were me, what two skills would you work on improving?” I responded, “Decision making and listening.” These two skills intersect with every single aspect of daily life.

The Rosary will focus you. It will calm your heart, mind, and spirit so you can hear the voice of God. It will open your heart so you can recognize him at work in your life. It will lead you to make better decisions, become a better listener, and get clear about what matters most and what matters least, and it will fill your life with peace and order.

In my upcoming book Rediscover the Saints, I write about how the saints have always been with us, around us at every time in our lives. Whether we recognized them or not, they were there. In the same way, I think the Rosary has always been with us and around us. You may have seen your grandmother praying it when you were a child, or you may have noticed that a friend’s father had the beads hanging from the rearview mirror in his car. Maybe you prayed the Rosary with your family growing up, and maybe you saw it used as a necklace by a movie star or in a taxi. It was there.

I don’t know if my journey with the Rosary has been more interesting or less interesting than anyone else’s. My parents raised me as a Catholic, but we never prayed the Rosary together as a family. I have a very strong memory of my fourth-grade teacher giving every student in the class a rosary, and telling us a story about the powerful role it had played in her life. I don’t remember the details, but I know I was moved, and thirty years later, I still have that rosary.

My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Greck, used to pray the Rosary every day in the chapel during lunchtime. Every morning we would hear the announcement, “The Rosary will be prayed in the school chapel at 1:00 p.m. today. All are welcome.” Every day he would personally invite the class to come. Nobody would go. Sometimes if you got detention, he would make you go. It was open to the whole school—twelve hundred boys, all the teachers, and the administration staff. There were usually only five or six people there. I know because I got detention a few times. Mr. Greck was a bit different. We didn’t understand him at the time because he had different priorities. He wanted to prepare us to be men living for God in the world, but we wouldn’t listen.

Many years later I asked him why he had prayed the Rosary every day and invited the whole school to come for years and years, and kept doing it even though nobody really came. He told me a story about his son, who had been very sick as a child. He begged God to heal him. He begged Mary to ask God to heal him. He took his son to Lourdes and begged for his healing, and his son was healed. Cured. Illness gone. Miraculous, incredible. Unbelievable stuff. He told me he was just saying thank you. The older I get, the more I think that my fifth-grade teacher, John Xavier Greck, might have been a saint.

It wasn’t until I was about fifteen that I ever prayed the Rosary in earnest. Around that time I was in a youth group at our parish, and we went on a retreat and prayed the Rosary. Like most teenagers, I was restless during that time in my life. But praying the Rosary had a peaceful impact on me. I vividly remember being surprised by that at the time.

A few months later one of my best friends invited me to a prayer group. I had never heard of a prayer group. But he was a very good friend of mine, so as often happens, friendship became the bridge toward the next stage of my spiritual growth. The prayer group met every Wednesday night, praying the Rosary, reading from the Bible, and discussing the reading. I went the first time because I didn’t really want to say no to my friend. I went the second time because I discovered a girl I really liked was in the prayer group. God will use whatever he has to use to get our attention.

I don’t know how it happened, or even exactly when it happened, but it was around that time that I started praying the Rosary every day on my own. Looking back it is baffling to me. When I think about the average fifteen-year-old, and who I was as a teenager, I simply have no explanation for how this came about and continued. But it did.

By the time I first started traveling and speaking, in the early 1990s, I was nineteen, and I was praying three Rosaries a day—all fifteen mysteries. (The Luminous Mysteries did not come about until 2002.) In some ways it was a wonderful period in my life. All I did, really, was read, write, pray, and speak. It was a time of intense silence, solitude, and reflection.

I have been speaking and writing for twenty-five years now. Doesn’t life go by in the blink of an eye? People often say to me, “I loved your first book.” I ask, “What did you like about it?” It very quickly becomes clear that they are not talking about my first book. Many people think my first book was A Call to Joy, because it was the first to be published by a major publisher. Even more believe that my first book was The Rhythm of Life, because it was my first certified best seller. My first book was actually a small one, Prayer & the Rosary. How did a nineteen-year-old sit down and write a book about prayer? I don’t know. And why? I don’t know. After twenty-five years I have stopped trying to understand it all. Acceptance is more peaceful.

When I am tempted to set the Rosary aside, I am always reminded that many of the people I would like to be more like in this world pray it. So many of the saints and the ordinary people who have nourished my spiritual life are faithfully devoted to it.

There is just something about the Rosary. It’s a very powerful way to pray. In some ways I can explain it, and I have tried to the best of my ability in these pages. In other ways I cannot explain it; there is a certain mystery to it that each person has to experience for himself or herself.

It just works. When I pray the Rosary, I am a better person. It makes me a better son, brother, husband, father, employer, neighbor, citizen, and a better member of the human family. It brings an incredible peace; it teaches us to slow down, calm down, let go, surrender, and listen. The Rosary teaches us how to just be, and that is not a small or insignificant lesson. In some ways it is the perfect prayer for busy people in a busy, noisy, confused world.

I suspect that if we are to reconcile the great disharmony that exists between the role of men and the role of women in modern society, we will need the insight and wisdom of this great feminine role model. Is it possible for us to understand the dignity, value, mystery, and wonder of women without first understanding this woman?

At the same time, despite her fame and people’s fascination with her, Mary has largely been rejected as a role model for women in the modern age. In fact, she has been rejected on an industrial scale as a model for anything. What does that say about our times? Are we confused? Do we value different things than other people in other times? Do we value the wrong things? And if so, what are we willing to do about it?

Beyond her fame and personal attributes, Mary’s historical importance and significance as a feminine role model is her centrality to Christian life. The first Christians gathered around her for comfort and guidance, yet many modern Catholics treat her as though she has some contagious disease. And of course, our non-Catholic Christian brothers and sisters generally minimize Mary’s role and importance. One of the great challenges we face as modern Catholics is to find a genuine place for her in our spirituality.

When my wife gave birth to our first child, Walter, it transformed my spirituality in unexpected ways. Being a father for the first time filled me with so many new spiritual insights. Today I am blessed with five wonderful children, each unique and special in his or her own way. I love my children so much, and if I can love them so much, with all my brokenness and all my limitations, how much more God must love me? Through my children I have experienced the love of God in a whole new way.

I yearn to be with my children. When I am on the road, or even at the office for the day, I long to get home and hold them, play with them, be with them. It strikes me that perhaps above everything else, God just yearns to be with us.

The birth of my children has renewed and heightened my relationship with Mary. It has occurred to me many times that no matter how much I love my children, my wife will always have a unique perspective on their lives. It doesn’t mean that she loves them more, or that I love them less. It just means that a mother sees her child’s life in a way that nobody else can. If I don’t take time occasionally to ask her about this motherly perspective, I unnecessarily miss a part of my children’s lives.

A mother has a unique perspective. Nobody sees the life of a child the way that child’s mother does—not even the father. This is Mary’s perspective of Jesus’ life. She has a unique perspective. It seems to me that every genuine Christian, not just Catholics, should be interested in that perspective—and not just interested, but fascinated. In the Rosary we ponder the life of Jesus through the eyes of his mother. This is an incredibly powerful experience if we enter into it fully.

This is in large part the result of the relentless questioning of Mary’s place in Christian spirituality by non-Catholic Christians. The question they have been posing over and over for five hundred years is: Why do Catholics worship Mary?

Why haven’t we answered this question once and for all for the whole world? It’s astounding when you step back and think about the damage this one question has done to the faith of millions of Catholics and to the Church as a whole. The answer is that we have become hypnotized by complexity. The Catholic faith is so rich and deep and broad that the average Catholic struggles to know what matters most or even where to start. People need simple starting points.

Why do Catholics worship Mary? Even the way the question is formulated assumes that what they are questioning is an accepted fact. It is not a question seeking truth or understanding; it is a question that seeks to trap. The question starts out with the assumption that Catholics worship Mary. It doesn’t start out with truth-seeking curiosity, asking, “Do Catholics worship Mary?”

Anytime you are being attacked with questions, the first rule is always: Don’t accept the premise of the question.

This constant questioning for five hundred years, which began with the Protestant Reformation and has been carried on by modern evangelical Christianity, has played a role in slowly but surely eroding the faith of Catholics.

We are now at the point where most modern Catholics don’t have a dynamic relationship with Mary, are generally uncomfortable or suspicious of the role she plays in Catholic liturgy and spirituality, and look down on the Rosary as something from another place and time that has no relevance in their complex modern lives.

For hundreds of years, our non-Catholic Christian brothers and sisters have been accusing us of worshipping Mary (and the saints), and I don’t think we have done a good job of settling this question. It is fascinating, disturbing, and tragic that we have failed to articulate and widely circulate a short, compelling answer to the question. This single failure has altered the history of modern Catholicism, by sowing faith-eroding doubts. We should have equipped every Catholic on the planet with an answer to the question: Do Catholics worship Mary?

No. We pray to Mary, but not in the same way we pray to God—and not to worship her as a deity.

Think of it in this way: If you got sick and asked me to pray for you, I would. This does not make me uniquely Catholic, or even uniquely Christian. There are many non-Christians who believe in the power of prayer. If I ask my non-Catholic Christian friends whether they pray for their spouses or their children, they will all say yes. If I ask them to pray for me, they will say yes.

Our relationship with Mary operates under this same principle. We believe that Mary and the saints are dead to this world, but we also believe they live on with God for eternity in the next world. And we believe that their prayers are just as powerful now that they are in heaven—even more powerful—than they were when they were here on earth. We are essentially saying to them, “We have problems down here. You know what it is like, because you have been here. Please, pray for us!”

Our non-Catholic Christian friends don’t believe people can still pray in the afterlife. We do. Our spiritual universe is bigger than theirs. In fact, one of the most incredible things about our Catholic faith is the vastness of our spiritual universe.

We could, of course, dive much deeper into the question, but the average Catholic needs an answer he or she can remember and articulate when questioned. We need this answer to protect our own faith from doubts creeping in, but we also need it so we can defend our faith against errors, have confidence in our Catholicism, and speak boldly about this common objection.

Devotion to Mary is a legitimate part of Christian spirituality. It is also an authentic path to God and heroic virtue.