so busy influencing results that they have little time for evolving their career. The only person whose job it is to evolve your career is you. In Chapter 9, you will learn about networking and interviewing. After driving results, when leaders come up for air, they realize that they do not have the appropriate skills to network effectively. Networking is the single biggest key to building your career because it is people who help you get promotions and new positions.
There is also a section on interviewing in Chapter 9. This might seem out of place in a leadership book, but being able to cut through the clutter and interview someone effectively (whether you are the interviewer or the interviewee) can ensure that you have the best people matched to the most important jobs in your organization.
Sustainability of strong leadership is the end goal to unleashing your Inner Leader. I call this determining and living your Leadership Legacy. Many of my successful clients came to me after a long (20-plus years) career, wanting more..wanting to follow their personal values and brand to still drive results, but in a more compassionate way. This is the time in their career that they want to build and live their Leadership Legacy. Chapter 10 will take the individuals from the case study in each chapter, which you will come to know, and extend their story to how they are currently living their Leadership Legacy.
Part Three of the Book
The book's Part Three is a huge departure from the first two, in that it is a grouping of inspirational and motivating stories. There is nothing like hearing how “someone else did it” to help motivate and move us forward. While writing this book, I asked my community to share what inspires them. I received a large number of responses, which told me that inspiration was important to all. The inspirational stories are divided into the following categories:
● Guiding Principles
● Letting Go of Me to Get to Us
● Reflecting on the Past to Grow into the Future
● When You Are the Inspiration
In each of these categories the individual provides his or her inspiration and then tells the story of what makes this inspiration so important to them. It is amazing to feel all the changes that others have gone through and see the results of how they have handled their specific circumstances. In all these inspirational stories, having a clear goal for your behavior and your work gives clarity to living your Leadership Legacy.
How to Read This Book
The way that you choose to read this book is, of course, up to you. If you want to read the whole book to get an overview and then go back and do the exercises, that is great. If you want to read it in spurts with the outcome of you immediately completing the exercises in each chapter, that is also a good strategy. The exercises will help you deploy the concepts and change your behavior within your leadership role. This is noted because the principles described in this book are about gaining unmistakable clarity about yourself to become a highly effective leader. I urge you not to gloss over the exercises but to truly commit to take the time to invest in yourself.
Another suggestion is to do the exercises with a friend, mentor, coach, or professional development group. A friend or mentor could be helpful while completing the self-knowledge exercises in Part One, because they know you well and could give you confirmation as you make self-discoveries. A coach or a professional development group could be helpful in discussing any of the techniques in Part Two with specific emphasis on changes in “process-oriented” personal interactions.
Change Model: Unleashing Your Inner Leader
Human behavior is one of the hardest things to change. Therefore, some of the exercises might be hard for you, because they are going to ask you to change. I tell the story of remodeling my kitchen. The trash container was moved five feet to the right of where it was previously. For more than a month, every time my husband and I went to throw something out, we literally went to the old spot. How ridiculous! My husband got furious with himself that he could not break such a simple habit. Yet, the research shows that you must consciously do something consistently for at least 30 days to build a new habit. Then, four months later, when I was especially stressed and went to throw something out, what did I do? You guessed it; I went to the “old” spot. The bottom line is that change is hard, and it takes a long time consistently implementing the new behavior for the change to become a constant.
I say this to encourage you to heartily embrace the changes discussed in the book and to understand that change is hard. Over the years I have built the following Change Model that I use for coaching, and it can also be used for any individual or organizational change (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Change Model: Unleashing Your Inner Leader
The first step is Awareness. Although the place where the awareness happens in each case study and chapter may be subtle, it will be found in every chapter of the book. As you read the case studies and concepts, begin thinking about your own life, and try to note how applicable this idea of awareness is for you. The exercises are designed to make this process easier and to ensure that you are very aware of the applicability of the leadership concept in your life. You might not be aware at first, and the exercises and case studies are designed to make you mindful of it.
The second step of Acceptance is much bigger than initially meets the eye. Say, for example, that you become aware that one of your underlying strengths is that you are extremely competitive. This is a great strength and should be used when right for the situation. You might have known this at some level before, but after doing the strengths exercises, you might find that this could actually be holding you back in certain instances. Accepting this fact may be difficult, and it is essential to you making a change to truly use your leadership powers and accept what you discover in the exercises.
The third step, Choice, might also be challenging for you. Earlier steps will show your awareness and personal commitment, which will in turn ensure your acceptance, but will you make the choice to change your competiveness? Are you truly ready to change that behavior by accepting that only by changing you will get to the next level of leadership? Congratulations to you when you make that choice. Then and only after you have gone through these first three steps will you be able to successfully make a lasting change in your leadership behavior.
The last step, Change, is the final goal. Once you have gone through the first three steps, you might think that change is easy, yet remember the moving of the trash can. Change takes lots of effort over time to really make it a part of you. By going through these first three steps, you can be clear that you have chosen the right change for you, and your change efforts will be highly rewarded.
About You
As you absorb case and client studies in the pages that follow, the exercises in the book will challenge you to recognize the opportunities to lead that you may have not recognized in the past. To that end, have you ever asked yourself something similar to one of these questions?
● Have I ever wanted to stand up and lead someone and did not?
● Have I ever left a meeting wondering why it was someone else who voiced the important point, when I was thinking the same thing all along?
● Have I ever been late in volunteering for a lead role, only to have it given to someone else?
● Have I ever been in the position to take a calculated risk and at the last minute decided against the move?
● Have I ever wanted to be a better leader and not known where to start?
If any of these situations resonate with you, then I would ask you the following questions: What made you hesitate? What got in your way?
As my years of coaching more than 4,000 business professionals in 17 countries shows, the answers have been as varied as the individuals and the industries that they work in. However, the resulting concept is always similar; everyone has a leader within him or her, and with some