“The most difficult matter is not so much to change the world as yourself.” ~ Nelson Mandela It is amazing to me, that in this time where there are countless videos, seminars, workshops, books, and podcasts on how to be an extraordinary leader, we continue to hear story after story and see example after…
“Baseball (*Leadership) is like church. Many attend, but few understand.” ~ Leo Ernest Durocher When I was a kid, we spent hour after hour in our narrow driveway playing baseball. First base was the fence post, third base was the spigot, you get the picture… We didn’t use a regular baseball, we used using…
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” ~Lao Tzu These words spoken by the 6th Century Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu, really captures the heart of leadership for me. Unlike many of the current leaders of today…
“It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” ~J.K. Rowling One way to more powerfully influence others is to leverage your failures. People don’t realize the power of failure and…
“We all have needs, and we will find a way to get those needs met in either a healthy or an unhealthy way” ~ Joe Contrera Studies have shown that you can boil human behavior down into 4 basic categories. People are either driven by a need to be right, to be liked, to…
“Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that’s what makes you strong.” ~ Sarah Dessen Many years ago, Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company sponsored a show called The Wild Kingdom. It was a show hosted by Marlin Perkins along with his co-host, Jim Fowler. Each an every Sunday night they took…
“What others say and do is a projection of their own reality” ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz Projection is a defense mechanism where we take a part of us that we don’t like (i.e. our arrogant-self, selfish-self, or our untrusting-self, etc.) and project it onto someone else. For example, if we look at someone and…
“We all have blind-spots, but if we are willing to open our ears to feedback and our eyes to how others react to us, we can improve our impact as leaders ten-fold” ~Joe Contrera People always ask me, “What can I do to increase my impact as a leader?” That said, everyone has a…
“It sure did kick up some excitement in the Senate when one Senator called the other Senators ‘sons of Wild jackasses.’ Well, if you thought it made the Senators hot, you wait till you see what happens when the jackasses hear how they have been slandered.” ~Will Rogers I think it is fair to say…
“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.” ~ Bill Watterson Are you turning a blind eye to an issue in your business? What a leader chooses to see or more importantly, what not to see, can have a devastating impact on their business. Being aware of an issue and not taking…