Please don’t read this book. Or rather, please don’t only read it. You also need to do the work.
Reading Inner Leadership will bring you benefits, it is true, but you do not learn to swim by reading a book about swimming.
I have provided a set of key questions and tools, arranged in a developmental order that builds step by step. To get the full potential, you need to find your own answers to these questions and exercises, applying the tools to uncover your insights into your specific situation.
Inner Leadership comes with a free downloadable electronic workbook that you can use to do this. Or you can simply use pen and paper. A large format paperback workbook (US Letter size) is also available.
Remember that different tools will be useful to different people at different times. My aim is to provide a full set of tools across the whole spectrum, in the full knowledge that not every tool will be equally useful to everyone all the time. So as you work through the book you should expect to find that some are tools less useful to you than others. But each step builds towards what comes later, so I recommend you try out all the tools at least once, especially on your first pass. Spend less time on those that seem less useful for what you need today but remember that inner leadership is a repeating, circular process of continuous improvement across all seven competencies. What is less useful today may become more useful tomorrow, for you or for someone else you know.
A man once asked a stranger in the street, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The stranger thought for a moment and replied, “Practice, practice, practice.” The tools laid out in this book offer you the potential to lead yourself to wherever you want to get to. And the way to get to your equivalent of Carnegie Hall is by practicing those tools.
Adapted from Inner Leadership.
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