Developing The Leader Within You

You know its funny how some things happen. How one thing leads to another. How something small can turn into something bigger…

Something Small: I think it was a little less than three months ago when I posted on WeRead that I was reading a book at the time, called “The 21 Irrefutable Laws Of Leadership” by John C. Maxwell…

Something Bigger: Jana from LoudSpeakers noticed my post and thought of another book she had read for him, called “Developing the Leader Within You”. She told me that a while back, at Speakers & Leaders, they had formed a discussion group for his workbook and so she asked if I was interested in forming one here at LoudSpeakers. I thought the idea was good and so we gathered a group of five other interested members and we ordered copies of the workbook from Librarie Antoine…

Today, an hour before our Toastmasters Meeting, we had our first session. What I loved about the workbook is that it’s divided into 10 Weeks, and each Week is divided into 5 Days, and each Day teaches you a lesson. This first week’s lesson talked about “The Five Levels Of Leadership” which I learned were: Position, Permission, Production, People Development, and Personhood. At the end of each Chapter/Week, there are a bunch of discussion questions which we talk about and we think of answers to ideas which we discuss next week…

I think one of the most important lessons I learned from Week 1, is that in one word, Leadership means Influence. From his workbook, “Sociologiss tell us that even the most introverted individual will influence ten thousand other people during his or her lifetime!” […]

J.R. Miller said: “There have been meetings of only a moment which have left impressions for life, for eternity. No one can understand that mysterious thing we call influence… yet… everyone one of us continuously exerts influence, either to heal, to bless, to leave marks of beauty; to wound, to hurt, to poison, to stain other lives”.

Think about it…