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Inspire: What Great Leaders Do


by Lance H. K. Secretan

 


 
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So effective are the ideas in Inspire: What Great Leaders Do that 15 CEOs and leaders wrote the forward in which they describe the remarkable transformations that happened to their organizations and personal lives when they adopted them.

Inspire takes on the biggest question facing corporations, non profit organizations and even nations today:  how do we overcome fear and tension and replace it with confidence in the potential of the human spirit.  Most importantly, Secretan offers a roadmap for leaders showing them a way to build confident and inspiring organizations that succeed.  What a treasure!

Tim Shriver, Chairman, Special Olympics

Most models of leadership and relationship-building are grounded in primitive concepts such as Pavlovian psychology and behavioral science methodology. Almost all these theories have their roots in turn-of-the-century thinking based on the concept of rewarding behavior we wish repeated and punishing behavior we wish discontinued. It is this thinking that informs how we raise our children, who, in turn, learn from us that this is the way they will be in the world. Thus we become experts in motivation—a fear-based approach. But great leaders do not motivate, they inspire—an approach that emanates from a loving, serving heart.

Another fundamental flaw in our thinking is that inspiration can be managed, that it is a "technique" and can be "practiced on" people. In truth, inspiration comes from a much deeper place—it comes from the soul. Learning to come to terms with our own egos, integrating our egos with our souls, and learning how to relate with others, soul-to-soul, is how we inspire others and become inspired.

Inspiration is the experience we are all yearning for – at home and at work—and this is what Inspire! What Great Leaders Do is all about.

We are living in times when people are yearning to be inspired more than ever. But inspiring others during the last decade of the last century, when people were lighter, more optimistic and filled with a sense of abundance, was an entirely different proposition than inspiring them in this century, when people are more afraid, sad, and cynical. Many organizations, teams, and families operate from a fear-based culture. But when we are afraid, we cannot inspire, nor can we be inspired and, therefore, we cannot be great. Removing fear is the first step to creating the conditions for personal and organizational inspiration that lead to greatness. Inspire! is a book about how to inspire others and ourselves and thus transform ourselves and our organizations. It describes a proven, widely used, and highly successful process for overcoming our fears and reframing our thinking that causes all of our interactions—at home and at work—to be inspiring. This includes the interactions we have with others, as well as those we have within ourselves.

Lance Secretan has dedicated his entire life to the study of leadership. He has researched the biographies of more than 100 of the most inspiring and successful people in history, as well as contemporary leaders from many fields. He has helped 6 companies to be named to Fortune's Best Companies to Work For in America list, and 8 others on this list are also his clients, and 30 more are on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies list. From this research, practical application, and first-hand observation, he has developed a set of concepts and theories about how to become inspired, and how to inspire others. He calls this work Higher Ground Leadership®.

These ideas have broken new ground for many modern leaders familiar with Lance’s work and promise to do the same for others as these ideas spread rapidly across the corporate landscape.

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