I have been lost in writing the new book for our Launching Leaders Worldwide effort; it is essentially a book about how to find and maximize your potential. It will be out about mid-year along with the on-line LMS courses. Michael Leonard (our full time executive director) and I have been visiting with several leaders of various faiths as we develop an inter-faith and faith-driven curriculum. What wonderful and good people we are honored to be associated with. I feel humbled in their presence.
The new book, Leadership by LIGHT, principles that empower, will be a game changer for anyone who has felt a gap between who/where they are and who/where they want to be. Let me give you a peek at the chapter titles:
Chapter 1 This is Launching Leaders
Chapter 2 Taking Control of Your Life
Chapter 3 Mentors
Chapter 4 Charting Your Course with God
Chapter 5 The Formula
Chapter 6 Beware the Double Life
Chapter 7 Habits of Success
Chapter 8 Fitness Financial
Chapter 9 Rising Above
Chapter 10 Effective Communication
Chapter 11 Giving
Chapter 12 Stand UP
Some of the content is similar as that in The Ministry of Business, How Correct Principles Magnify Business Success, but this book takes it to a more practicum level and includes a lot of new material.
Let me share an excerpt from the introduction:
Recognizing the unique challenges Millennials face as they attempt to establish themselves in today’s fast-paced, high tech, increasingly global world, we’ve crafted Leadership by Light to speak specifically and clearly to them. The ideas contained in this book will certainly benefit anyone who applies them to their life, regardless of age, but they have been designed to speak most directly to the needs, challenges, and cultural contexts of the current Millennial generation.
In so doing, we’ve tried to avoid simply preaching at our readers. We know that Millennials aren’t interested in the idea of having someone else come and “fix” them. Millennials are fiercely independent, creative, and determined to make their own unique marks on the world. They’re not content to accept things as they’ve always been. They’re wary of hierarchical top-down organizations and want their voices to be heard. Millennials place great value on teamwork, equality, and innovation, and for this reason, they possess the energy and ability to be a truly revolutionary generation.
Our goal is to value Millennials, to listen to their voices, to learn from their insights, and to validate their knowledge, experience, and real-world savvy. Rather than try and tell them exactly what to do, we want to create space for them to fine tune and develop the best parts of themselves.
One of the most ubiquitous challenges young adults face today is the seemingly endless amount of information that literally swamps all of our lives. While having anything and everything a mouse click or screen tap away can be an incredible blessing, it can also introduce all sorts of new distractions. In his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Loss, Greg McKeown describes some of the potential stumbling blocks introduced by our high tech, information-saturated world when he writes: “It is not just information overload, it is opinion overload.”[i] The problem is not the amount of information available; it’s the unmanageable volume of unproductive, distracting, problematic information swirling around our digital worlds. How do we sift through the infinite information, opinions, ideas, and ideologies we encounter every time we turn on a technological device or go online? How do we create harmony out of the cacophony of voices drowning out our everyday lives? How do we carve out space for our own voices in a raging ocean of noise?
The goal should not be to simply avoid entering into this ocean of information and ideas. Not only is that becoming nearly impossible to do, but more importantly, doing so would cause you to miss out on truly incredible, beneficial, and helpful opportunities to learn, grow, and contribute. Rather, the goal should be to figure out how to identify the voices worth listening to and the information most helpful to you, and then learn how to create opportunities to learn from those voices so that you might one day add your own voice to them in cooperation and harmony.
Leadership by Light sets out to give you a foundation of ideas, principles, skills, and practices that will empower you to make these types of determinations in your own life. We want you to engage your world and change it for the better—not avoid it or be intimidated by it—and we believe we’ve compiled a collection of “formulas” or “recipes” that will help you do just that.
Recently, I took a grandson into the bakery section of whole foods. He came face to face with a fun monster cupcake, and many other cupcake delights. He was mesmerized. Here before him was a smorgasbord of possibilities.
Why should our dreams be fade as we age? Why should we be less enthused at the possibilities before us? Why let the world filled with all of its controlling potentates dictate the dreams we have or prevent us from their realization?
I have seen too many folks get trapped in their path; controlled by fear, blocked from the vision and dreams before them. It’s time to reach through the glass and grab a few cupcakes; let the frosting line our lips, taste of the possibilities and live beyond the limitations we have placed ourselves in.
In my next post I’ll share a short video and more updates on the emergence of Launching Leaders Worldwide. In the meantime, keep dreaming!
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