Great, today, to see the ideas of Inner Leadership being namechecked by Kate Cooper, Head of Research, Policy, and Standards at the Institute for Leadership and Management.
In a piece on how to win support for unusual business concepts, Kate says (with emphasis added):
“This is where self-awareness is key. It’s all about understanding what your values are, what motivates you, what inspires you, where you will negotiate, where you will compromise — and where you will not. If you have clarity about all of that — and it takes a great deal of introspection in order to do so — then the path ahead almost lights up by itself.”
“This links very neatly to Finn Jackson’s book The Churning, Inner Leadership … Jackson’s cause célèbre as a writer is the importance of purpose in leadership, and the foundation of that purpose is authenticity.”
We agree: once you do the inner work of creating self-awareness “then the path ahead almost lights up by itself.”
And if we might disagree a little: the work of developing self-knowledge doesn’t have to be hard. And it becomes so much easier when you have someone who has laid out the path for you in advance and provided simple questions and tools that help you move along it.
This is what the book of Inner Leadership provides. It is highly practical, so it helps you move forward from wherever you are today. And there’s no need to get to some impossible, ‘final’ form of self-knowledge in a single pass: Inner Leadership is an ever-improving cycle of learning more about ourselves and applying that in the world. Then learning and applying again.
What Inner Leadership provides is a set of tools and techniques for accelerating the personal journey to greater self-awareness that we are all on anyway and applying it in the world. Inner Leadership makes the process easier and faster. It’s when we don’t use the tools that things are hard.
Great to see that others are finding Inner Leadership useful and seeing the path ahead “almost light up by itself.”