Nominating A Few Heroes

In my typical day of driving my life at 1000 miles per hour, I am blessed with the opportunity to share with and learn from many people.

Every person, whether they represent something we like or don’t like, provides us with an opportunity to marvel at the creativity of the human mind and the notion that unlimited potential exists in all of us.

Given all of this potential, today’s world is complex and there are many people out there crying for help – perhaps one of them is us.

In this same world, there are many people who are answering the call, bringing their wonderful talents, strengths and compassion to bear to help in any way they can.  Perhaps one of these people is you also! :-)

On my full length version of my blog, located here, I nominate 5 special people who are heroes in my world:

Mark Hundley

Terry Reilly

Leonard Szymczak

My Family

A special hero I won’t name here

These people represent the best of humanity – people who do their best with what they have to make a difference in the lives of others.

The qualifications for being a hero have nothing to do with the scale of the act of heroism – we don’t need to be a hero for thousands of people.

What matters is that we use our gifts, talents and strengths to make a difference in the life of someone else.

When we do this, we are a hero to someone else.

You also have your own heroes.

I invite you to publically acknowledge them and share with the world why you believe they are a hero.

Despite what some people would say, the world is filled with heroes.  Let’s bring them out in the open and celebrate what makes them special.

We can all learn from them.

Yours in service and servanthood.

Harry

For the full length version of this blog on “Nominating a Few Heroes”, click  here.

A Quest for Authenticity – How Many Lives Are You Living?

I am running into more and more people these days who are living two or more completely different lives.

One life is the life of their dreams – passionate and living on purpose.  In this life, they are living their dreams, creating their own companies, making a huge, positive impact on the world.  Many of them are best-selling authors, in-demand speakers or high-powered consultants offering advice to the elite.  Their home life is right out of Leave it to Beaver, the Brady Bunch or some other idyllic family experience.  They live in a world where they speak freely and passionately about their purpose, their faith, their ideals and core values and their vision of the world. It is a beautiful life without fear of anything.

What a beautiful image they weave.

The other life is the life the same people are currently experiencing.  They are frustrated with their boss, their business partner, their client, their spouse, their children, their President or Prime Minister or someone else.  They feel frustrated that nobody seems to care about their vision for the world.  They are afraid to expose their core values, their faith or their belief structure.  They are afraid to stand up and speak out when they witness something that is legally, ethically or morally incorrect.  With this in mind, they assume their own personality is flawed or unworthy and thus they create new personas based on the situations they find themselves in.

Life is challenging enough when you have one life to live.

If we are living by our core values and are aligned with others with similar values, it helps to know that we should push through because the results are worthy enough to persevere for.

If we are pushing something that we are not in alignment with, then we often wonder why we should bother.  After all, we may be pushing for something important for someone else and not for ourselves – living a life for someone else.

If that’s the life we want to live, then we should select a person that we are living our life for and ask them if we can leave their name on our headstone when our end-of-days has arrived.

We might as well, since we lived their life based on their values, beliefs and expectations anyway.

Wouldn’t it better to be remembered for who we are and not for how we reflected the best of someone else?

Exactly – so what are we waiting for?

Yours in service and servanthood.

Harry

Click here to read my detailed blog entry on “A Quest for Authenticity”.

Observations on Leadership

I have been rereading Ken Blanchard’s recent works, including Leading at a Higher Level and The One Minute Entrepreneur and thinking through a number of organizations that I am familiar with for one reason or another.

I am struck with the brilliance of his work and at the same time, alarm bells go off in my head as I see many self-described leaders failing at basic principles of leadership, namely:

- having clearly communicated vision, mission and purpose

- empowering their teams to achieve the vision, mission and purpose in a manner that allows for significant contribution and personal growth of team members based on their strengths and abilities

- recognizing and highlighting the strengths in team members and finding ways to explore and amplify these strengths

- proactively coaching their team members

- encouraging team members to grow beyond the capabilities of the leaders themselves

- creating an honest, respectful, trust-filled, transparent environment where communication and collaboration are embraced.

Only about 20% of the leaders I have worked with actually follow these basic, common-sense principles.

Are we doing these things as a leader?

How do we know?

We need to remember that leaders are not just producing quality corporate results.

We are growing the next generation of leaders.

Whether the world grows or collapses economically, socially, ecologically or any other way depends on whether we empower or cripple the next generation of leaders.

If you are not sure how you feel about the leaders in your organization, feel free to drop me a note. I welcome the opportunity to explore it with you.

After all, our future is tied to our leadership.

How bright a future do we want?

Yours in service and servanthood.

Harry

Click here to read my detailed blog entry on “Observations on Leadership”.