CHAPTER 22

Next Steps

I had three top goals in compiling these exercises.

The first was to enable and empower you—to give you, through doing the exercises, an integrated, comprehensive foundation in the skills, beliefs, and experiences of effective leadership, to lead yourself and others based on understanding yourself and others.

I designed the progression to enable you to create MVIP and passion in yourself, your teams, and your communities, so others feel gratitude to you for leading them to do so much, even to work so hard when necessary, because they’ll feel they did it for themselves.

I designed the progression to help you to develop the skills of empathy, compassion, self-awareness, sensitivity, integrity, discipline, and so on essential to effective leadership. I call these things skills because the more you practice them, the more you master them. If you don’t practice, they seem unattainable. People without empathy and self-awareness wonder what they mean. No amount of words will explain them. With some practice you start getting them. Practice the right exercises enough and you master them.

My second goal was to create the expectation that what skills, beliefs, and experiences you want, you can develop. If you see someone else lead or do something you can’t, know that you need only find out how they got it, make an exercise of it, and do it until you have their skills, beliefs, and experiences—that is, do The Method.

To the common question “Are leaders born or made?” I created these exercises to tell you that all great leaders became great through practice. None were born leading. The only limit to your leadership is how much you practice.

My second goal, in other words, was to instill in you one of the most motivational, life-affirming, and empowering beliefs I’ve had: “What anyone else can do, I can too.”

My third goal was to motivate you to find in leading the deep reward, MVIP, and passion that I do, and that it creates the most meaningful, valuable, important, purposeful, and passionate relationships. If so, you’ll feel the enthusiasm I do to take on ever more meaningful, valuable, important, and purposeful challenges. Our world has plenty.

If you did the exercises, you know the reward and emotions they create better than I can say, which is the point of Method Learning. If you didn’t, go back and do them to find out. Either way,

Practice, practice, practice.