How can I make sure these seminars are relevant to me personally?

Imagine we are talking to you face-to-face. We want you to take away as many practical lessons as possible. Here's what we ask of you:

Be so completely focused that you ask yourself, "Do I see myself in that situation or in ones like it?"

Read on to find why we want you to agree: I Am Looking for Myself…

Sometimes our thoughts are spurred by what appear to be unrelated incidents in our lives, until we see the link. Such was the case with one of our colleagues who was considering various approaches our seminars and other products might take. For whatever reason, he remembered watching a student speaker talk poignantly with his audience about the daunting subject of Alzheimer's Disease. This young man elaborated the devastating effects of Alzheimer's--the complete loss of memory and thus of knowing one's own past or present--and then closed his speech with a word picture that our colleague will never forget. The young speaker described a tiny elderly lady, someone's mother and grandmother, rummaging through a drawer in her small room at the nursing home. She was frustrated and at loose ends. When a visitor asked her what she was doing, she murmured, "I am looking for myself."

Oddly, at the time the memory of this incident crept into our colleague's mind, he was thinking about a problem common to all leadership seminar providers--how do we get inside your minds? How can we possibly divine what you already know about leadership and how you apply that knowledge? How do we figure out what kind of leaders you ALREADY are? How do we fathom what beliefs and attitudes and opinions you bring to a seminar, all of which affect not only your own leadership but also your response to any suggestions we make? Most important, considering our limited knowledge of each of you, how can we possibly suggest that you change your methods of leadership or re-examine your beliefs? After all, leadership is such an individual exercise. We have our styles of leadership, you have yours, and what works for us might not work for you, no matter how much we claim our recommendations are time-proven.

At this point in our colleague's thinking the haunting words of that Alzheimer's victim resurfaced: "I am looking for myself." And he reasoned, shouldn't we all be "looking for ourselves" when the matter of leading other people is considered? How can we possibly lead others effectively if we don't know ourselves? Only YOU know how you relate to other people generally and your followers particularly. Only YOU know the beliefs, attitudes, and opinions that contribute to your personalities.

As the result of our inability to walk in your shoes or come anywhere close to knowing you as well as you know yourselves, we have the responsibility to ask you to take a fresh look--a brutally honest private look--at yourselves and your styles of leadership. You will have to decide what may need rethinking and retooling. You will have to decide, out of all we might present in seminars or audio products or books, what fits and does not fit you and your style. Isn't a leader the sum of all the unique personality and character traits that make up a person? Does anyone really believe that there is a little niche inside each person labeled "leader," separate from the other ingredients of being human? When we attempt to influence others to follow us, when we attempt to be leaders, all those same human ingredients kick in. They shape the way we lead, and they strongly influence the ways in which others respond to us. We cannot summon just a part of us if we desire to make changes in our leadership styles. We must really look at the whole package of being the individuals we are in all phases of our lives, then change what needs changing.

Only you can do that. For you to benefit from our materials, we ask that you "look for yourselves" in the leadership situations we will describe. If you find that you have acted similarly in your own leadership, ask yourselves whether you need to change and, if so, what and how you might change. It's quite possible that some of the "good conduct" we describe is exactly what you do yourself. If so, enjoy the validation and mentally award yourself a good conduct medal. If any of the situations we describe in the various cases make you uncomfortable and make you doubt whether you have done a good job in a similar situation, be glad for the discomfort. That's part of the brutally honest private look you must take.

We will advise you to learn what your own values are and how they affect your behavior and, in particular, your reactions to followers. We will encourage you to learn how to discern the values of others and will caution you never to expect your followers to be your clones. As you "look for yourself," ask OTHERS what they think. The only person who can get by solely on an opinion of self is a hermit. A leader must never presume he or she cannot benefit from the results of an employee attitude survey or a confidential peer review. Just because YOUR intuition is strong doesn't mean all your followers think like that; many learn instead by experience. Just because you are extroverted doesn't mean the introverts among your followers are out of step. Just because you tend to be even-tempered and unemotional doesn't mean some of your excellent followers won't have emotions that carom around like a racquetball. So, one of the best ways to see yourself is to ask for and scrutinize the perceptions of you by others.

Honest self-examination is mandatory for those who aspire to be effective leaders of people. As a result of reflecting on the story of the tiny lady "looking for herself," we believe one of our essential tasks is to give you thoughtful tools to help you in your search.