Sharing My Dream to Help You Achieve Yours
One of my favorite definitions of life purpose is that you find it when your great joy meets a great need. I think that appeals to me so much because it defines what I’ve been doing as a leadership coach for over two decades. I got started in this work because in my own career as a corporate executive I regularly found myself in high stakes situations where I really had no clue what to do or how to be. Fortunately, I made it through but it was often like finding my way through the dark.
When I started coaching, I quickly found there was a mutual attraction between myself and high potential leaders who felt like they were in over their heads. Those were my people. We got each other. Doing that work led, in 2006, to my book, The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success. Three editions later, tens of thousands of leaders have read The Next Level, thousands more have completed our group coaching program, Next Level Leadership® and related programs and workshops I’ve led, and, I’ve been privileged to coach hundreds of individual executive leaders on succeeding at the next level.
And, now, this week, after 18 months of intensive development, I’m realizing a long-held dream of casting the net of coaching leaders to their next level even wider with the release of our online self-directed coaching course, Next Level Leader: A Proven Plan to Increase Your Influence and Impact. The course and the community that we’re creating alongside it enable me to share everything I’ve learned about how to increase your influence and impact as a leader with a much larger group of leaders than I would ever be able to reach through in-person coaching conversations and programs. And, one of the best parts of realizing this dream is that everyone who takes the course will still be able to work with me directly through regular coaching office hours and through a private online Leaders HQ community we’ve created exclusively for participants in our courses.
One of the reasons I’m so excited about launching this course is I’ve seen the difference the process I share in Next Level Leader has made for the leaders I’ve worked with over the years. I fondly remember Dave, who, when he realized his negative outlook was bringing his team down with him, used my process to enlist them to point out in real time to him when he needed to change his approach. Dave made lasting changes over a few months and, during that same time, the critical multi-million-dollar project his team was working on went from dark red to bright green on the status dashboard. Something else I’ve really enjoyed in the last few years is tracking the career path of my Next Level alums who have leveraged the team leadership and colleague engagement skills I cover in Next Level Leader into positions like senior vice president, executive vice president, president of their business units or CEO of their companies. On a more personal level, I’m so happy for the many leaders who have focused on the Next Level behaviors around managing yourself effectively to make long-lasting foundational changes that haven’t just made a difference for their teams and organizations, but for their families and their own health and well-being as well.
What all of these people did was use the process I share in Next Level Leader – identify the one or two behaviors that will make the biggest difference in strengthening your leadership; share with key colleagues what you’re working on and why; ask for their best ideas on actions you can take every day to be better; turn those actions into habits; and confirm with your colleagues that it’s all making a difference.
From a quantitative standpoint, I know that the process of self-coaching and colleague engagement that I share in Next Level Leader works because I’ve got 15 years’ worth of follow up 360-degree survey data that shows that leaders who follow the process are deemed by an average of 93% of their colleagues to be 72% more effective than they were six months before. The numbers are great, but the stories are better. I’d love to include your story of growth and success as a leader when I look back on the difference that Next Level Leader: A Proven Plan to Increase Your Influence and Impact has made for the people who took the course.
Next Level Leader is available for your review and enrollment this coming month at a special introductory rate of investment. Our course website provides all the details about how the course works, what’s included and videos I’ve filmed for the course that you can preview. Please take a look at the course and consider joining the other great leaders who are on their journey to the next level.
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