The Insightful Leader

Book excerpt: The Insightful Leader is the secret formula for claiming your best leadership and using it to achieve unlimited success. Traditional leadership coaching asks leaders to substitute ineffective behaviors with alternatives, without addressing the underlying internal beliefs that reinforce the old behaviors. After months of successfully trying to change, a leader may suddenly face stressors at work—a looming deadline or a difficult negotiation—that trigger counterproductive behavior, resulting in guilt, shame, and frustration. The Insightful Leader first helps readers to recognize ineffective behaviors that may be connected to one or more of ten "superpowers," or overused strengths. Readers embark on a step-by-step process, identifying their superpowers and understanding the strengths of these superpowers as well as when their overuse may cause them to be perceived as egotistical or manipulative. Having deepened their understanding of their superpowers, leaders then use them as a catalyst to discover adversity they may have faced in their past. The book guides them to uncover survival beliefs held over from these experiences and to reprogram them such that they no longer trigger self-destructive habits but instead focus on recent successes. Finally, tips are provided to help leaders to successfully sustain this transformation.