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Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership

Sometimes books become friends, and this is certainly one that has been a travelling companion for us as a team, particularly throughout last year.

It’s not your average take on leadership development.  There is not really a mention of principles or techniques.  “The best thing we bring to leadership is our own transforming selves,” says Ruth (or Ruthie as we have affectionately come to know her).  We lead best when we are in touch with the ways that God is at work in our own hearts – as He painfully reveals underlying motives, sets us free to be more deeply and truly who we are in Christ, and meets us in the loneliness that leadership almost inevitably involves. “Spiritual leadership emerges from our willingness to stay involved with our own soul.” The stuff of our soul is not a bothersome interruption to our serving God, but it is the very ground out of which our leadership takes shape.

In a quotation from Parker Palmer, we are told, “A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what’s going on inside him- or herself, inside his or her own consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.”  So this is a book about paying attention to our inner lives, in the very midst of the crucible of leadership pressures.  It is intensely practical and wonderfully inspirational.  It chimes resonantly with the heart of our own ministry as Transformational Leadership Centre, and the journey that God continues to take us on.  And my favourite quote?

Spiritual transformation is the process by which Christ is formed in us for the glory of God, for the abundance of our own lives and for the sake of others.

Amen!