At 71 years old, I don’t need many gifts at Christmas. I have a good home, a good family, a good team, and my life has never been more fulfilling than it is right now. The opportunities I’m seeing for partnerships and transformation are greater now than at any other time in my life. Now,…

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Who deserves the credit for your successes? If you said, “I do,” you may be mostly right. We all must make our own choices and reap the results of those choices. However, I say you’re mostly right because no one succeeds in a vacuum. I believe that all successful people owe a debt of gratitude…

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Recently, another leader asked me about how he should go about sharpening his skills in the areas where he was naturally gifted. He had already done something that I consider really important: he had discovered his strengths. Now he was ready to focus his efforts at growth in those areas, so he could really improve…

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It’s about that time of year again: In just two short months, my new book, Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn, will be released. I can’t wait for this book to come out, because while winning is fun and easy, losing can be challenging. Yet how we deal with loss has a huge effect on…

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“True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed, or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that cannot be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing a title can buy is a little time-either to increase your level of influence with others or to undermine it.”1 Leadership is influence. Just because someone has a title, doesn’t…

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Do you remember how you felt on Christmas Eve when you were a child?  If you were like me you probably had butterflies in your stomach.  You couldn’t sleep because of anticipation.  Your dreams were full of images of what Christmas morning would be like. Trust me, I still love Christmas and I get excited…

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United makes John Maxwell leadership training available to all middle management personnel. So, his leadership principles saturate our corporate ethos to a large degree. But recently, I experienced one of John’s principles first hand.I attended a training luncheon and asked John a question about layoffs that United was expecting to have. “How would you prepare…

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In 1804, Lewis and Clark faced the daunting task of finding their way across the vast wilderness of the American continent to reach its Pacific Coast. Their 33-member expedition included some of the most experienced navigators, scouts, woodsmen, and hunters in the United States. Yet despite their collective talents, the explorers would have died of…

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“What [a person] knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is not the knowledge of formulas or forms of words, but of people, places, actions—a knowledge gained by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love—the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and of other men.” ~ Adlai…

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Used with permission of Susan Jeffers, Ph.D. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into wealth and prestige, and as a young Harvard graduate, he seemed destined for success. By the age of 30 he was elected as a state senator, and a few years later he was appointed as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. However, shortly…

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