Most books on career success and leadership ladle out advice on habits and techniques to follow to become an effective leader. Memorize these steps and follow the recipe and, voila, a corner office awaits. Richard Metheny’s THE AWARE LEADER: Self-Knowledge Is The Key To Your Success digs deeper and offers readers a more profound understanding of what it takes to be a true success in an ever-changing, lighting-quick work world.
Metheny outlines a Zen approach to becoming a leader, one that asks only one important thing: Do you know who you are? With ample research and interesting anecdotes, Metheny gives practical steps to understanding the ways in which people move through the day, slicing off emotions, self-esteem, values and motivations in a variety of ways to get at what causes a leader to behave well – or not so well.
Metheny centers THE AWARE LEADER on a simple idea that has stood the test of time: mindfulness. As any Buddhist or even an occasional yoga practitioner might understand, slowing down and taking in the present without allowing the mind to wander awakens us to awareness and understanding. In Metheny’s world of leadership, this mindfulness, when used for self-discovery, sits at the core of success.
THE AWARE LEADER offers exercises and questions to help readers discover the deep reasons for why people behave the way they do. And, as he points out, that’s what business really is: people making decisions, one choice at a time, to either succeed or fail at tasks. Corporations may not be people, but they are made up of hundreds or thousands of individuals. And every one of them affects the bottom-line.
The underlying and quite salient point of THE AWARE LEADER is that leaders don’t need to be perfect. But to succeed, a leader not only must know her flaws and strengths, but how those attributes affect decisions through emotions, style and the choices made. Understanding how past traumas or life-situations–especially during formative years–affect interactions with colleagues, supervisors and subordinates is the key to allowing self-awareness to guide decisions and choices. The guiding principle of THE AWARE LEADER is that change and growth on the outside–in life and career–are possible once an examination of the inside (ie the self) occurs. Once the reader can look inward without judgment, self-awareness begins to flourish.
Richard Metheny’s THE AWARE LEADER is an easy-to-read, well-sourced guide to understanding the most important element to leadership success: yourself.
~Greg Rideout for IndieReader