Since I left my corporate job I have immersed myself in the world of thought leadership in the areas of personal and spiritual growth, creative expression and inspired business and leadership. I initially did this through my involvement with Alternatives at Saint James’s in Piccadilly where I got to meet and host many of the leading voices on the planet. Then I began to find my own voice and my own thought leadership through my speaking, coaching and ultimately writing.
All my own thought leadership has been born out of my own personal experience, my struggles and triumphs. As I have pioneered in my own life in the key areas of work, success, power, inspiration, creativity, entrepreneurship, fear and now leadership, I have written about what I have found has worked and not worked for me.
Each of my books has been my offering my contribution to thought leadership in these areas. So here are a selection of the key leadership thoughts I have offered with each book and each chapter of my life:
1999 The Work We Were Born To Do
As I had moved from “The work I felt I was supposed to do” to “the work I know I was born to do”, I began to see the whole idea of work and a job versus a calling from new perspectives.
- There is something you were born to do, that you came to earth to do
- Work can be a joy, an expression of your soul and spirit not just something you have to endure to pay the bills
- Conventional thinking has been that to some extent, you have to you’re your soul to earn a living and only a few gifted or talented people cab make their living doing what they love
- You can create income from what you love and its OK to earn money from what you thoroughly enjoy and is easy and comes naturally to you
- That you work can be your love made visible
- You can release your programming and conditioning and become more of the real you that you came to earth with
2001 Unconditional Success
I had spent many years “chasing” success, with varying degrees of success. As I grew more spiritually, I began to look at the whole area of success very differently.
- Success is not something to chase, it is who you are in essence – your being is a success
- Success follows from unwrapping more of who you already are in embryo
- Success is about loving, embracing and accepting all of who you are
- Something is something to be not something to get
- Success is a place to come from, not just a place to get to
- Many of us have taken on other people’s definitions of success so we need to enquire what meaningful success is for us
- Success got most people was either in the past or will be in the future, whilst Unconditional Success is always now
- Success always follows from being more the real you
2002 The 12 Principles of The Work We Were Born To Do
A synopsis of the ideas of the big book and the messages are repeated in a condensed form
2003 Powerful Beyond Measure
I had generally viewed power as a bad thing, something generally used to contrail, manipulate and at times even abuse each other. So I became curious about the way we can have power with each other rather than over each other.
- True power isn’t something we have over other people, its something we have with each other
- Power can be use for good and the greater good
- We are all powerful but have often denied or buried our power
2005 How To Be Inspired
I grew up believing that inspiration was a mystery, available occasionally to a few special people. I began to realise that inspiration was available constantly and to everyone.
- Inspiration and an inspired life are available to all of us, not just a special few of us
- Inspiration isn’t occasional and haphazard, but a phenomenon that is available to us all 24/7 when we are tuned in to it
- Inspiration is to invitation to access our “bigger Self” and grow beyond the limits of who we think we are and what we are capable of
- The future belongs to those who are truly Inspired
- True inspiration is the birthing place of creative expression in the world
- When we get truly inspired, our fear and resistance is also likely to get triggered but we can learn to get beyond them and not be stopped by them
2009 – Passions into Profits
I coached and supported many people who were still employed full time and had brilliant ideas found it difficult to actually get themselves going. They couldn’t easily see how they would earn all their income from their idea so they didn’t start to implement their ideas to create any income. I wrote this book to offer inspiration, encouragement and the practical eleven steps needed to generate your first income so that you could “prove your concept” and see that it actually worked. I have always been a passionate advocate of baby steps so this was my encouragement to start the journey of baby steps.
- Get your ideas off the drawing board and turn them into something that you can deliver to the world
- Your ideas have a life of their own and you cant necessarily see how they will generate income until you get going with them and show up
- Creating your first income is crossing a threshold, an initiation, and is crucial
- Nearly everything great starts from small and humble beginnings and then you build momentum as you go
- Grasp and experience the tremendous power of baby steps in securing small victories and breakthroughs
- Generate your first income and you will feel inspired and validated
- How to be a truly Inspired Entrepreneur rather than a vanilla entrepreneur
2010 The Business You Were Born To Create
I found myself very much influenced by how experts said you “should” create and run your business. I found myself struggling to find compatibility between how I thought I should run my business versus how I felt I wanted to authentically run my business. I didn’t like feeling I had to mold and distort myself into a different version of myself in order to succeed with my business. I wanted to be truly inspired by what I did and how I did it.
- Making money are not the only reasons to be in business; your business can have and needs to have a higher purpose to be truly successful
- You don’t have to squeeze yourself into conventional business models and take on other people’s values
- You can create your business by expressing yourself and your own values
- Your business can be the vehicle for your own growth and transformation
- You con offer leadership through your business and create a tribe and community around your leadership
2011 Resisting Your Soul
Throughout my life I had been curious about why I often didn’t do what I knew I wanted to do, or how I would often show up in the world in a way that often less than 100% but somehow felt safer. I spent years illuminating this whole area of fear and my inner resistance.
- This book was my contribution to illuminating the unconscious working of my mind and why we don’t do what we know we’d love to do and are inspired to do
- You are likely to experience fear and resistance around any project or action that is an expression of your Higher nature
- The more important a project, the bigger the resistance is likely to be
- Seen this way, resistance is actually good, a pointer that shows you are dreaming boldly and are actually right on track
- We all have the power within us to beat our resistance on a daily basis
- Resistance never goes away, and we have to be vigilant to it showing up in new and unexpected ways
2012 The Book You Were Born To Write
As a successful author, I found many people drawn to me to ask me questions about how to get going with their writing and how to get published or publish themselves. So this book was a little less about thought leadership and more about information and experience transfer. The one key message is;
- When you feeling inspired to share your voice and messages clearly and authentically, there are people who want to hear what you have to say and will be grateful for you saying it
2014 The Leader You Were Born To Be
I haven’t written this book yet, but my current work with the Born to Lead community, in my talks and with one-to-one clients has already helped me clarify the following leadership messages.
- We are all leaders and no longer need a position to be anointed or appointed to lead – we can all simply choose to offer leadership in a world that is hungry for inspirational leadership
- All leadership starts with leading yourself from your Self, the inspired greater you. The more you live your own authentic life, the more you inspire others
- Great leaders are willing to appropriately show their vulnerability and humanity as well as feature their strengths
- True leadership is about calling forth the best that’s already in you and encourage by example the best in the people around you
- As you define your leadership and articulate what you care about and stand for, you will start to assemble a tribe or community around you that you can serve
- Your most powerful leadership derives from your commitment to serving something greater than yourself and your own self-interest. Great leadership serves a higher purpose than personal gain alone
- The willingness to forgive yourself and others is a key leadership quality, maybe the ultimate leadership quality