Take Your Soul to Work, 365 Meditations on Every Day Leadership, by Erica Brown, Simon & Schuster 2015
Dr. Erica Brown describes her Take Your Soul to Work as "a prayer book for leaders." A departure from the wave of hard-edged leadership books, readers will see this book as an opportunity to step back and think about what leadership and followers need, what true leadership means, and how to be more humane and trusting in your work life. Although she believes that lack of time and the overabundance of media distractions explain part of the disconnect , her prescription is "I believe that if you regularly encounter the wisdom of the Buddha, Lincoln, Jesus, Picasso, Faulkner, Moses and Twyla Tharp, it can't help but make your day more special, ore creative, more profound."
Brown's grandparents and mother were all Holocaust survivors, and in spite of this background, or perhaps because of it, she chose in her early teens to seek her own spiritual identity, a more positive and uplifting one. "It took a lot of courage," she recalls, but forty years later it has become a habit. Each essay contains a guiding question at the bottom of the page designed as "life homework."
For example, in her "Day 17, On Dependence" she quotes a Persian poet:
There are only so many people you can
carry in your small boat before their
weight sinks you.
A hundred you can carry whom you love
But barely one you wish to harm.
The lesson is how disabling over-reliance can be, and how leaders must think carefully about whom, and what issues, they can safely take on. The author asks:
Who are you carrying in your small boat?
Who needs to leave your small boat?
Three hundred sixty-five compact essays like this one written with provocative self-questions, along with great stories, quotes and real-life examples, make this book different enough to want to plunk it on the center of your desk, and as a new daily habit, start (or end) each day with a valuable dose of wisdom and new growth.