Light on Leadership

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Welcome to Light on Leadership! In under two minutes, our newsletter delivers one book recommendation, one leadership action step, and two leadership tips. We know you're busy, so we've designed this content to be both useful and shareable. Enjoy!

What are we reading? The Gift of Influence: Creating Life-Changing and Lasting Impact in Your Everyday Interactions.

-Tommy Spaulding

In the opening sections of the book, author Tommy Spaulding shares a few stories highlighting the amazing positive influence we can have in the lives of others. Unfortunately, the opposite of this is also true, we can make a negative impact in the lives of those we interact with each day. Spaulding uses a passage he credits to author Jon Gordon to help illustrate the power of influence. “I heard about a recent study showing that the average person will influence eighty-thousand people in their lives, positively or negatively.”

If you take time to read this book, you might be like I was after reading the 80,000-person influence story and think that this sounds like a very large number. Depending on the math you want to use when selecting the “average life span”, you would need to influence approximately three people per day or roughly 90 per month to reach your 80,000 goal. Can you do this? The answer is yes and the more intentional we are in the effort, the larger the number becomes. As a leader we have the tendency to view this as how many people we can “positively” influence, but the study is based on positive and negative interactions. When you walk past someone on the street and choose not to make eye contact or interact you still had an influence on that person. The same is true when you walk into a busy building and take three extra seconds to hold the door for someone behind you – you just influenced that person. Don’t think of influence as being a grand gesture or action that changed the world. As with most things, simple is better.

Purchase this book! https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Influence-Creating-Life-Changing-Interactions/dp/0593138635

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