📚Welcome to Week #2 of adventures in reading for 2025

Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen & Roy Schwartz

I listened and read this book, often while working on various projects to get my family and house ready for 2025. Using some of the techniques to refine my next presentation at WACUBO’s Women’s Leadership Forum later this month. 

A few ideas that are sticking with me: 

⁉️ Is the time people are spending with you or reading what you write useful?

⁉️ Identify your one or two most important points. Be clear about what they are. 

💡How do you win the war for workplace attention?

Read the book: https://amzn.to/4ajN5BS

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If Only I Had Told Her by Laura Nowlin

A follow up book from the first told from different perspectives. 

An idea I love:

⏰ “It seems so obvious now. It matters which people you spend time with, and it matters how you spend your time, because you don’t know how much you have.”

Powerful reminder … who gets your time? Who gets your attention? 

❤️ The legacy we leave is how we treat people. 

Never underestimate the line of a book to remind you what matters. 

Read the book: https://amzn.to/3DUMVEK

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Unleashed by Frances Frei & Anne Morriss 

I started listening to this book and then realized I wanted a copy to mark up and remember. I read it while waiting for kids & finished it after sledding down the driveway with my kids on a fun snowy day. (With hot cocoa made by one of my kiddos ❤️)

My book with hot cocoa, enjoying my reading chair

‼️ Leadership is often in small, unglamorous moments. 

💯 The practice of leadership almost always asks you to risk something. 

💥 Leaders must be intentional about distributing power and decision rights & then take total, unqualified responsibility for the outcome. 

⚡️People tend to become more interesting. The more you learned about them.

❓If you can’t sustain genuine interest in the ideas of other people, including those ideas that have nothing to do with you, then you haven’t yet earned the right to lead. 

📖 Leadership asks you to be in touch with your own agency & ability to influence your surroundings. 

💯 We all have the ability to release the energy of possibility in someone else’s life. 

‼️ If you seek to lead your focus by definition shifts from elevating yourself to protecting, developing, and enabling the people around you. 

❤️ So, so love the idea of leaders as the ambassador of other people‘s awesomeness (OPA)

💯 Collaboration happens in daylight. 

😖 Women receive mixed signals in all the spaces in their lives. 

💯 Policies are only as good as their outcomes. 

😳 A pattern of weaponized values is a lagging indicator of an unhealthy culture. 

❤️ Love the concept of “empathy anchors:” the people naturally wired into the experiences of others. 

🎧 Listen as someone responsible for the experiences of others. 

One of my favorite thoughts:

‼️ Your leadership past does not define your future and therein lies the possibility. 

Read the book: https://amzn.to/4fVhwzq

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