Boundless Leadership - book review
Boundless Leadership: The Breakthrough Method to Realize Your Vision, Empower Others, and Ignite Positive Change by Joe Loizzo and Elazar Aslan
A book review by Ron Cacioppe, Integral
As the sign above the temple in Delphi says, ‘Know Thyself’. Boundless Leadership helps us to know our mind, heart and body and lead from there.
“A breathtakingly original approach to leadership, both practical and visionary. Anyone who cares about our future and how leaders can help shape a better future will find Boundless Leadership a source of inspiration.”
According to the authors, Loizzo and Aslan, our evolutionary ancestors saw danger around every corner and were the ones who avoided becoming prey. This allowed them to survive and pass their anxious tendencies on to us. In a world where lions and tigers don’t lurk around every corner, we are still influenced by our ancestors, but a survival instinct based on life in the wild no longer serves us in the same way.
Today, this default mode wreaks havoc with our perception of the world and our response to it. Boundless Leadership, provides a path to move from the default survival mode of our distant ancestors to the thriving mind required of compassionate leaders to cultivate a more equitable, sustainable, and healthy world.
Boundless Leadership provides a complete and systematic roadmap to finding meaning in your work, realizing your full leadership potential, and inspiring your team with resilience, innovation, compassion and confidence. Loizzo and Aslan offer a new science-based vision of leadership that prescribes disciplines of mind, heart, and body to help leaders cultivate clarity, compassion and fearlessness for themselves and throughout their organisation.
Joe Loizzo has a substantial background in neuroscience and contemplative practices. He is a psychiatrist, clinical researcher, and meditation scholar-teacher who integrates neuroscience with contemplative practice so brings substantial credibility to this exploration of the inner world of effective leadership.
Boundless Leadership offers accessible, real-world applications to bring ease to leading oneself and others, and provides examples from the authors’ experience with clients, including CEOs of multi-billion-dollar businesses, entrepreneurs and managers trying to balance the complex challenges of work and life in our interdependent age. Each section includes a range of practices based on neuropsychology and contemplative science, including guided meditations to improve focus and awareness, cultivate empathy and compassion, and build fearlessness and flow. There are practical tools to apply to daily challenges, including clarifying intentions for better decision-making, improving accountability and responsibility for better team collaboration, and embodying purpose.
Boundless Leadership is especially needed during this explosion of remote working and provides advice and guidance to remain productive and joyful when your work environment is in flux. Whether you are a CEO, manager, team leader, consultant, coach, social entrepreneur or community activist, this book gives you tools you to clarify your vision, lead others, and ignite positive change in the world in today’s fast-paced digital age.
The book goes on a journey through three foundational areas: the disciplines of mind, of heart, and of body. The authors bring a unique perspective on each of these three dimensions, as well as integrating all three in an effective and balanced way.
With its third discipline of embodied leadership, Boundless Leadership weaves in the theory of how the nervous system deals with trauma with scientific evidence to teach leaders to shift their natural response to the world from stress and survival to social thriving. By consciously paying attention to what has often operated unconsciously, boundless leaders can use their body’s capacity to shape what our mind thinks. We have the power to influence our thoughts and actions to keep us calm, engaged with others, and playful instead of being worried, cautious, and anxious.
Throughout Boundless Leadership, the authors use clear language and avoid technical jargon. They also use understandable language when dealing in the more complex areas of contemplative practice. Each of the three disciplines – mind, heart, and body – is associated with an essential competency. For the mind discipline, the competence is clarity; for the heart, it is compassion; and, for the body it is fearlessness.
Boundless Leadership develops leaders to have strength in clarity of mind, compassion, and fearlessness. This nurtures true compassion that responds to the suffering of the world. The competency of fearlessness is aligned with courageous compassion that seeks to remove the causes of suffering by bringing about systematic change.
Rather than a superficial list of common qualities found among ‘great leaders’, Boundless Leadership takes a deep dive with real leaders to identify the critical characteristics that define authentic, mindful, and effective leadership in a world full of leadership slogans. This book is a unique and progressive take on the leader of the future.
In a world increasingly powered by connectedness, interdependence, and networks, the ability to shed historical win-lose thinking and embrace boundless leadership is critical for the success of any leader, organisation, or nation. The evidence-based approach and pragmatic techniques contained in Boundless Leadership combine to create a powerful handbook that guides you to successfully achieve this necessary and advanced approach to self-development and leadership.
Boundless Leadership builds an understanding that leadership comes from within, that each of us can impact positive change in ourselves, our organisations, our personal lives, and even the world. The book also gives practical methods to shift thinking and behaviour to achieve success. This book will be especially helpful for leaders who emphasis targets, tasks and outcomes and neglect the inner sensations of body, mind and heart.
This book that isn’t just another leadership manual that offers new wrapping for the same old concepts of how to lead. This book is a guide for how to shift your whole being to uncover the compassionate wise leader within you. They lay out a clear and actionable plan for training the mind, body, and heart, and which will help all those who read it find the boundless potential they might not have even known they possess.