The leadership seminar

I wanted to thank you for the class on Leadership at Columbia last weekend. It was a big eye opener for someone like me who has never taken any class on leadership. Your real life examples were exemplary and everything I learnt in your class, I feel I can in some way apply in my professional and personal life. I look forward to more such classes from you and in the mean time will be reading your blogs.

– Kabita Dasgupta, Manager, Deloitte & Touche

It’s easy to have confidence in Josh’s advice because he’s applied it with so much success in so many different areas.

I have made more progress this year in my career and in my personal life than ever before. His ideas on how rites of passage and significant events affect self identity and personal growth have been a particularly important catalyst.

Most importantly, his model has helped me break free from the endless cycle of seeking out different self help schemes and make real, lasting and dramatic changes in my life.

– Dominic Tsui, champion kickboxer and mixed martial artist

Joshua’s seminar was jam-packed with the activities and skills I need to push me thought a lot of my confusion and bad feelings. I am dead set on sticking with my goals and achieving a happier life with the information he gave me. I can understand why my life was in such a rut — and with his examples from evolutionary psychology, business leadership, entrepreneurship, and personal development, I feel so much more eager to pick up and move myself forward.

– Tim P.

This is a very valuable course. It will help everyone in every aspect of their life. Overall life. Not just leadership. Everything from leadership to relationships to taking care of yourself. It’s awakening. It wakes you up to see freedom that people don’t understand. It teaches you what freedom is.

– J. K.

I have been in many personal development and leadership courses. Josh’s course and material is concise, practical, and to the point. Even more important, it is versatile and applicable to many areas of my life. There are no silver bullets, but this is a good gun.

– J.K. (no relation to the previous J.K.)

The skills and techniques Josh has taught me from his seminar have shown me instant success in my life and consistent long term success. He helped my business, my relationships, and my life finally become vibrant and stimulating.

– Chris Bolger, Peak Performance Consultant

Implementing Joshua Spodek’s model will increase the success of my entrepreneurial ventures and raise the quality of my relationships with people. Josh provides practical and easy to understand processes and steps a person can take to vastly improve their life.

– Mick Green

Dear Joshua

How are you?

I was fortunate to take your two-day seminar [in Shanghai]. You inspired me!

You showed me patterns to transform things and suggested how to handle the sales director at my company. I had an open talk with her based on your suggestion and self-awareness of how I felt. She totally changed! I changed my environment! Thanks for the tip. I learned to be honest with my emotions and behavior and to have the courage to change my behavior to create new environments. I feel better and more capable. Thank you for your advice.

Also, the group of girls I did the exercises with decided to form a working group to continue our exercises for long-term transformations. We’ve already created goals and will meet regularly to collaborate. So that was a nice life surprise for me from the seminar. I look forward to changing for the better

I hope to keep in touch and to keep practicing to keep improving.

You are a great mentor and person. I really like your teaching style.

Warm regards from Shanghai

– K. Chen

Great use of a weekend. Josh gave us a lot of tools to improve ourselves and think about what we want to achieve in life. And he did it with a lot of humor and fun exercises.

– T.L. (Shanghai)

I think this is a very inspirational class. Becoming more self-aware and improving my emotional intelligence has been my goal, but I have not been able to find a structured way to do so, until now. Thanks!

– Anonymous (Shanghai)

Thank you Joshua for a wonderful seminar on Self Awareness / Emotional Intelligence. Really enjoyed the session — in particular, the Model was simple, practical and easy to understand. Distinction between Pleasure and Reward was awesome. Great take-aways from the seminar include

• Being yourself
• Understanding the emotional cycles
• Tools to increase the REWARD quotient

Exercises were FUN!

Thanks again.

– Y. G. (Shanghai)

One on one coaching

The reason I approached Josh was because I wanted to improve the quality of my life. To be more specific, as faculty in a business school, I found myself constantly worrying about making mistakes while coaching students. I also struggled with making meaningful connections with people to build a professional network. I have read Josh’s blog for a few months. I found his Model brilliant, and I wanted more guidance on how to implement it.

With Josh’s guidance, I did the following exercises:

1. Tracked my self-talk for a week
2. Implemented the Model based on one specific challenge I faced. Josh helped me analyze the situation and proposed an action plan. We listed people to reach out to and practiced key points to make. I then reached out to these people to discuss my situation and seek their advice.
3. Practiced opening up to friends and colleagues about my exercises and goals. Practiced feedforward.
4. Communication exercise: what is your passion?
5. Communication exercise: meaningful network

My biggest progress was becoming more confident and comfortable reaching out to people I didn’t know. I also feel more confident and comfortable dealing with difficult situations.

I am less nervous about making mistakes as I know that I can learn valuable things from them. Practicing the Model makes me not that afraid of negative emotions anymore, as I am confident that I can change negative emotions to a positive, and gain insight from the process.

I also feel more comfortable sharing my imperfections and vulnerabilities with people. Actually, most people I opened up to start to share more of themselves with me.

After 4 sessions with Josh, I have a script/template that I can follow when I talk to people. I know that over time when I practice more, I won’t need the script anymore. But at the beginning, having a tool provides a good foundation.

The great thing with Josh is that he not only provides a good framework, but also gives specific suggestions tailored to my situation.

– Y.C. Business School Professor

Small business consulting

I was pretty green as an entrepreneur when I met Josh. Coming off of years working in an academic setting, I was timid and uncertain about the leaps required to start something of my own.

Working with Josh helped me to clarify my goals and the stakes–both business and personal. And with his PhD, MBA and years of experience as an inventor/entrepreneur himself, he was able to understand and advise me on even the technical parts of my project, such as patent filing.

I credit him with giving me the courage to launch with gusto my first business, a novelty product company that sold over $1M in two years. Now I’m onto bigger and better things, and Josh remains one of my most trusted, go-to resources. Whether I go to him with a success on my hands or a failure, Josh has consistently helped me make the most of it.

– Jon, entrepreneur

I had been running a small business for about ten years when I realized it was time to expand, which would require new investment. I asked Josh to help with my business plan.

He worked not only on the plan but helped me understand the issues in expanding, raising funds and working with investors. He also coached me on presenting my plan, anticipating questions and developing relationships with business partners.

His comprehensive approach gave me a better understanding of my business today and after I grow as well as the documentation to show it.

– Glenn, small business owner

I’ve done sales my whole professional life, but when I started my company I knew I had to take my skills to another level. The stakes were higher and my clients bigger. Joshua’s entrepreneurial and consultative sales seminar was the best 3 hours of re-thinking of how I do meetings and how to interact with clients I’ve had. I can now plan and execute my sales and business strategies with more confidence, awareness, and effectiveness. I would recommend if you think your game can get better, it can and with Josh’s sales seminar, it will.

– L. Yumeku, CEO of 3 Degrees Films, a New York-based animation company

Creativity consulting

As a modern-classical composer, I create original music for live performances (sometimes I perform). I wanted to take my music in new directions.

I told Josh my goals. He listened and asked a few questions. Then we scheduled a couple sessions at a whiteboard. He described some theory behind creativity, then did a few exercises. I was amazed because even though he didn’t know music like I did, he knew about generating creative ideas. He showed me ways to put my ideas together to come up with original work I created.

Six months later I was still building off ideas from those sessions. I expect to continue using the techniques I learned then to generate new works forever.

– R. R., composer

I am a Producer for a large video game company. Our business depends on having repeatable creative processes. We brought Josh in to help us with ours.

So many consultants just wave their hands and pronounce that you should be “thinking outside of the box.”  Josh presented peer reviewed research on creativity and idea generation, as well as leading exercises that took advantage of the research he had just presented.

The employees who participated loved it and there was a noticeable shift in their creative analysis by the end of Josh’s consultancy.

– Benjamin Sherman

Analysis and writing

It’s natural to assume that North Korea is insane and illogical in its actions. It’s also easy to think of the citizens of North Korea as simple drones of the state. Surely there can be no reasoning to explain the actions of the leadership of the hermit kingdom?

This book presents that there is in fact a method to the ‘madness’ and the western world assuming “insanity” is exactly what the North Korean leadership intend for us to believe. The author also presents what he describes as a “toy proposal” to allow for the opening-up of the nation. A very thought-provoking read that may totally change how you interpret the country.

– Mark Fahey

It’s not surprising that the most illuminating read on N. Korea doesn’t come from a politician or social scientist — it comes from a PhD physicist with an MBA.

Author Spodek visited North Korea and did first-hand research, breaking down their economic and political situation, and what must be done to change things.

A fascinating and insightful read. Recommended.

– G.

I admit that I was quite skeptical to learn that on his return he wrote a book on North Korea, it’s a country that requires a career of study and dedication to research to understand – at least from a historian’s viewpoint. Instead, Joshua took his considerable business and entrepreneur experiences, along with his ability as a physicist to break down complex systems into easily understandable parts, and applied these talents to write a book that presents a simple, clear, and nonjudgmental understating of modern North Korea’s motivations. He accomplishes this by explaining the business concepts of strategy and sustainable competitive advantage, and how these concepts apply to, and help simplify an understanding of not only North Korea, but to each of the relevant players (countries) concerned with the North Korea situation. These concepts are also used to help explain why those in power in the modern North Korean regime (those born after the Kim Il- sung personality cult was firmly established) resist change, finding it safer to continue and to perpetuate the statues quo.

This book battles the mainstream idea that North Korea’s leaders are crazy and act irrationally, and firmly proves that there is an easily understandable and well developed strategy behind modern North Korea’s actions and motivations.

– Joseph Ferris III

Press

“Best and Brightest“

– Esquire Magazine, Annual Genius issue

“Rocket scientist“

– Forbes Magazine and ABC News

“Astrophysicist turned new media whiz“

– NBC