[Another post superseded this one by posting the full interview and the highlights. I’ll copy that post here:

Over the past six months I created an online leadership course, The Fundamentals of Leadership. I interviewed a student who took it. Listen to the interview highlights and full course. If you want to learn to lead yourself or others better, or to improve your life, listen to the interview and see if it fits your interests.

• Click here for the interview highlights (about ten minutes)
• Click here for the full interview (about an hour)
• Here it is in nine 5–8-minute segments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

About the course

The Fundamentals of Leadership will prepare you to practice effective leadership and teamwork in a variety of contexts—business, politics, community organizing, entrepreneurship, sports, teaching, sales, coaching, etc—without relying on authority, status, hierarchy, or other external conditions.

You will learn to create more meaning, value, importance, and purpose in your teammates, work, and professional relationships. As a result, your teams will accomplish more with greater satisfaction. Your teammates will feel inspired and will want to work with you again.

The course will also help you make leadership and teamwork more calm, rewarding, and enjoyable for you and your teammates—and your relationships and life in general too. You will develop professionally and personally, in a process that will continue throughout your life.

The course focuses on learning and practicing fundamentals. As in any discipline, people who have achieved mastery tend to focus on fundamentals and beginners can learn them readily. They also apply to all contexts. Once you have the fundamentals, practice leads to mastering high-level principles and skills, such as how to create meaning, value, importance, and purpose to inspire yourself and others. We begin with simple basics and build to advanced techniques.

The course is experiential. It will lead you through a series of exercises. As leadership is fundamentally behavioral, social, and emotional, these exercises develop behavioral, social, and emotional skills such as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, and empathy, which research shows to predict successful team performance.

The exercises are simple, introspective, challenging, active, and need few resources. Each develops useful skills on its own, builds on earlier ones, and contributes to later ones.

We start with the human motivational system, how it works, how to use it, and how it contributes to meaning and value. You will develop your awareness of and skill with its elements, such as perception, belief, mental models, emotion, behavior, environment, and reward. We first focus on the motivational system you know best and have the most access to—your own. After improving our understanding of it, we move to leading ourselves with it. We then apply that understanding and skill to understanding and leading others.

For reference, I’m keeping the original post below.

]

Over the past six months I created an online leadership course.

• Here are the highlights from interviewing Chris, the first person who took it
• Here is part 1
• Here is part 2
• Here is part 3
• Here is part 4
• Here is part 5
• Here is part 6
• Here is part 7
• Here is part 8

Here is the ninth and last segment of the full interview. It covers

• If others can achieve as much as he did in the course
• If he got special treatment by working directly with me
• How early, easy exercises kept contributing months later (and, he expects, forever)
• How others don’t have to share vulnerabilities like he did, but can at their option
• And more

Download the mp3 here (some browsers will play if you click here too).

I believe it will be ground-breaking in the field, helping people develop the fundamental skills to lead others and themselves simply, effectively, and comprehensively.

It uses experiential learning to develop these skills through short and simple exercises you apply to your life. If you do it, you’ll go through the same process Chris did, as did my clients, students, and seminar attendees for years. If you do the exercises, I predict you’ll get similar results.

I’m not marketing it yet because I want to pilot it with a few people first, ideally people who read my blog, like yourself.

If you’d like results like Chris’s and you’re interested in doing the course as a free pilot in exchange for feedback to help develop it or if you have questions, contact me and I’ll tell you more about it. I plan to start the first group next week.

• ← Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview, part 8/9
• Listen to the results of my online leadership course: the full interview! →