THE LOVE-BASED LEADER

The Love-Based Leader is not a philosophical attempt to define an unattainable utopian ideal of leadership, but instead is a description of an observable evolution of leadership. Additionally, it is a tool-kit of practical techniques for developing Love-Based Leadership as your vehicle to create desired results ... personally, professionally, and globally.

For me, the quest to understand and teach the concepts and techniques of The Love-Based Leader began in Chicago in 1975. That was the summer I was finally talked into attending my parent’s LifeStream personal growth seminar. Please take a journey with me back in time.

I am sitting in the audience, waiting for the seminar to begin. About 45 people are seated in typical seminar chairs, packed closely together, with an aisle down the center. I am sitting about three rows back, near the left side of the room as you face the front. There are windows to the right and rear of the room, a solid wall in front, and doors to the left. In the front of the room is an easel stand with a large pad.

Most of the people around me are chatting. I am sitting quietly by myself and wondering why I have come. My parents, who own and present this seminar, have been trying to get me here for about two years. Basically, I have come for the purpose of getting them off my back.

In four days, I am thinking, they will no longer be able to tell me that I am missing something special. Not only that, I will soon be able to dismiss this ridiculous concept of personal growth that they keep preaching to me. I am already prepared to shoot holes in the idea.

I seriously doubt that I will experience anything special, and in fact, am sitting here wondering why all of these people have paid money to my parents for this four-day, so called, self-improvement seminar. I am sarcastically thinking, “Did my parents withhold all of the good stuff until I paid a tuition?” My thoughts are judgmental and resistant.

Finally, my father enters the room and begins the seminar by welcoming us all, and challenging us to be responsible for creating our own value from the weekend. I am thinking, “So, what is he going to be doing if we have to create the value?” I would really rather not be here.

Then, my father looks at us and says something that changes my life. He points to the center of the audience and says, "You are only as big as the smallest thing it takes to upset you."

For some reason, that really upsets me. After all, I reason, it is not my fault if someone else is being mean or stupid.Then it occurs to me that in my lifetime, there have been many tiny little things that have upset me. All of a sudden I am thinking, “What if my father is right? And, if he is right, if all it takes to upset me is for someone to make a stupid statement, then I must be pretty small indeed.”

I do not like having that thought, but I go with it. Upon reflection, I realize that for the bulk of my life, if someone treated me badly, I resented them – and if someone treated me nicely, I liked them. Basically, my life has been controlled by how the people around me have been treating me. I wonder, could this explain why I am filled with so many insecurities despite all of my blessings?

At that moment I decide to discover how I can become bigger than the little things that have hurt my feelings and made me feel angry or insecure. Heck, I am tired of spending my life worrying about what everyone else is thinking anyway.

I am suddenly aware that my father is still speaking. He says, “The bottom line is you have a choice. You can choose to live in fear and justify it, or you can choose to take responsibility for your own life and to live in love. By the end of this weekend you will know how to make that choice.” I decide to take him up on the challenge.

24 Years Later

That was the beginning of my quest to become a Love-Based Leader. It has thus far led to successes far beyond my dreams.

If I had realized then where this quest would take me, I would have certainly hesitated. My low self worth would never have allowed for me to envision speaking in nine countries, and with companies such as Walt Disney Feature Animation – much less to share the speaker’s platform with world-class leaders such as Mark Victor Hansen, Les Brown, Brian Holloway, Congressman Ed Foreman, the late Jim Rohn, and others. No, those would have been impossible presumptions.

It is my wish that this book represents the beginning of your quest to be a Love-Based Leader. Prepare now for the creation of successes bigger than you have ever dreamed. Not bigger than you have achieved, but bigger than you have dreamed.

It has been said that DREAMS are what give our LIVES value. But it is how we LIVE that determines if our DREAMS have value.

Throughout history, humans have demonstrated an overwhelming tendency to resist change. For example, we have known for hundreds of years that there is no truth what-so-ever to the terms ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ ... the Sun does not rise or set (it just appears to do so as the Earth spins on its axis), yet the terms are still in common usage.

Nevertheless, not only is 21st Century Earth changing rapidly for humans, some of these changes are being embraced globally. Technologically, we have seen the internet, personal computers, cell-phones, PDAs, HD television, and other technological wonders achieve global market penetration and acceptance, far more rapidly than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.

Changes are not just occurring in technology. In 1900, for example, there were only 15 democracies in the world and only two in Europe. Today, there are over 120 democracies in the world and only two nations in Europe are NOT democracies (and one of them is Vatican City).

Traditional fear-based leadership has been based on Position-Power. Based on their positions of authority, parents have controlled their children, bosses have controlled their employees, and governments have controlled their citizens. But, the era of humans allowing themselves to be controlled by anyone is quickly coming to a close.

Fear-Based leadership based on Position-Power is history. It is time to stop fighting 'against' what you do NOT want, and to start fighting 'for' what you DO want. There is a difference.

These are volatile and unpredictable times. Intimate relationships often seem to cause more frustration than fulfillment. Many families are in turmoil. A large number of corporations are floundering or failing. The United States is involved in two wars, and the fears of a global recession abound.

People have almost always been threatened on several different fronts. Today, however, they are becoming increasingly frustrated because the Fear-Based strategies and behaviors of the past, are rapidly losing effectiveness.

As Buckminster Fuller observed, while Fear-Based Living has helped people to survive for centuries, it has now become the problem. It is this fundamental shift that is resulting in a Love-Based evolution of leadership, which will influence our personal, professional and global affairs.

The concepts and techniques in The Love-Based Leader are more than theory. Since 1979, they have been refined in more than 1,500 personal and professional development seminars and keynote addresses in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Panama, Dubai, Thailand, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas.

They have helped tens of thousands of people to overcome everything from minor irritations to unimaginable tragedies. Many of their stories are included in this book in order to assist you in solving your personal and professional challenges.

I challenge you to use the concepts and techniques in The Love-Based Leader to create desired results WITH your life, not just IN your life. If this stirs something in you, and you want to understand what this truly means and how to do it, then you have already begun your journey.

Hard work is not new for people. What is new, is the chance to be leaders.

The world has enough people Living Fear-Based. We need Love-Based Leaders. We need you, and we need you now.

Welcome to the quest,
"Ross"

James Roswell Quinn

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