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This is not a guide to becoming a leader simply to be successful; it is a guide to becoming a leader with integrity, passion, and authenticity.

Barry Mills

President, Bowdoin College

Design and Conduct Your Own Workshop or Class

The Citizen Leader is a comprehensive, self-directed guide with a design and flow that allow you to move through the material as if you were using a seminar workbook. It’s all right here for you, your students and your participants to use in a workshop, seminar or class — objectives, explanations, exercises, learning points, illustrations, real-life stories, next steps and summary of questions.

Your opportunity and challenge is to develop your own creative presentation.

With focus, guidance and energy, a group can derive meaningful and applicable benefits by investing approximately eight hours of their time and attention working through the chapters.

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The Citizen Leader: Be the Person You’d Want to Follow

The Citizen Leader is derived from the experience of real people, designed for practical application and intended to benefit anyone who has the genuine desire and the determination to grow personally and professionally as a leader — regardless of title, position or status. 

With real-life stories, illustrations and a fair amount of prompting derived from my twenty years of experience as a consultant, lecturer, teacher and learner, I guide you on an exploration of the essential qualities of an active citizen and an engaging leader, and make individual leadership understandable, personally meaningful and actionable.

The Citizen Leader is structured for you to venture through on your own and at your own pace. It is also designed to let you partner with others — peers, coworkers, family, or friends, in school, at work, at home, in a seminar, in a book club — so together you can use its guidance, exercises and tools to create a forum for reflection, sharing, learning and growth. 

The first half of The Citizen Leader dives deeply into character to help you conduct a rigorous and thorough examination of your values and guiding principles. I will guide you through a process to help you identify and define the handful of principles that truly reflects who you are, today. And I will help you articulate who and how you aspire to be in the future, and why. I will provide you with focused exercises and tools to help you build and maintain a quality of character that will inspire others to willingly follow your lead and want to participate, serve, act and persevere. These exercises and tools will also help you forge a strength of character that can, and will, hold steady in challenging times and circumstances.

The second half of The Citizen Leader provides a tutorial on citizenship in which I frame questions and suggest a process of inquiry to prompt and coach you to ask yourself: What are the causes that I care about in my community? What initiatives could I champion that would contribute to my community? How can I harness the courage to follow through with actions that will move the initiative forward? I call this line of inquiry and application active citizenship.

It is my belief and experience that a candid assessment of character, a conscious commitment to be the person you’d want to follow, and a courageous resolve to be an active citizen are preparation for, and the prerequisites of, engaging leadership – that is, leadership that would inspire other members of a community to want to follow your lead.

It is my hope that the insights you derive from The Citizen Leader will both enrich your life and help you engage the enthusiasm of others to make meaningful contributions in your world.