The proven model that offers powerful and elegant strategies for leaders. How Great Leaders Think: The Art of Reframing uses compelling, contemporary examples to show how more complex thinking is the key to better leadership. Leaders who understand what's going on around them see what they need to do to achieve the results they want.

To lead is to live dangerously. It's romantic and exciting to think of leadership as all inspiration, decisive action, and rich rewards, but leading requires taking risks that can jeopardize your career and your personal life. It requires putting yourself on the line, disrupting the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. And when people resist and push back, there's a strong temptation to play it safe. Those who choose to lead plunge in, take the risks, and sometimes get burned.

What type of leadership is needed in a moment that demands adaptive change? Tod Bolsinger, author of Canoeing the Mountains, is uniquely positioned to explore the qualities of adaptive leadership in contexts ranging from churches to nonprofit organizations. He deftly examines both the external challenges we face and the internal resistance that holds us back. When reflection and relationships are combined into a life of deliberate practice, leaders become both stronger and more flexible.

Explorers Lewis and Clark had to adapt. While they had prepared to find a waterway to the Pacific Ocean, instead they found themselves in the Rocky Mountains. You too may feel that you are leading in a cultural context you were not expecting. You may even feel that your training holds you back more often than it carries you along. Drawing from his extensive experience as a pastor and consultant, Tod Bolsinger brings decades of expertise in guiding churches and organizations through uncharted territory.

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation - especially difficult ones - leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, it teaches listeners how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.

Lament is how we bring our sorrow to God - but it is a neglected dimension of the Christian life for many Christians today. We need to recover the practice of honest spiritual struggle that gives us permission to vocalize our pain and wrestle with our sorrow. Lament avoids trite answers and quick solutions, progressively moving us toward deeper worship and trust.

"I'm tired of helping others enjoy God―I just want to enjoy God for myself." With this painful admission, Ruth Haley Barton invites us to an honest exploration of what happens when spiritual leaders lose track of their souls. Each chapter includes a spiritual practice to ensure your soul gets the nourishment it needs. Forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God is the best choice you can make for yourself and for those you lead.

After eight years of youth ministry and four years planting a church, I was done. It was over. A lethal combination of overwork, misplaced identity, and a stress-induced sense of panic took me out. Our marriage, once a vibrant ministry partnership, began to wobble. We struggled, we fought, and eventually we settled for a child-centric relationship that lacked passion and purpose. But God gave us another chance. We are now experiencing the reality of a marriage on mission. This is our story.

When change requires you to challenge people's familiar reality, it can be difficult, dangerous work. Whatever the context - whether in the private or the public sector - many will feel threatened as you push though major changes. But as a leader, you need to find a way to make it work.

The Enneagram is an ancient personality type system with an uncanny accuracy in describing how human beings are wired, both positively and negatively. In The Road Back to You, Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile forge a unique approach - a practical, comprehensive way of accessing Enneagram wisdom and exploring its connections with Christian spirituality for a deeper knowledge of God and of ourselves.

In this groundbreaking work, based on Will Mancini's 15 years and over 10,000 hours of church team facilitation, God Dreams reveals a simple and powerful planning method that will bring energy and focus to your church like never before.

In this absorbing tale, you watch the timeless principles of servant leadership unfold through the story of John Daily, a businessman whose outwardly successful life is spiraling out of control. He is failing miserably in each of his leadership roles as boss, husband, father, and coach. To get his life back on track, he reluctantly attends a weeklong leadership retreat at a remote Benedictine monastery.

Are you hungry to help others through leadership but don't feel like you have the authority? One of the greatest myths of leadership is that you must be in charge in order to lead. Great leaders don't buy it. Great leaders - whether they have the official authority or not - learn how to be an influential presence wherever they are. In How to Lead When You're Not in Charge, author and pastor Clay Scroggins explains the nature of leadership and what's needed to be a great leader - even when you answer to someone else.

Uproar: Calm Leadership in Anxious Times helps leaders understand the powerful impact that emotional processes have on the people they lead. Peter Steinke, best-selling author of Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times, draws on decades of work on system conflict and personal experiences to share real stories of challenges leaders have faced and how understanding the power of emotions has dramatically influenced their success. In this book, listeners will observe important leadership characteristics.

As the master teacher of positive change through powerful communication, Susan Scott wants you to succeed. To do that, you must transform everyday conversations in effective ways to get your message across.

Speakers often use the words vision, boldness, and influence to describe the characteristics of effective leaders. In The Most Excellent Way to Lead, Perry Noble makes the case that the heart of great leadership lies elsewhere. Perry, despite being voted least likely to succeed in high school, beat the odds against him. Today, he inspires 3,500 people every weekend to live for something greater than themselves. He credits this achievement to the leadership principles he has learned from the Bible.

We are designed for relationships, yet they often bring us pain. In this paradigm-shifting book, Gary Smalley unravels the DNA of relationships: we are made for three great relationships, with God, others, and ourselves, and all relationships involve choice. Gary exposes a destructive relationship dance that characterizes nearly every relationship conflict, and he offers five new dance steps that will revolutionize relationships.

New York Times best-selling author and leadership expert Ken Blanchard’s popular TrustWorks! training program is now available in audiobook form! Trust Works!: Four Keys to Building Lasting Relationships is an insightful guide designed to help people navigate one of the most complex issues that affects all areas of our lives: trust. In Trust Works!, Ken Blanchard, Cynthia Olmstead, and Martha Lawrence demonstrate how to get along better with those around us.

What would you do if you met someone you thought just might be one of Jesus' original disciples still living in the 21st century? That's Jake's dilemma as he meets a man who talks of Jesus as if he had known him, and whose way of living challenges everything Jake had previously known. So You Don't Want to Go To Church Anymore is Jake's compelling journal that chronicles 13 conversations with his newfound friend over a four-year period and how those exchanges turn Jake's world upside-down.

Let's face it. With all the demands of the workplace and all the details of a family, it's only a matter of time before one bumps into the other. And many of us end up cheating our families when the commitments of both collide. In this practical audiobook, Andy Stanley will help you establish priorities and boundaries to protect what you value most.

The coauthors of the New York Times best-selling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: How we see ourselves. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past 15 years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice.

In this unabridged audio download of Sticky Teams, Larry Osborne exposes the hidden roadblocks that often sabotage the health and harmony of even the best intentioned ministry teams. Then, with practical and seasoned advice, he shows what it takes to get a leadership board, ministry team, and an entire congregation headed in the same direction.

Shaunti Feldhahn helps listeners transform any relationship by making three small changes! In a new approach for Shaunti, this book is a cross between a major research study, a self-help book, and a daily step-by-step habit-building plan. It shows listeners how to apply the surprising relationship insights revealed in her earlier million-copy best sellers, why certain actions matter so much, and a specific 30-day plan on what to do to build a very simple habit that will change any relationship for the better.

A deep yet simple guide to revolutionizing the romance-building communication every thriving marriage needs. Love Talk is like no other communication book you've ever listened to. The fruit of years of research by two foremost relationship experts (who also happen to be husband and wife), this book forges a new path to the heart of loving conversation. You'll begin by identifying your security need and determining your personal communication style.

Whether you speak from the pulpit, podium, or the front of a classroom, you don't need much more than blank stares and faraway looks to tell you you’re not connecting. Take heart before your audience takes leave! You can convey your message in the powerful, life-changing way it deserves to be told. An insightful, entertaining parable that's an excellent guide for any speaker, Communicating for a Change takes a simple approach to delivering effectively.

Who Stole My Church? is a fictional story that tells the all-too-real tale of many church communities today. In this audiobook, you can walk alongside an imaginary community, led by real-life pastor Gordon MacDonald and his wife, Gail, and discover how to meet the needs of all believers without abandoning the dreams and desires of any.

"A long and happy marriage." It sounds like the end of a fairy tale - an illusion that modern times have exposed. And it is, if marriage depends on a constant stream of romantic emotion, or even on copious amounts of time or money. Thank the Lord, none of those are necessary. Two thousand years ago, Paul gave women the key to a successful marriage, and it can be summed up in two words: unconditional respect. It's not popular. It doesn't sound fair. It can be hard to imagine. But it works. Nina Roesner has led countless women through this practical and life-changing journey, and in The Respect Dare she offers you the hope that so many others have found. Day by day, true stories and thought-provoking questions will help you apply biblical wisdom to the most important relationship in your life.

For two decades, pastor and leadership consultant Matt Keller has worked with hundreds of influencers, and he has learned that the greatest enhancer or greatest limiter to a person's success is whether someone is teachable. In The Key to Everything, Keller shows how teachability isn't something that some people are born with and others aren't. It is a characteristic that can be learned and grown.

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation badly and suffer the consequences; or check out Crucial Conversations and discover how to communicate best when it matters most. Crucial Conversations gives you the tools you need to step up to life's most difficult and important conversations, say what's on your mind, and achieve the positive resolutions you want.

The most effective leaders know how to connect with people. It's not about power or popularity, but about making the people around you feel heard, comfortable, and understood. While it may seem like some folks are born with a commanding presence that draws people in, the fact is anyone can learn to communicate in ways that consistently build powerful connections. Bestselling author and leadership expert John C. Maxwell offers advice for effective communication to those who continually run into obstacles when it comes to personal success.