Goals alone aren't enough to make your path clear

we never walk alone, no matter the weather

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  Our Story

  Leader’s Walk is a sharp departure from established leadership development practices and programs.
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  The Walking

  Our process guides you to new insights, wisdom and levels of success that might otherwise remain hidden from you.
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  Learnings

  Whatever challenges your company faces, developing great leaders will help you solve them. We help build leaders.
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  Events

  Discover an event near you, or contact us to bring Leader’s Walk to your company, or to your  community.

The Founder

Jim Ericson, Story Master

Jim Ericson is a seeker and discoverer of wisdom. Jim looks to find the nuggets of concentrated intelligence that can provide guidance to a world searching for its footing, a world of massive change and considerable disruption. To accomplish this, he became a Story Master. He is constantly wading through a wide range of thinkers and minds to find some essence, some kernel of value that speaks to us today. The value that Jim brings to us is as a curator of essential knowing: there are some thoughts and ways of seeing the world that are essential to thriving and being balanced.

As a Story Master, Jim understands that we live by our stories…that our personal narratives comprise our way of understanding the world. And so, Jim is a finder and keeper of stories. He digs out essential stories. He brings together fundamental stories that call attention to significant wisdom, stories create bridges of understanding…connections among a myriad of ideas…to help us deal creatively with various pressing issues, human problems, and life opportunities.

As a Story Master, Jim also understands that insights don’t just come from a good story. Rather, it’s the conversations, fresh questions and the listening they evoke that can lead to lights going on and insights being discovered. As a Story Master, Jim serves the story, the telling, and, most importantly, the listening.

Businesses today are long on managers and short on leaders. As a result they are investing mightily in leadership development… or what they think is leadership development.

Specifically, they focus on the external, on what can be seen, quantified, standardized and learned by rote — a defined set of behaviors in the form of skills, tactics, techniques, competencies and strategies. And while this “cookie cutter” approach might work for developing supervisors or managers, it is neither sufficient nor of the first order when it comes to developing leaders.

We help people become someone others will follow because of their strength at their core and power of their path, rather than because of their job title, position, or ability to invoke fear.

Leaders Walk is an insight-generating machine, and while we can’t tell you exactly what lights will go on for you during your walking, we guarantee many will…and that they will transform you in good ways.

Leaders Walk Uses 5 Simple Points That Teach You How to Learn, As Well As How to Lead 

Every story, every session, is designed to spark a conversation that engages your mind, heart and soul. They will all stand alone, yet still be way points on a continuing arc. You will walk away from each session, not with a neatly wrapped up package and point of learning, but with threads of knowledge that draw you to your own wisdom. If you remain open and curious, and follow the threads, you will learn something fresh, tangible, and transformative to your life and relationships and impactful on your career.  (Click on the bars below to read more about each point.)

“Sherpa” means “Easterner” in Tibetan, and the sherpas who settled there 450 years ago are a peace-love people from the Eastern show of the plateau. They are also compulsive travelers. “In Sherpa-country,  every track is marked with cairns and prayer-flags as a reminder that Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.” — Bruce Chatwin, “What Am I doing Here?”

Leaders Walk is a journey. It’s an opportunity to challenge your ideas, assumptions, models and maps, and see the world with fresh eyes. It will provoke, inspire, disturb and dare you. It will press you to answer the key questions about your life and work.

• What brought you to now?
• What results do you want to create going forward?
• What people, challenges, or thoughts do you run from?
• What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
• What sustains you from the inside out when things fall apart?

“The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ‘ideas,’ of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions.” – Peter Matthiessen, “The Snow Leopard”

[/bra_toggle] [bra_toggle collapsable=”no” caption=”II.   We Focus on Character…Not Personality”]We seek to develop primary greatness…right values, right seeing, right choices, and right action. We leave secondary greatness…technical, tactical and strategic competencies…for another time and place.

You will travel to you center, and know the place for the first time. You will uncover your unique potential for greatness, and begin to work on becoming the powerful, one-of-a-kind person…and leader…you can be.

We help you uncover that wisdom this lives around you, and in you, so that you can bring that unique something alive in the world that no one else can.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma…which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They some how already know what you truly want. Everything else is secondary.”

– Steve Jobs

We move on to find our song…and learn to sing it in our own voice…by walking and gathering insight from four different paths. (read more…)

[/bra_toggle] [bra_toggle collapsable=”no” caption=”III.   We Use an Ancient Learning Technology”]

Collaborative conversations are the principal driver of learning and innovation in today’s organizations. They carry news, spread intellectual capital, create meaning, foster cooperation, spark creativity, and strengthen personal relationships. Of course, conversations always have been the most powerful force on Earth for such things…

Wisdom accrues…and ideas are born…in the space between people as they think aloud together. Therefore, most of your time will be spent in conversation in pairs and in small groups…and with people whose habits, experiences, and world views are different from yours. And you won’t simply trade old ideas and stories. You’ll reshape them. Repurpose them. Combine them. Draw different conclusions from them. See new possibilities in them.

These conversations will change you. They won’t just shuffle the songs on you iPod. They’ll fill it with new ones.

“In excited conversation, we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

[/bra_toggle] [bra_toggle collapsable=”no” caption=”IV.  We Have Stories…Not Bullet Points”]

We are hard-wired to think in metaphors and learn from stories. If we want to know ourselves…or our companies…we must know our stories.

If we want to change, we must change our stories.

We use the language of story…rather than the frozen lexicon of business…to change your eyes and allow you to look at the world, business, and life from incredibly different vantage points. Some of our stories are yanked from today’s headlines. Some are mined from older, deeper quarries. Either way, they’ll lead you to right questions, novel connections, game-changing ideas, and new ways of walking.

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives…the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change…truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” – Salman Rushdie

[/bra_toggle] [bra_toggle collapsable=”no” caption=”V.   We Steer Clear of Business Speak”]

We believe the language of business has lost much of its edge due to overuse. As a result, most conversations at work are pretty much the same, and so are the meetings we attend. Spontaneity? Candor? Novelty? No. Business speak is a frozen lexicon that limits our seeing, narrows our thinking, and lowers our chances for success both now and in the future.

“Lessons from business books never stick. Much better learning tools are novels, history books and biographies. For me, at least, these can really teach. Why? I suppose it’s because when your imagination is engaged, when you dig the lessons out yourself and connect them to your own life, the learning goes much deeper.” – Rich Karlgaard, publisher, Forbes Magazine

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Here are some facts about how Leaders Walk can help develop the leaders you need:

1.  Managers can succeed with skills & tactics; Leaders succeed most powerfully if they have character within
2. Character can’t be taught, it can only be developed from the heart
3. To consciously develop leadership muscles requires an openness to the process
4. The process involves deep conversations built around transformative stories (and has since we lived in caves)
5. Humans are hard-wired to learn through story and metaphor
6. Leaders Walk engages our own hard-wiring to guide the development and success of good leaders

Here are some results your organization can expect from the Leaders Walk Process