As we come into the realization that we cannot keep doing “business as usual” for a variety of reasons, let’s look at how we can translate that into a leadership model that is sustainable in every situation.

In my book, Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance, I present a very simple, yet profound way to lead, based on three pillars: Love of Self, Love of Source, and Love of Others.

When I speak of love, I am talking about the universal concept of love – honoring and valuing one human being to another. Leading with the Love-Based Leadership (LBL) model, we find meaning, authenticity, value, abundance, and purpose in and through our leadership. Those we lead find motivation, creativity, loyalty, commitment to the task, and value in their jobs through meaning.

Many of us share the common desire to find meaning in our daily work. A leadership model based on love recognizes the importance of living holistically by integrating love, health, wellness, work, and spirituality into all aspects of our life.When we lead with the three pillars, we first focus on Love of Self. This is not an egoic love, but rather one where we honor, care for, and respect our self. Love of Self includes the following:

• Intuition – Recognizing this beautiful gift and leveraging it along with our logical thinking

• Truth-telling – Of course with others, and most importantly with ourselves

• Truth-receiving – When we love and honor ourselves, we do not let other people’s non-truths come into play.

• Leverage the power of choice – We can have everything taken away from us except our ability to choose our attitude.

• Perception-shifting – The most powerful leadership tool of all is the ability to perception shift.

• Presence - Showing up – mind, body, and spirit.

• Health & wellness – Taking care of our physical bodies.

When we incorporate the second pillar into our leadership, Love of Source, we seek to connect with our Source. I chose the word, “Source” but you may substitute “God”, “Spirit”, “Universe”, or any other term to describe our life force, our energy, our vitality. This connection fuels:

• Inspiration – Inspiration comes when we are in Spirit

• Creativity - Comes from love and not fear.

• Happiness – Happiness comes from our heart-center.

• Faith – Believing you are not alone and believing in something greater than yourself.

• Perseverance - Our ability to keep going.

• Peace - and contentment are experienced through love of Source

• Love – again, this is the space of our heart-center

In the third pillar, Love of Others, our leadership expands outward to include family, community, and our organization. This practice creates:

• Forgiveness – benefiting others and ourselves

• Knowledge creation – Necessary for organizations to be creative.

• Learning cultures – This phenomenon of course creates learning cultures.

• Shared ownership – There is a strong sense of shared owner, shared power, and collaboration with Love of Others.

• Meaning – you not only discover the meaning for yourself, you also become a conduit for others to have meaningful experiences.

Shifting from “business as usual” to one based on love is transformative. This shift will not only transform your organization; it will transform your life.

Who do you know as a love-based leader and why? Click below to leave a comment!

With love,

Maria