A great metaphor from Jeffrey Cufaude that shows an example for personal leadership and leadership within District 27. Reminds me that my copy of The Leadership Challenge is getting a little lonely on my bookshelf and makes me think it would be a good idea to take another look into it. How can District 27's leaders--Area Governors, Division Governors, Lieutenant Governors, and the District Governor help you get your job done?

If you want to make yourself popular in airports, be the traveler with a multi-outlet power strip in your briefcase.  Its arrival brings sighs of relief from fellow travelers, making you an instant hero as you multiply the outlets available for others to use.

We would be wise to think similarly in our leadership efforts.  Whether you oversee a small project or an entire organization, more of your attention needs to focus on enabling others to act, one of the five leadership practices from The Leadership Challenge.

When we are in positions of leadership, our attention must focus on building the organizational culture and supportive policies and systems that make it easier for others to act in pursuit of our mission, vision, and goals.   We break through barriers, help dismantle obstacles, and introduce accelerators to progress.  This is our work ... helping others do theirs.  It is clock-building, not time telling as described by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last.

No doubt right now some of your colleagues have ideas in need of a little power boost to get in motion.  You could be (or bring) the outlet they need to jumpstart their efforts.

Spurred by health care trends and technological advances, telemedicine is growing into a mainstream industry. A fifth of Americans live in places where primary care physicians are scarce, according to government statistics. That need is converging with advances that include lower costs for video-conferencing equipment, more high-speed communications links by satellite, and greater ability to work securely and dependably over the Internet.

This from the business section, so the focus seems to be more on the macroeconomic than individual care, but it's good to see changes that can bring better care to more people at reasonable cost. Today's paper also had an article on crowdsourcing and medicine. 

So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.

So much meaning in a two-letter utterance!

I now experience a different, more subtle connection between mind and body. It does not require that I flex muscles. It does not dissipate in the presence of increasing inward silence.

… It does require, however, that I seek more profoundly within my own experience and do so with an open mind. It means that I must reach intuitively into what may feel like darkness.

Matthew Sanford told an amazing story on Speaking of Faith this morning that so far I've only heard in dribs and drabs. Krista Tippett's introduction was "We explore what he's learned about the grace of the human body — even through trauma and aging." This sounds like a story tailor-made for me, and I can hardly wait to give it the attention it deserves.

I was taken with this video on many levels. It reminded me how much I loved learning and how much I struggled against my own schooling. What if? What if we could really learn to to value people because every day and in everything they did they were spreading their dreams before us? And what if we learned to recognize that everything we do is a gift to those we live with?