Leadership and the longing to belong

With author and executive coach Jerry Colonna

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Youtube.

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Jerry Colonna is one of the world’s leading executive coaches. He is also the author of two best selling books Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing up and Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong. At the core of Jerry’s work is the belief that better humans make better leaders.

It is such a gift to speak with someone like Jerry who shares an appreciation for the ideals of wisdom, leadership and beauty. If you have the time to listen to the full episode, I couldn’t recommend it enough.

We discussed Jerry’s career as one of earliest venture capitalists, his work as an executive coach and questions for us to consider that can lead to growth, happiness and a more meaningful life. See the top takeaways below.

Top Takeaways

1. The current state of leadership is that we have an enormous number of people who have power over the lives of other people that who don't know what to do with their own feelings. This results in a lot of toxicity and many challenges for the leaders and those around them.

2. Jerry’s practice of radical self-examination involves removing the masks we wear as a form of self-protection against connection to create more love, safety and belonging for ourselves and others.

3. As leaders, we have a moral responsibility to create environments where people feel safe and to strive to make a broader impact in the world: to bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be.

Resources:

• Reboot Leadership Development

• Jerry’s LinkedIn

• Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing up

• Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong

• Reboot Poem: The Question

• Place by W.S. Merwin

• Adam’s Poem “What Makes A Life”

Full List of Topics Covered:

• The practice of radical self-examination

• Writing Reboot, Jerry’s first book

• Human’s desire for love, safety and belonging

• Defining safety

• Building on Reboot with Reunion, Jerry’s second book

• Our role and responsibility to stand between our ancestors and our descendants

• Wrestling with identity: our own and the ones we project onto others

• The scarcity fallacy promoted in marketing

• Sufficiency and the path to happiness

• Lessons from resistance

Hope you enjoy the conversation, feel free to share and let me know if anything resonates with you in the comments.

-Adam