Don Shapiro

Are you a cattle herder or a cat herder? Find out in this fun and insightful program that shares the latest thinking and research about leadership and what types of leaders produce the best results. In this seminar, Don Shapiro, co-author of The Character-Based Leader, will inspire you to embrace your role as a leader and learn how to develop a leadership character that can build trust. Not all leadership methods are equal when it comes to producing results. While most leadership ideas can help you work better with your people, that alone will not raise your people's performance enough to actually boost results. Research shows there are certain types of leaders that produce higher sales, profits, customer satisfaction, teamwork, employee engagement and employee retention. In community organizations, they get more enthusiastic involvement and commitment from volunteers. Great leadership is about trust and building that trust is about your character...who you are. It's not about your title, position, power or authority. You can be a great leader without a title and having a title does not make you a leader. It's also not about using good human relations techniques. While that can improve how well you deal with people, it takes a lot more than techniques to build the type of trust that can produce exceptional performance. People trust your character, not your title or techniques. When you lead from a character that builds trust, your people will enthusiastically join you in pursuing your goals. Leadership character is a combination of your values and principles, how you see your role as a leader and your attitude toward those you lead. That includes integrity, respect, humility and servant leadership. This seminar will explore the type of leadership character that builds trust and how you can grow into this type of leader.

Time is the great healer. No matter how difficult the circumstances that cross our path, it takes time for our emotions, minds and spirit to process what's happened. Do not let anything or anyone push you to move on too fast or get over it. We all heal in our way at our own speed. This healing cannot be rushed. It's normal and natural to feel overwhelmed, out of sorts and confused when a major change knocks on our door. Whether the loss of a loved one, the breakup of a long time relationship or other event that is emotionally devastating, we need time to heal and adjust. How long that takes depends on the individual. No two people have the same internal clock or the same wiring. Grief is something that we live with for the rest of our life. You don't ever get over it and you're not supposed to. There's nothing wrong with you. Nothing to be fixed. It is perfectly normal to grieve over someone we dearly love for life. Healing means that the initial intensity and frequency of what we are feeling subsides into something that is like a comfortable friend who walks with us. Join Don to learn what grief and other emotionally devastating events are really about, how we can heal from them and how we can best support others in their time of need.

Don't let the experiences of the past limit your vision for the future. A voice from the past may keep telling us we can't be more than we've been. Sometimes, our boss, a co-worker, friends or family may tell us the same thing. We may have had an experience that caused us to doubt our potential. The past is a long series of lessons that give us wisdom, not a barrier that limits who we are or what we can be tomorrow. What we envision and believe shapes our future. If you've been on planet earth for a few decades, you've collected a boatload of experiences. Too often, we allow those experiences to build walls around us that define what we can and can't do, what we can and can't be, what we will and won't be able to accomplish in this life. We let our past choices and experience limit who we are and what we can become. They say experience is the best teacher. Those experiences are there to help us learn things about ourselves, those around us and the way our world works. And they are mighty fine teachers if we take the time to learn the lessons these experiences offer. But those experiences are not meant to teach us limits. They are meant to give us wisdom and perspective. Yet, we unconsciously allow our past experiences to restrain us. Now is the time to realize that all those past experiences are only teachers, not boxes, roadblocks, or brick walls. It isn't the outside world that holds us back. It is our own past that often causes us to put on the brakes too quickly or not go down that road again.

Add up your choices and that's your life. Change your choices and change your life. Everything you do in life begins with a choice. Doing nothing is a choice. Getting out of bed is a choice. Calling a friend is a choice. Changing your routine is a choice. How you talk to your kids is a choice. How you view your situation is a choice. What you think about is a choice. Showing love and compassion is a choice. Even many tiny choices can add up to one big choice. Every choice counts. During our life, we will make over one million choices. Some of those will be conscious and deliberate. Many of them we will put on automatic pilot. All of them together shape how our tree of life grows. So how can we change our choices? Our choices are the sum of how we see ourselves, how we think others see us, our confidence level, our fears, our comfort zone, our past, our situation, our beliefs and whether we trust our inner wisdom. Each choice embodies all that we are and all that we feel and think. To change our choices, we have to change the feelings, perceptions and beliefs that caused those choices. Please join Don to understand how choices shape our life and how we can change our choices to create the life we want.