Things are going to be different around here this year.
You’re going to shake things up, for starters. No more status quo, no more complacency. You’re going to think better, do better, be better than ever before and you’re going to bring your entire staff along with you.
Read “This is How We Rise” by Claudia Chan, and you could find your blueprint for change.
It’s all bad. That’s how it might feel these days. You’ve been watching the news too much, you’ve got Holiday Hangover, shoulda, woulda, coulda. That “deep unhappiness,” says Chan, may send you on a search that’s all good. It may show you a path to leadership.
Sometimes, while moving forward in life or career, it’s easy to forget that making a difference starts with an individual. It might even begin with a household change that grows to encompass a community and beyond, multiplying its effects.
One way to do that is to “lift women.”
Research, Chan says, shows that there’s a “competitive edge” for businesses that utilize a female workforce to its utmost. Doing so will not only help the individual, but it will resonate socially and culturally; it also helps the men on your team to make them partners in this endeavor.
If you are a woman who wants to make a change but are afraid to do so, Chan says that you have a responsibility to stand up for other women. You can do that by cultivating a take-charge atmosphere through her “Foundational Pillars of Personal Leadership:”
This is How We Rise
by Claudia Chan
c.2017, Lifelong Books
$26
288 pages
Find your purpose. Know where your knowledge and assistance are needed most by looking back at your life to see how you were changed by challenge.
Find your vision and maintain faith in yourself. Learn to overcome obstacles, have a strategy, be humble but grateful, and remember to take care of yourself.
Finally, remember that what you’re about to do will matter – even if it’s years down the road. The legacy you leave, says Chan will make an impact.
There was a big, big part of me that started “This is How We Rise” with the highest of hopes. Alas, those hopes were dashed.
Part religion, part new-age, part sociology, part feminism, there’s business inside this book but it’s overwhelmed by wordiness. Yes, the author writes extensively about leadership, but it’s exhausting to read about it because of all the other things you must get past first. You’d absolutely be forgiven if your thoughts drifted…
Having said that, however, I think there truly is an audience for this book – but it’s not necessarily business.
“This is How We Rise” is great for new college grads whose focus is to gain experience through social issues and change-based start-ups – but be warned: the above caveats still hold. This book is just too wordy.
So. Wrap it up for a millennial; this book belongs in her hands. If you’ve already been in business for awhile, you may find “This is How We Rise” to be a little bit too different.
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in more than 260 publications in the U.S. and Canada.