Offering a new lens on leadership and living, this research-based guide shows how to design experiences that can touch hearts, provoke minds, and change lives in powerful ways. Transformative experiences are life events that change our sense of self in important ways. How do they work? What elements do they require? How can we learn to design them intentionally? By embracing the research-based approach of ELVIS (the Experiential Learning Variables and Indicators System), this book details how to recast yourself as an Experience Design Leader, one that can provide those in your organization with the opportunities needed to reflect and grow as individuals. Beginning with the ELVIS Framework, you will gain deep foundational insight into how transformative experiences work. And then with the ELVIS Toolkit, which includes seven practical design elements, you will have the key to unlocking these powerful experiences for yourself and others. Whether you are new to the idea of designing experiences for others or are a seasoned veteran, ELVIS shows you how to tap into the psychology operating behind the most powerful and important experiences of our lives-those that shape who we are.

Lessons Learned from Stories of Adult Intentional Change that led to Sustained Transformation, and their implications for Organizational Change and Transformation. This book yields insights about individual circumstances surrounding personal change journeys and how they eventually emerged into a new life of meaning, purpose and destiny. Are the processes of change and transformation the same? What provokes self-initiated (intentional) change in midlife? In a compelling study Inspiring Lives: Personal Stories of Sustained Transformation, author Myrna Araneta, Ph.D., examines the circumstances and processes involved in self-initiated and transformative adult change that yields insights about why and how people intentionally change in midlife. Using descriptive metaphors from nature, this book reveals some lessons learned that offer insights to individuals who will need to undergo a similar journey and their lessons and implications for organizational change and transformation. This book reveals that multiple circumstances that provoked transformative change include external experiences that created internal crises, dilemmas, discomfort, and the leap of faith to innovate one’s life. Findings also suggest that pathways to successful transformation is not one long straight road from a starting point to a finish line but, that it unfolds as a lengthy, evolving, and challenging process. An enlightening read, Inspiring Lives: Personal Stories of Sustained Transformation is filled with insights and lessons that can be utilized and implemented by others seeking to create their own process of change that may lead to personal transformation.

A journey into holistic transformation that can impact every areaofyour life—social, emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual—allowing you to live more deliberately and joyfully Will I ever feel like "me" again? Am I on the right track? How will I reach my dreams and find happiness? Based on her comprehensive qualitative research, Suzy Ross identifies thirteen phases of personal transformation—processes thatform an upright figure 8—to guide you along your path toward wholeness. Readers will learn the map by entering into the stories of two ordinaryindividuals who face life-changing experiences that bring them into and throughthe depths of crisis to emerge transformed and whole. Equipped with The Map to Wholeness, we can understand the deeper purpose behind major life eventsand seemingly ordinary circumstances.

This isn’t a book about BECOMING it’s about BEING: noted psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy shows how to imagine the person you want to be, then BE that person now. When you do this, your imagined FUTURE directs your behavior, rather than your past. Who is your Future-Self? That question may seem trite. But it’s literally the answer to all of your life’s questions. It’s the answer to what you’re going to do today. It’s the answer to how motivated you are, and how you feel about yourself. It’s the answer to whether you’ll distract yourself on social media for hours, whether you’ll eat junk food, and what time you get up in the morning. Your imagined Future-Self is the driver of your current reality. It is up to you to develop the ability to imagine better and more expansive visions of your Future-Self. Your current view of your Future-Self is very limited. If you seek learning, growth, and new experiences, you’ll be able to imagine a different and better Future-Self than you currently can. It’s not only useful to see your Future-Self as a different person from who you are today, but it is also completely accurate. Your Future-Self will not be the same person you are today. They will see the world differently. They’ll have had experiences, challenges, and growth you currently don’t have. They’ll have different goals and priorities. They’ll have different habits. They’ll also be in a different world—a world with different cultural values, different technologies, and different challenges.

As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to--by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience--we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.

August Turak is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning author who attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey for seventeen years. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses. Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success. It is an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, Turak shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. He demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. Turak also introduces other "transformational organizations" that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.

Most of us live our lives worn out with stress, anxiety, and emotional chaos. Moreover, the law of adaptations shows us that the more we experience any internal state, the more it becomes the operating system of our life. From Mindfulness to Heartfulness offers another path. It invites you on your own transformative journey to live life at your fullest capacity. It will show you how you have become who you are, and it will offer you a blueprint for change. It will show you how heartfulness, embodied, calms the threat and fear that so often consumes you, and it will offer you a step-by-step approach to one of calm and connection, including a loving connection with yourself. It will show you that love, compassion, and connection are trainable and allow you to tap into your deepest potential. It will show you that healing is possible through heartfulness for yourself, and it will demonstrate the transformative power of every moment. Built on the foundations of mindfulness, you will experience the miracle of heartfulness. This miracle emerges when we seek and actively engage in whatever life-generating opportunity each moment holds. When we fully embody heartfulness, our bodies transform, our lives transform, and the whole of our existence transforms.

The structure of the United Church of Christ, and its well-being, depends upon shared leadership: between ministers and congregations, between congregations, between believers with diverse life experiences, across regions with varied histories. That quality of collaboration is often understated – in contrast to the United Church of Christ’s more public pronouncements – yet the ethos of shared leadership may be one of the UCC’s greatest gifts to a secular world that is increasingly narrated by division and platform.

In this inspiring guide to successful leadership, New York Times bestselling author John C. Maxwell shares his tried and true principles for maximum personal growth. Are there tried and true principles that are always certain to help a person grow? John Maxwell says the answer is yes. He has been passionate about personal development for over fifty years, and for the first time, he teaches everything he has gleaned about what it takes to reach our potential. In the way that only he can communicate, John teaches . . . The Law of the Mirror: You Must See Value in Yourself to Add Value to Yourself The Law of Awareness: You Must Know Yourself to Grow Yourself The Law of Modeling: It's Hard to Improve When You Have No One But Yourself to Follow The Law of the Rubber Band: Growth Stops When You Lose the Tension Between Where You are and Where You Could Be The Law of Contribution: Developing Yourself Enables You to Develop Others This third book in John Maxwell's Laws series (following the 2-million seller The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork) will help you become a lifelong learner whose potential keeps increasing and never gets "used up."