Leading Thoughts for May 22, 2025

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Dan Thurmon on testing yourself:

“When uncertainty and randomness strike, whether the immediate perception is threatening or exciting, you don’t take it personally. You simply see it as a new factor to incorporate into your life. This is not about the challenge coming at you. It’s about the challenge coming from you. It’s not what’s testing you, but how you are choosing to test yourself.”

Source: Positive Chaos: Transform Crisis into Clarity and Advantage

II.

Dean Williams on helping people face challenges:

“The first challenge of leadership is to get people to wake up to the fact there is a problem—that the group is avoiding some aspect of reality, ignoring a threat, or missing a great opportunity. To get the people to wake up and face the problem is an activist challenge. Often the problem is embedded in people’s values and behavior. The people might espouse one view but act in ways that are not consistent with that view. The leadership task in an activist challenge is to call attention to the contradiction in values and intervene to disrupt the thinking and patterns of behavior that allow the people to persist in avoiding the reality of their condition.”

Source: Real Leadership: Helping People and Organizations Face Their Toughest Challenges

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Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

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