This new eBook by Mike Bell will interest leaders and leadership coaches.
It highlights the 'Is this it? Is this all there is?' dilemma that can arise in mature leaders who seem to have lost their focus.
What do you - as a leader - do if the leadership or executive role begins to pall? If you have a growing feeling that that life as an executive is not what you had anticipated? As a leadership coach, do you work with executives who are in that situation? At some point during my professional life, I read that executives, leaders and managers may get bored at some later stage in their careers.
'Whaaat?!' I was incredulous! I had moved into a role supervising practitioners and managing professional development.
There it was - in black and white - 'coaches and supervisors may find themselves working with managers and leaders who are bored by what they do.
' 'It'll never happen to me - I LOVE what I do,' I thought.
I was wrong.
How about you? Are you an exec or a business or corporate leader who is marking time, treading water? Are you a coach working with someone who is stressed or burned out? As a leader, do you remember the time when leading your team, your section or your department was the reason you got up in the morning? And probably the reason you stayed late? Problems were fascinating, solving them tapped into your creativity and engaged you completely.
There was a time when you'd happily go to great lengths to plan, strategise, enthuse, coach, cajole, bluster or demand.
You'd do whatever it took to make yourself heard in the boardroom, the senior management team meeting, by the coffee dispenser.
Whatever it took.
You were committed.
You were passionate.
Your people responded to that.
You got noticed and climbed the success ladder rapidly.
But something changed.
Slowly, imperceptibly and insidiously.
The energy drained away, you lost your focus, your passion and your lustre.
Your work lost its meaning.
In the book, Essential Business Coaching (Routledge, 2007, page 69) Leimon, Moscovici and McMahon describe the development of this scenario well -

Coaching has a huge impact when people reach the stage of questioning the purpose and value of what they are doing and contemplating later stages of their careers as leaders.
Senior executives have usually worked with focus and determination to achieve success in business.
They spent the first part of their lives training for success and the next stage working hard to achieve it.
For many, the times comes when they wonder, 'Is this it?' Somehow the satisfaction they had expected is less rich than they had hoped for and does not have the power to motivate them for the next stage in their lives.
In a sense, they are bored [that word again!], but they often also begin to question whether they still value what they are doing.

Green Lightning, a modern fable of balanced leadership In Green Lightning, Mike Bell explores this phenomenon through the experiences of Leo, who has just been promoted.
He travels long haul to give a keynote speech to new colleagues in Asia - his first in his new role.
We first meet Leo in a pretty grumpy mood, buried in his thoughts, phased by an extrovert character he has a brush with at the airport.
It's beginning to occur to Leo that his company needs to break some of its more conservative ways.
He can see what needs to be done, has some glimpses of possible alternatives, but seems to retreat into his shell.
He realises that he's spending a lot of time re-living the past or fretting about the future.
He realises that his present moments are few, dimly experienced as if through a veil.
Could he appear moody, tuned-out and insensitive? Guess so.
Gradually, Leo's experiences - and his introspections - start to stack up.
They seem to falling into a sequence, to be gathering momentum.
Where are they heading? It's a good story, well-told.
So I won't deprive you of journeying along with Leo by telling a pale version here.
I recognise Leo's dilemma.
That's how I felt.
My journey has been different, but it touches Leo's in enough places to resonate.
Leadership Coaching As a coach, I'll use this fable to help some of my clients articulate their own fears and anxieties about their role.
I'll use the book to help break down feelings of isolation.
I'll ask clients to describe ways in which their own situation mirrors or differs from Leo's.
In coach training, I'll use the story to provide the background for role-plays for simulated coaching sessions.
In my own jaded and fruitless times, Leo's story may have made uncomfortable reading.
It may also have encouraged me to question my own motives at an early stage - and find a coach! I think that if - as a leadership coach - you hand this story to a client, you will provide an opportunity to explore issues that are sometimes difficult to articulate.
You will give your clients permission to reflect on problems that may be on the fringes of their awareness.
I think they'll thank you for it.
Green Lightning - about the author and the book Mike Bell is a successful business coach.
He has been consulting for twenty years.
He is a graduate of the Tavistock Institute (London) and the Ehama Institute (New Mexico).
He was previously a marketing manager with Procter and Gamble.
The book is well presented.
It is nicely illustrated with images - some breathtaking - quotes and stories...
(By the way, 'Have you heard the one about the barnacle that...
?' Hilarious! And - as you'd expect - it carries a poignant message.
) The appendix clarifies some of the background to Leo's pathway.
The narrative is informed by the ancient wisdom of the native American way, teachings that Bell has studied - and lived - at the Ehama Institute.
Other writers have explored the intersection between ancient wisdom and organisational development fruitfully.
Mike Bell's book adds to that literature in a very accessible way.
I look forward to more.