Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit, Revised Third Edition

Finding Our Spiritual Centers

The spiritual journey that we as leaders must take to inspire others begins with ourselves but not necessarily by ourselves. Maria asks Steve to look both inside and outside, because his quest will require both an inner exploration of soul and an external search for communion. To aid in the inner journey, every religious tradition has developed spiritual disciplines—exercises for getting in touch with something bigger. One is prayer, one form of the “heartsong” that Maria offered to Steve. Prayer, Ann and Barry Ulanov tell us, is primary speech. “[It] starts without words and often ends without them. … It works some of the time in signs and symbols, lurches when it must, leaps when it can, has several kinds of logic ...