Motivational and leadership books, workbooks, and CDs that will help you manage your career, build your business, create true wealth, and achieve your personal and professional goals. SparkStore.com is also the home of CourageWear – Apparel with Altitude!

Proven strategies for goal-setting, personal motivation, leadership development, and life success. You will learn how to:

• Dream bigger and think more creatively.
• Confront your fears with courage and determination.
• Stop procrastinating and use your time more productively.
• Overcome inner barriers holding you back from being your best.
• Be more effective as a leader – and as a parent.
• Achieve your most authentic goals.
• Become the person you are truly meant to be.
  

Values-based life and leadership strategies:

Motivation: Be your own Success Coach by applying the strategies in these books and CDs to your work and your life.

Leadership: Learn how you can be a more effective leader at work, at home, and in your community.

Goal-Setting: Stop cheating yourself with anemic goals and dreams!

Team-Building: Learn from the greatest leaders in history and fiction how to motivate your team for achievement.

Wealth and Money: Achieve your financial goals by living your values.

Spiritual and Emotional Strength: The ultimate benefit of values-based living is the emotional equanimity and spiritual peace that you gain.

Price: $15.00

The Lord of the Rings is more than one of the bestselling books of all time and a blockbuster movie – it is also a story of leadership, team-building, and goal achievement that offers powerful lessons for real world leaders. Leadership Lessons shows how real world leaders can become more effective at building teams and achieving results by learning from Middle-earth masters of the art. Richly illustrated with real-world examples of leadership, and immediately applicable to leadership in every corner of your organization.

Special Bonus: Joe’s audio CD The Greatest Leaders Who Never Lived: Leadership Lessons from the Fiction’s Greatest Characters .

Excerpt from Leadership Lessons – What You Can Learn from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Classic Works

UNCHAIN PEOPLE FROM JOB DESCRIPTIONS
When Gandalf sent Bilbo and the dwarves off to vanquish Smaug, he did not give each of them a job description. Even so, the dragon was slain and the treasure recovered. Nor did Elrond, lord of the elves, give job descriptions to members of the Fellowship of the Ring. Even so, Frodo and Sam found their way into Mordor and destroyed the Ring. Job descriptions, no matter how broadly worded, would have restricted their latitude for action. At different times, leadership shifted from Gandalf to Aragorn to Frodo, and even to Sam. What if only Gandalf's job description had included "leading the team" under the heading of duties?

A massive research project by the Gallup organization (documented in First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman and Now, Discover Your Strengths by Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton) concluded that of workers in the large organizations they surveyed, only about 20 percent felt they were really able to utilize their greatest strengths at work on a regular basis. Twenty percent! Think of the lost potential!

Why don't organizations do a better job of capitalizing on their people's strengths? One of the main reasons is that they force-fit people – with their infinite variety of strengths, talents and interests – into all-too-finite job descriptions. Then, rather than focusing on the strengths that make the individual unique and that can add enormous value to the organization, training and supervisory resources are devoted to patching up weaknesses in an attempt to bring people up to the minimum requirements of their job description. I often hear managers talk about how they're trying to get people to think outside of the box. Don't they realize that they're the ones who put people into the box to begin with – the box of the job description?

A job description can be a disempowering and counterproductive management tool. It unwittingly deprives organizations of people's best thinking, creativity and emotional fire by putting them into pigeonholes that severely limit their potential for contribution. For many individual employees, job descriptions create a comfort zone that fosters complacence and inertia.