$5.00 - Language of Leadership

The New Language of Leadership:
Purpose, Presence, and Commitment

S. Kanu Kogod, PhD, MCC

"As I considered the importance of language and how human beings interact with the world, it struck me that in many ways the development of language was like the discovery of fire–it was such an incredible primordial force. I had always thought that we used language to describe the world–now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it's nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe." Joseph Jaworski

Language: Our Human Gift

Language comes so naturally to us that we seldom stop to think about what an amazing gift it is. As well-known author Steven Pinker says, all over the world humans fashion their breath into “hisses and hums and squeaks and pops” and listen to others do the same. Why? It is not the sounds themselves, but rather it is because these sounds create meaning for us. Information and feelings generated from language are the means of sharing our ideas in all their “unfathomable vastness.” When we listen to others speaking, we can be lead to thoughts that we have never thought before and that may never have occurred to us on our own.