As we close out this month of Love, let’s look at how we can translate that into a love-based leadership model. In my book, Love-Based Leadership: Transform Your Life with Meaning and Abundance, I present a very simple, yet profound way to lead based on three pillars: Love of Self, Love of Source, and Love of Others.
Leading with the Love-Based Leadership (LBL) model, we find meaning, authenticity, value, abundance, and purpose in and through our leadership. Those we lead find motivation, creativity, loyalty, commitment to the task, and value in their jobs through meaning.
Many of us share the common desire to find meaning in our daily work. A leadership model based on love recognizes the importance of living holistically by integrating love, health, wellness, and spirituality into all aspects of our life.
When we lead with the three pillars, we first focus on Love of Self. This is not an egoic love, but rather one where we honor, care for, and respect our self. While developing this pillar, we look to develop:
When we incorporate the second pillar into our leadership, Love of Source, we seek to connect with our Source. This connection fuels:
In the third pillar, Love of Others, our leadership expands outward to include family, community, and our organization. This practice creates:
Shifting from fear to love is transformative. This shift will not only transform your organization; it will transform your life.
With love,
Maria
Meaningful Leadership and "The Why"
Did you know the majority of heart attacks occur around nine on Monday mornings? “One study showed that the most common factor in these heart attacks was that the victims were people whose work had become joyless striving. In other words, they could not find meaning in their work, and their lives had become so out of balance that, one Monday morning, their bodies said, You are not going to work today. Zap.”
While we look for more meaning in our lives at work, home, and play, and until we begin to find that meaning, we are unsettled. Did you ever notice how challenges in our lives cause us to ask, Why? We ask, because we want to make sense of the situation. We want to understand the meaning behind the event, so we can move on. When we don’t find meaning, we become disillusioned, lack motivation, and find substitutes for meaningful experiences. Some of us choose substitutes that may be unhealthy or destructive. Some of us just go through the motions and become human doings instead of human beings. Some of us succumb to overwhelming stress when we believe we are living a meaningless life. Even worse, some of us just give up on life when we perceive our lives to lack meaning.
A few simple steps to start you on the path of self-discovery and meaning: 
As always, I love hearing from you. What do you do to go inward?
With love,
Maria
Professionalism, Leadership & Love
Ahhh, the month of love.
In this month, many of us have love on the mind. Being an advocate of love myself, I too, find myself daydreaming of how grand the gift of love is in my life. Imagine for a moment, if we could harness the love we feel and translate that into our leadership. Now of course, I am not talking about romantic love. I am talking about universal love; the love we feel as one human to another. This love is honoring, valuing, and respecting each other. This is a love of Namaste, honoring the spirit of another. 
As leaders, we are taught to de-compartmentalize a love such as this. We are taught to remove ourselves from any emotion (including love) and be “professional” as if being professional makes us non-human or even worse, super-human. This practice, and many of us have gotten this concept down good, has propelled us in our careers, but also has left us empty.
Emotional intelligence teaches us to recognize our emotions and manage them in healthy ways. Managing our emotions does not mean shoving them down and ignoring them. We know from experience this only gives our emotions time to grow and mutate into emotions that are exaggerated, misdirected, and sometimes manifest in disease and illness.
Being professional does not need to mean being distant, aloof, uncaring, and impersonal. We are in a world of transition and change. We are in a world where many of us are creating new models for living. In this spirit and in the spirit of love, let’s create a new professionalism. Let's create a professionalism that stands for something powerful, serving, supportive, and love-filled.
I am thinking a new professionalism looks like this:
Present
Reflective
Open-minded
Free
Empathetic
Service-minded
Source-connected
Inclusive
Openhearted
Non-judgmental
Aligned with values
Loving
How would you create a new professionalism?
With love,
Maria
Just Ask
As leaders, we often buy into the perception (more likely than not, self-imposed perception) that we must know the answers, be strong, and just like the Energizer bunny, keep going, going, and going.
Enough already!
As leaders, the most important lesson we can model and teach others is that we are human. 
As humans and leaders, we do not always have the answers. This requires us to fess up and be honest. Big deal, we don’t have the answer. The difference between leaders and non-leaders is that we will find the answer…whatever it takes, we will find out. This may require us to do some research or ask someone else, who may have the answer. We may also need to tap into our intuition for inner wisdom to solve the surface question. And, my favorite resource of all, ask your Source, who is always available 24/7, always honest, and always right on target.
The perception that leaders are always strong is like saying it is always sunny. Just as nature has beautifully shown us, there are seasons to life. As living, breathing human beings, we too, have seasons. Our strength does not come by us always standing, our strength is our ability to get up again after we fall. Sometimes, this requires us to ask for help. The beautiful benefit of our asking is that the helper receives a gift too, by serving. This is a win-win exchange. It can’t get much better than that!
We cannot keep going, going, going. This is unrealistic and quite frankly, dangerous to our physical body, emotional health, and spiritual growth. We are not super-human, so we must stop pretending to be…it is killing us! We need to learn to ask for re-charge time and then take it! Your mind, body, and spirit will thank you.
What is the most challenging thing for you to ask? As always, I love to hear from you.
Abundant blessings,
Maria