Leading from the Inside Out: The Art of Self-Leadership Review

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Leading from the Inside Out: The Art of Self-Leadership ReviewI like leadership books, and I was fully expecting to enjoy this one. Though I didn't find it to be particularly problematic or irritating, it was decidedly unremarkable. I don't think that Rima offered many, if any, new ideas that haven't already been addressed more thoroughly or more compellingly in other leadership books.
The main idea of the book is that leaders (and this book is really written to pastors, though the author pretends that its audience is more diverse) need to take care of their own character and personal junk before trying to lead an organization like the church. He offers a handful of examples of fallen leaders to point out that those who are not conscientious to get their own lives in order are prone to very public and destructive falls from leadership prominence, no matter how strong their leadership capacity might otherwise be. This primary premise is solid and hard to refute.
After making the case for self-leadership and describing a rather contrived, if potentially helpful, process for defining some personal values and goals into what he calls a personal constitution, Rima spends the second half of the book explaining the specific areas where leaders need to proactively pursue self-leadership: spiritual, physical, emotional, and intellectual venues. Again, there is nothing controversial or particularly groundbreaking about any of these categories. Rima is right to suggest that leaders need to attend to these areas of their lives. The problem is that he offers nothing new or particularly challenging.
Where Rima is most helpful is when he gets more specific. For instance, in his call to life-long learning, he describes the value that he gains from reading biographies of all sorts of people. Though I have often heard leadership gurus lay out the challenge that leaders need to be readers, I've not heard someone so specifically explicate the potential value of the genre of biography, which I rarely, if ever, read. I am intrigued to consider which biographies I might like to investigate over the next year or so.
I also appreciated his willingness to do a little soap-box sermonizing, especially regarding the stupor that television has beset upon the modern evangelical community. Church leaders would do well to consider the challenge that Rima offers to seriously curtail the amount of television that we invest as an all-too-normal part of American life.
Less helpful was his near-obsession with physical appearance, which bordered on some form of vanity. Though he promotes physical well-being in a way that causes overweight folks like myself to ponder, I think he goes a bit overboard. He slams the church for using food as an instrument of celebration, but any understanding of sociology and even biblical accounts suggests that food is and always has been a completely natural and even holy part of Christian celebration. Heaven is described as a feast with its obvious analogy of consuming good food, so to suggest that the church would be better off to celebrate God's work while avoiding food seems to point us away from one of the best gifts that God has given us. Though food, like all good things, can become an idol or an addiction, it is no healthy corrective measure to suggest its complete avoidance within church practices.
Overall, this book is fine, if largely benign. There is little that is particularly helpful and nothing that seems especially detrimental. For a better leadership book for church leaders, read Bill Hybels' "Courageous Leadership."
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