Lead Compassion: Gunnar George on Creating a World of Hope and Joy

How can we make our common road lead to a world of hope and joy? Our guest today is Gunnar George, author of the book Aha... Wow! Yes, and leadership development expert.

Gunnar George believes that the most effective leaders are those who are compassionate, inspirational, and have a vision that promotes hope, joy, and sustainability. He challenges the notion of transactional communication in business and personal interactions, advocating instead for authentic and emotionally engaging exchanges.

By developing others and maintaining a vision that encompasses societal and global impacts, compassionate leaders can play a significant role in creating a better world.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform to learn how to become an authentic and emotionally engaging leader.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: The first question that I have for you, being someone who wrote a book, is how is the whole experience of writing a book? How your idea for “Aha... Wow! Yes.” came by?

Gunnar George: Oh, the whole experience. It's a long experience, actually. It started many years ago. I thought I wanted to write a book. And I also worked in a company that had a different way of leading. We were consultants working with strategy and big transformations.

And we had a different way of leading change that most of the traditional consulting companies had in those days. So we said to ourselves that we need to write this down sometime. And I had that in the back of my mind for many years. And then I've worked a lot with leadership development programs lately.

And one of the things that I realized is that the more you share, the more you get and sharing is sort of the sharing of knowledge and experiences and views and so on. It's really what that is the core of leadership development.

I met so many fantastic people and been part of extraordinary things in meetings with companies and transformations in big companies and so on. So I thought I need to share myself what I've experienced and what I've noticed and observed. But I didn't want to share it sort of to give advice, more to sort of to share my observations and my reflections on that.

But it is a fantastic experience to see it grow and to see it take form. And then also, another thing is that the people you have around you and the people you meet, as soon as you start to talk about it a little bit, people want to contribute.

And I have a friend who likes Paulo Coelho and he often quotes him and says that you have to be careful what you dream of because universe will conspire to make it happen. And that is sort of joked a little bit about it sometimes. But when you write a book, you see that almost like this is true because people come from suddenly from nowhere and say, I can help you or I can do that.

So it's an amazing experience in that way.

Stephen Matini:When you thought about writing a book, what was your initial biggest wish for the book?

Gunnar George: I wrote it in English, in a simple kind of easy to read English. So I wanted to reach out to as many as possible in the world, not only to English native speaking countries. That was one of the thoughts I had.

And then one of my wishes also that people start to think more about, “Aha... Wow! Yes,” which is the title of the book. That is sort of if we need more emotions in business, we need more emotions in society and positiv