Welcome to Friday 411, issue #134. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll rediscover the beauty of leadership and learn how to help others see the future you’ve been trying to show them all along.
1 Insight
True leaders don’t just see what is; they help others see what could be.
Somebody knocked on our door last night at 10 p.m.
It startled me (Dorothy) a little. My friends had just left after our monthly book club, and the house was quiet. The dishwasher hummed, and the scent of chili and cinnamon rolls still hung in the air. I looked at Garland—who’s usually asleep by this time—wondering if one of the ladies had left her coat behind.
When I opened the door, my friend, Leslie, stood there, cheeks flushed from the cold. “You’ve got to come outside,” she said, a little out of breath from climbing our steep driveway. “You can see the Northern Lights from your yard!”
I laughed, thinking she must be joking. We live in Knoxville, not Norway. But she insisted. Our 15-year-old son and Garland and I stepped barefoot onto the 29-degree sidewalk.
Above the rooftops, I could see a faint red hue stretched across the sky—soft, like watercolor brushed thin over midnight blue. I might have missed it if she hadn’t told us to look.
Then she said, “It’s even better if you look through your camera.”
I pulled out my phone and pointed it toward the sky. My screen lit up with streaks of red and purple, glowing and alive. I gasped. Through that small lens, the sky transformed into something radiant, almost otherworldly.
We stood there for a long moment, whispering “wow” back and forth, our breath turning to mist in the air. As Leslie climbed back into her car to leave, I thanked her again—for noticing, for knocking, and for sharing beauty she couldn’t keep to herself.
She saw something radiant off in the distance and couldn’t stay quiet about it. Those small acts—getting out of the car, walking up to our door, and knocking—meant we didn’t miss a sight we might never see again.
Leadership is like that.
Leaders are people who see a better, more beautiful future. Once you see it, you can’t help but share it. You want to get others involved. You don’t just see what is—you see what could be. And when you see it, you gather others to help them see it too. Then, together, you work to bring that vision into reality.
Leadership can feel overwhelming. The beauty of leading others can get buried under endless meetings, reports, performance reviews, and KPIs. Yet all those mundane activities point to something magnificent—the glorious future you want people to not only see but also help create.
Like Leslie, your role is to invite people to step outside, to look farther ahead, and to see—and shape—a better, more beautiful future.
In our new book, Unleashed Leadership, we devote an entire chapter to defining what a leader is. That’s not a game of semantics—it’s transformation. How you define leadership quietly defines you.
So if you haven’t already, grab your copy of Unleashed Leadership.
If you lead a team of leaders, do what our friend and client, Amani, did—buy copies for all of them and discuss it together. We even included a link to “Steps to Start an Unleashed Leadership Group” in the book. The whole process, including discussion questions, is already created for you. (Check out her text message below, where she ordered 40 copies for all her Service and Branch Managers.)
Leadership, at its core, is about beauty. It’s about seeing something worth chasing and helping others see it, too. That’s the moment the lights come alive—not through a camera lens, but through people who believe in the future you’ve shown them.
You’ll witness your own version of the Northern Lights as your team begins to see the future you’ve been trying to show them all along.
1 Action
This week, take time to step outside the noise of meetings and metrics. Ask yourself, What beautiful future am I inviting my team to see? Then, like Leslie, go knock on a few doors and help them see it, too.