Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

3 Flow-based Decision Making

“It was as if I had no real choice. It was not so much a decision about what I ‘ought’ to do—rather, I could not do otherwise. At this moment…one arrives at a point where freedom and destiny merge. It was at this point that my words became action.”

—Joseph Jaworski

How flow impacts decision making and the ability to lead is dependent on the individual’s level of confidence. Confidence is a function of training, experience, and preparation in the form of physical readiness, mental alignment, and spiritual connection. To accomplish this, the individual must be situationally aware at multiple levels. When all these aspects are in place, leadership happens—whether it is self-leadership or leadership of others.