Favorite Book

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Favorite Book - #bookloversday

The woods have always called to me, and when I was a boy in Naples, Florida, I desperately wanted to live in the woods all by myself for a year like the main fictional character in “My Side of the Mountain.”?This book by Jean George absolutely spoke to me.?Sam Gribley was a 13-year-old boy from a large family, living in New York City.?

He convinced his parents to let him live in the Catskill Mountains for one year where he took up residence in a hollowed-out tree, trained a falcon to hunt small prey, and kept a journal of his trials and tribulations.?The story demonstrated courage, resourcefulness, resiliency, independence, and ultimately, the need for real companionship.

Every year, I would ask my parents if I could live in the Everglades near my home for a year.?Every year, my parents said no. They wouldn’t even let me try it for a few short weeks.?

On weekends, the parental strings were looser, and my friends and I would head to the woods with only bare essentials.?We managed to subsist in the pristine pine forest and mangrove swamps that existed around Naples in the early 1970s.?We’d catch our own bait by using treble hooks to snag mullet and needlefish, or catch fiddler crabs or snails along the shore.?We used the bait to catch snapper and anything that was big enough to actually produce a filet.?I’d take my twenty-gauge junior-model shotgun, and we’d shoot rabbits and quail to roast on a stick over a fire built from sappy pines that produced a ton of smoke.?We would look for edible plants to eat, like prickly pear cacti.?

We usually took sleeping bags, but that created the miserable choice of sweltering while covered, or getting devoured by mosquitoes – or both!?The obvious solution was to get big Swisher Sweets cigars and smoke out the mosquitoes.?We thought everything we did was self-sufficient and very composed.

This was where I began to learn and appreciate the concept of self-reliance while building my own self-confidence. And… this is in big part why I named my firm - Self-Reliant Leadership?!

Have you read my favorite book?

What's yours?

What’s coming up…

I just put the finishing touches on my newest course from The Crucible? - it’s called

Lessons from The Crucible?: Leading through Adversity

In the course of 11 videos (about 30 minutes total), I cover 3 Leadership Strategies - Direction, Pace & Tone, and how they are key to developing a High-Performance Team. This course is all about how leaders can be more effective at engaging the head, heart and hands. The course was shot entirely on location in Moab with 17 participants this past May.

For the first 200 people who enroll, you can use the coupon code CRUCIBLE, and get the course completely FREE! At the end of the course, there is another coupon code to get 50% off all my other courses in Teachable!

SELF-RELIANT LEADERSHIP? NEWSLETTER

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I'll show you how to make the start of journaling less onerous, and a method for finding better insights through self-awareness and self-discipline.

What I’ve been reading…

Speaking of Self-Reliance… I just started reading After the Roof Caved In: An Immigrant's Journey from Ireland to America by Michael J. Dowling

It’s the story of an Irish immigrant's life, from a poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland to becoming a big-time American CEO. The books shows how hard work and education can completely change circumstances.

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Jan Rutherford is an executive coach and keynote speaker. A former Green Beret and founder of?Self-Reliant Leadership??- he also leads Crucible? wilderness expeditions with executives and veterans.

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