As I finish up the final chapters of FEARLESS: LEADERSHIP LESSONS AT THE CROSSROADS, I’m taking a moment to marvel at what we have been through over the past three years. When the COVID pandemic pushed us all into bubbles of safety and security, I’m not sure I believed we would get to this point. Everything was so frightening. And yet, day by day, we put one foot in front of the other, did what we needed to do, and here we are in 2023.

Looking back, I can’t say how many times I thought about how thankful I was that I was able to work from home and in safety. I worked for (and still work for) an organization that valued the health and well-being of the staff in a way that went beyond simple words on paper. And, though I’d been a client of author Steve Johns’ company, OneCause, for a few years at that point, it’s clear the OneCause team was in a similarly caring environment.

FEARLESS is a compassionate and deeply thought-provoking review of weathering one of the most difficult storms in our recent collective history. Steve Johns shares his own thoughts along with emails that he sent to the OneCause team throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022. Each chapter focuses on a theme; Steve introduces the theme, shares emails and updates, and gives readers some key take-away lessons. A retrospective in some regards, but the messages and lessons Steve shares are no less relevant in 2023 than they were in the preceding years. In fact, they may be more valuable than ever. My book now features bright green Post-it note flags, marking pages and passages that I found significant or particularly helpful for me.

I am truly thankful for this book. It gave me something that I can’t quite name and that I didn’t consciously know I was missing until I read it on these pages. And now, well, I only have one question left: Steve, how can I get on your weekly email list?