Craig T. Owens

When you combine a memorable visual image with the challenge of a new leadership habit you create something powerful: a habitude. That’s exactly what Dr. Tim Elmore does in his series of exceptional books called Habitudes.

Our minds store information in picture format. For example, when you read “elephant,” you don’t think of the letters e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, but you think of a huge, floppy-eared, tusk-bearing, mammal on the African savannah. So combining visual images (a right-brained exercise) with life-changing data (a left-brained activity) creates a concept that really sticks with us.

For each one of the 13 habitudes in this book, an image is first presented (for instance, a flood-ravaged home, with the brown swirling water flowing through the front door). Then add to this image some powerful insights from Dr. Elmore about a leader’s responsibility to keep everyone’s energies inside the banks for maximum effectiveness. If a leader doesn’t keep the river’s flow within the banks where it can do some good, the flood of misguided energies can lead to devastation.

Each habitude includes some workspace to help you work through the concepts presented with each image. The pictures create a great “hook” for the concepts to hang in your mind, and the follow-up exercises in each chapter help make the concepts applicable to your unique circumstances.

Each chapter is fairly short, but as the cliche goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” so expect each habitude to teach you a lot without using a lot of written words.

This is a great resource for anyone wanting to improve his or her leadership capabilities. But it would be especially useful for young leaders-in-training in a mentoring/protege role.

Check out some notable quotes from this book here.