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Presence-Based Leadership

Complexity Practices for Clarity, Resilience, and Results That Matter

Presence-Based Leadership is founded on this liberating premise: leaders’ most crucial and complex challenges, rather than being obstacles, are actually doorways for becoming precisely the leader that current conditions require.
Here is a rich field guide to the territory of complexity, and how leaders can navigate it with leading edge approaches that generate clarity, resilience, and results that actually matter.

Silsbee’s new book is his most expansive. A master of integration, he seamlessly weaves fields as disparate as complexity, leadership and adult development theory, mindfulness, and interpersonal neurobiology into a deeply human exploration of how leaders can bring the fullness of their humanity to the most intractable challenges they face. His immensely pragmatic approach grounds new perspectives with intimate real-world examples. He offers specific, field-tested experiments and practices that invite the reader into discovery and application.

This is a radically new and integrated approach to leadership, through which leaders can tap the creativity and resourcefulness of their internal complexity in order to meet a complex world. Through cultivating an embodied leadership presence, readers will become more dynamic shapers of the context in which they lead, and a creative force for what matters in a fractured and dynamic world.

Presence-Based Leadership is the third and final volume in Doug Silsbee’s ground-breaking and influential trilogy on coaching and leadership.

With a Foreword by Kevin Cashman

Table of Contents

Part One: Foundations

  1. 1 The Territory of Complexity
  2. 2 Embodiment, Identity and the Bell Jar
  3. 3 Realization and the Developmental Edge
  4. 4 Nine Panes for Leadership

Part Two: Sensing

  1. 5 Sensing Context: Observe the System
  2. 6 Sensing Identity: Recognize Identity at Stake
  3. 7 Sensing Soma: Attend to Experience

Part Three: Being

  1. 8 Being as Soma: Regulate Inner State
  2. 9 Being in Context: De-couple State from Context
  3. 10 Being an Identity: Embody What Matters

Part Four: Acting

  1. 11 An Attitude of Curiosity and Experimentation
  2. 12 Acting for Connection
  3. 13 Acting for Fluidity
  4. 14 Acting for Stability

Epilogue: Paradox and Integration

“Looking unflinchingly at our outdated worldview, Silsbee makes his case with scholarship, grit, and elegant prose. This is a beautifully comprehensive inquiry into leadership. Written with passion, lucidity, and daring, this will be disquieting to some and useful to all; a wise and pragmatic light on the path of fully being human.”

Richard Strozzi-Heckler
Founder, Strozzi Institute of Embodied Leadership; author of The Leadership Dojo

What Others Say

Karen Kimsey-House

Doug Silsbee’s release of his third book completes a trilogy of comprehensive and ground-breaking work. He elegantly navigates the balance of expansion and pragmatism. Practices, perspectives, and real-world examples reveal keys to leadership presence, courage, and resilience in tumultuous times. Here is an essential, even radical, yet surprisingly accessible book.

Karen Kimsey-House Co-President and Co-Founder, CTI

David Garchow

I worked with Doug as a leadership coach during a period of major challenge to the global nuclear industry after Fukushima. Doug’s human approach expanded my leadership thinking and deepened my self-awareness, presence, situational awareness and effectiveness during extremely demanding and complex challenges. This book offers you the keys.

David Garchow Retired Vice President/Director, Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, World Association of Nuclear Operators

Lisa Eby, MSW

Silsbee offers a powerful and pragmatic field guide for anyone doing difficult community “work.” This unique book will help you recognize and shift your thinking and being, and therefore the foundation of your relationships. Here are the keys to disrupting patterns that keep us and our communities stuck, producing poverty, inequity, and violence.

Lisa Eby, MSW Director of HR and Community Engagement Buncombe County, NC

Marshall Goldsmith

Silsbee’s seminal third book offers radical new perspectives on our internal habits of thought, processing of information, and action. He offers a pragmatic and leading edge resource, offering powerful practices and detailed examples for the crucial work of our times: leaders setting an example for others by improving themselves.

Marshall Goldsmith Author or editor of 35 books including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Triggers.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler

Looking unflinchingly at our outdated worldview, Silsbee makes his case with scholarship, grit, and elegant prose. This is a beautifully comprehensive inquiry into leadership. Written with passion, lucidity, and daring, this will be disquieting to some and useful to all; a wise and pragmatic light on the path of fully being human.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler Founder, Strozzi Institute of Embodied Leadership; author of The Leadership Dojo

Marshall Goldsmith

Silsbee’s seminal third book offers radical new perspectives on our internal habits of thought, processing of information, and action. He offers a pragmatic and leading edge resource, offering powerful practices and detailed examples for the crucial work of our times: leaders setting an example for others by improving themselves.

Marshall Goldsmith Author or editor of 35 books including What Got You Here Won't Get You There and Triggers.

Karen Kimsey-House

Doug Silsbee’s release of his third book completes a trilogy of comprehensive and ground-breaking work. He elegantly navigates the balance of expansion and pragmatism. Practices, perspectives, and real-world examples reveal keys to leadership presence, courage, and resilience in tumultuous times. Here is an essential, even radical, yet surprisingly accessible book.

Karen Kimsey-House Co-President and Co-Founder, CTI

David Garchow

I worked with Doug as a leadership coach during a period of major challenge to the global nuclear industry after Fukushima. Doug’s human approach expanded my leadership thinking and deepened my self-awareness, presence, situational awareness and effectiveness during extremely demanding and complex challenges. This book offers you the keys.

David Garchow Retired Vice President/Director, Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, World Association of Nuclear Operato

Lisa Eby, MSW

Silsbee offers a powerful and pragmatic field guide for anyone doing difficult community “work.” This unique book will help you recognize and shift your thinking and being, and therefore the foundation of your relationships. Here are the keys to disrupting patterns that keep us and our communities stuck, producing poverty, inequity, and violence.

Lisa Eby, MSW Director of HR and Community Engagement Buncombe County, NC

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