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Navigating the Impossible: Build Extraordinary Teams and Shatter Expectations

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World-record endurance athlete and professional leadership coach Jason Caldwell draws on his amazing experiences to show how anyone can build and lead teams that accomplish incredible things.

Thirty-five days, 14 hours, and 3 minutes. That's how long it took Jason Caldwell and the crew of the American Spirit to row 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean during the 2016 Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge—or, as it's known to those who attempt it, “The World's Toughest Row.” They not only succeeded but set a world record.

This was an extraordinary team effort. And that's what this book is about. Caldwell transfers the hard-won lessons of his transatlantic adventure out of the ocean and into your office, showing how to build and lead teams that do what others say cannot be done and sustain that level of performance.

The thrilling details of Caldwell's quest to break the world's record deliver a “just-one-more-page” experience, during which you'll also learn lessons like 
 
• How to quit like a winner
• Why results aren't the measure of a high-performance team
• What four questions you should ask yourself before you set any goal
• How to harness the power of emotion-first leadership
• Why the best people aren't necessarily the right people for your team

This book is a distillation of Caldwell's worldwide speaking programs delivered to packed crowds at Fortune 500 companies and universities worldwide. It is the answer to a question he is constantly How were you and your teams able to accomplish such seemingly impossible goals? And it's also a guidebook that can teach anyone how to do the same.

161 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 22, 2019

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Jason Caldwell

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Profile Image for Jason Hillenburg.
203 reviews7 followers
November 28, 2019
Jason Caldwell understands human capabilities in a way few others do. The California based author of Navigating the Impossible: Build Extraordinary Teams and Shatter Expectations is a top tier athlete who, for almost a decade, has turned his talents from the world of athletic competition towards making a mark as a leadership trainer and keynote speaker. A championship caliber rower, Caldwell captained the United States in two Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenges, one in 2015 and another in 2016. The 51 day event calls on a team of rowers to cross the Atlantic Ocean, often in fraught conditions, and yet Caldwell and his team won both years setting speed records each time. The demands of such an event defy overstatement and he brings the same singular commitment for meeting personal challenges to this book.

Caldwell knows how to fail forward. Lesser lights allow setbacks to instill a defeatist spirit in their hearts, but not Caldwell. The book makes it clear that one of the key ingredients defining transformative leadership and team building is redoubling your efforts in the face of adversity and never losing sight of the goals you are striving towards. There are a couple of insights arriving early in the book defining much of what follows. The first finds Caldwell undercutting the common idea that human lives are too short – to the contrary, he believes they are too long. The meaning behind this is the length of our lives often gives us license to delay doing today what we might feel more ready for tomorrow. In a sense, you could call Caldwell’s concept a “seize the day” philosophy. Why wait? If you have something you want, go after it now – don’t hem and haw, don’t procrastinate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: http://www.latitude35leadership.com/h...

The second cliche he overturns in convincing fashion regards emotion. Caldwell promotes the idea that emotional leverage is a key aspect separating leaders from followers. A decisive and successful leader knows how to push the right emotional buttons in their team members that inspires them to greater achievements than they might have otherwise proven capable of reaching. This cuts against conventional wisdom that advises relying on professional intuition and other characteristics instead of an emotional stance, but Caldwell makes a strong case for why this approach is more successful.

Another twist on conventional thought he pursues is the idea that strong leaders do not make things easier for their team, they make things harder – and thus elevate performance. This demands chased after, naturally, a systematic fashion – you are unlikely to motivate team members to accept difficult challenges without first engaging them emotionally. Navigating the Impossible: Build Extraordinary Teams and Shatter Expectations provides a clear blueprint for achieving these ends and so much more.

AMAZON: https://amzn.to/2NzHdvx

Caldwell unflinchingly pulls back the curtain on his own life, the challenges he’s overcome, and what fuels his own drive to tackle seemingly impossible feats. It is no wonder, after finishing this book, why Jason Caldwell has worked with over 30 Fortune 500 companies, Nuke and Santander Bank among them, as well as numerous educational bodies. He has an important message for readers and we ignore it at our own peril.
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