The Gift of Influence: Creating Life-Changing and Lasting Impact in Your Everyday Interactions

Spaulding (It’s Not Just Who You Know), founder and president of a leadership-development training organization, urges readers to act as if “every person you’d ever influenced would be waiting for you in a stadium at the end of your life” in this earnest look at how to affect others positively. He defines influence as “having a lasting effect on the character or behavior of another person,” and offers up four profiles to help readers see it in action: there’s an eighth-grade math teacher who taught her students to appreciate each other, a CEO who opened a brewery staffed by active gang members, a nine-year-old who embraced a bullied kid on his hockey team, and a nun who dreamed of “truly mak[ing] a difference in the world.” From their stories, Spaulding extracts advice on ways to impact someone else’s life: readers can make a list of people they interact with on a daily basis and have meaningful conversations with them, as well as thoughtfully tweak routine conversations by saying, for example, “Here’s what I’d like to do for you” instead of “If there’s anything I can do,” when someone needs help. Readers in search of a feel-good approach to “lifting others up” will welcome this easy-to-understand advice. (Sept.)