A recipe for leading with love.

"To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart," Eleanor Roosevelt once said. Techniques and outward skills aren't enough for effective leadership. Compassion and authenticity come from the heart, so leading others begins with self-understanding.

Lorraine Lum Calbow uses reflection, poems and stories to help leaders view their inner landscape more clearly. She's just retired from the counseling faculty at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix AZ, a founding member of the South Mountain Storytelling Institute and the author of This Little Light of Mine: Remembering the Light Within.

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Staying open to yourself in the moment is the key to leadership, she said at the annual conference of the American Association for Women in Community Colleges (AAWCC) and the National Institute for Leadership Development (NILD) in June in Phoenix.

Authenticity frees us to lead from love and compassion instead of fear and judgment. She offered a "recipe" to stir up the self-knowledge at the core of heart-filled leadership. A story or poem accompanied each step.

Rinse and reduce ideas that disconnect.

"We keep doing what we do because we limit ourselves," she said. Rinse off the things that keep you from being your best self, like fear. Notice your ideas that exclude others. As you gain awareness of what limits you, you can begin to reduce it.