Downloads for You

Valuable Downloads!


My goal is to provide you with valuable information that you can put to work today! This page is packed full of Book Excerpts, Tip Sheets and White Pages that you can use to create success in your life. Best of all, every single thing on this page is yours ... absolutely free!

Interested in Integral Leadership? Make sure you also read my articles "The Power of the Centaur: Integral Leadership and the Wisdom of the Body" as well as "Change One Thing ... and Everything Changes."

So scroll through the information below and download what you can use ... with my compliments!

Books Excerpts

Leading People the Black Belt Way: Conquering the Five Core Problems Facing Leaders Today

Read the first chapter

Download the foreword to Leading People the Black Belt Way that was written by Wendy Palmer author of The Practice of Freedom: Aikido Principles as a Spiritual Guide and The Intuitive Body: Aikido as Clairsentient Practice.

Read the Prelude to Leading People the Black Belt Way, which contains a very cool Zen story ..... download your complimentary copy here.

Download the Introduction to Leading People the Black Belt Way, which is entitled: Eating the Same Thing Every Day: The Five Core Problems Facing Leaders Today ... download your copy here.



Healding Katrina: Volunteering in Post-Hurricane Mississippi.

Download the entire ebook of Healing Katrina: Volunteering in Post-Hurricane Mississippi. (If you'd like, you can donate the cost of this ebook ($8.95) to your favorite disaster relief organization. Or not. Whichever.)



The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching (co-authored with Patrick Warneka)

Read the foreword by Richard Strozzi-Heckler.

Read my essay on "Post-Rational Leadership, Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching" from the book..

To download actual pages from The Way of Leading People, visit this page.




Black Belt Leader, Peaceful Leader: An Introduction to Catholic Servant Leadership.

Read the foreword by Bro. Ray Fitz, S.M., Ph.D., past-president of the University of Dayton.

Read the Table of Contents

Read Chapter One -- Catholic Servant Leadership: An Overview




Clinical Chapters

My chapter, Everyday Terrorism—The Long Shadow of Our Hidden Dragon: Shared Factors of Terrorism and Juvenile Violence, was published in Volume 4 of The Psychology of Terrorism, a four-volume set of books edited by Chrisotopher Stout, Ph.D. and published by Praeger Press that examines the violence of September 11, 2001. I am proud to have been selected to add my voice to such a pretigious group of international experts. You can download a complimentary copy of the chapter here.




Tip Sheets & White Papers

Ten Tips for Talking to Children About Terrorism
This tip sheet, written after 9/11 was circulated around the nation as well as the globe. Ten Tips gives parents quick and simple-to-follow advice in the aftermath of any traumatic event (including terrorist attacks). Read it here.


Build Your EQ!
Learn about the importance of Emotional Intelligence, or EQ, for succeeding in work and life! Read it here.

The Power of the Centaur: Integral Leadership & the Wisdom of the Body - Learn about the importance of tapping into the wisdom of your body from Ken Wilber's integral perspective in order to succeed as a leader. Read it here.

Change One Thing and Everything Changes - Discover the power that changing one thing in your life can have as you read about Tim Warneka's struggle with the onset of the chronic illness Alopecia Areata Universalis. Read it here.


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The Power of the Centaur: Integral Leadership & the Wisdom of the Body

“What modernity differentiated, post-modernity must integrate.”
-Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology & Spirituality

The first time I met her, Sarah* was a wreck. A mid-level manager for a multi-national corporation, Sarah had just come from a meeting where she had been drawn into a heated argument with a person she supervised. “Tim,” Sarah exclaimed in frustration as we began our coaching session, “emotions are so complicated!”

I couldn’t agree more strongly with Sarah. For better or for worse, leadership is about people, people are emotional, and emotions are complex. Leadership is therefore—by definition—a complicated business, one that does not lend itself to concrete formulas or simple platitudes. From an integral perspective, most modern leadership approaches seek overly simplistic answers in the objective (or right-hand side of the AQAL model) aspects of leadership while ignoring the subjective (left-hand side of AQAL) dimensions of leadership. This belief in simplistic, objective answers to leadership is a flatland fallacy. The fundamental—and rarely acknowledged—problem facing leaders today is that flatland leadership perspectives are stealing enormous profits from us while creating untold damage in our organizations.

Lead Your Organization Out of Flatland …
You cannot solve leadership problems using the same level of consciousness that created those problems. Consequently, the need for integral leadership today is greater than ever. Recent data strongly suggests that flatland perspectives actually hurt your organization’s bottom line. For example, primarily due to current leadership practices, somewhere between 70%-80% of American employees are not emotionally committed to their work, costing the U.S. economy over $360 billion in profits annually. Scale that number up to global economy levels and the results are quite distressing indeed.

… by Becoming a Centaur.
The integral solution for leading your organization out of flatland is straightforward: become a Centaur. Ken Wilber uses the Centaur—the mythic half human/half horse creature—to represent the integration of body and mind. For leaders, becoming a Centaur requires nothing short of personal transformation, because today’s complex global economy demands that leaders move from the rational realm into post-rational levels of consciousness. Centauric leadership is post-rational leadership that transcends and includes rational knowledge in the support of even greater levels of success. (For more on post-rational ways of knowing, see Warneka & Warneka’s The Way of Leading People.)

Fortunately, your starting point for becoming a Centaur is quite easy to find─it is staring back at you in the mirror. The image you see reflected there is an enormously powerful leadership tool that is at your fingertips every moment and costs you absolutely nothing to use. That tool is your body. In my book Leading People the Black Belt Way, I share the secrets of Embodied Leadership Technology (or E.L.T.), an integral strategy for leading organizations out of flatland by tapping into the wisdom of the body. As an integral leadership approach, E.L.T. calls you to embody—that is, to actually live out—the truth that your mind, body, and spirit are an integrated whole. The difference between understanding and embodying a fact is crucial here, that distinction being the same as understanding the lottery and actually winning the lottery. The more you embody yourself as a leader—that is, the more Centauric you become—the more effective you will be as a leader.


Embodied Leadership Technology is an integration of principles from the revolutionary non-violent martial art of Aikido, with recent insights from integral theory and modern leadership science. E.L.T. moves you toward Centauric levels of consciousness by recognizing that your body is your primary leadership tool. Nowhere is your body more important than in the leadership realm of emotional intelligence. Recent research overwhelmingly demonstrates the importance of emotional intelligence for successful leaders … and the centrality of embodied awareness for building your emotional intelligence.


In my work with leaders, I often see dramatic results when they upgrade their E.L.T. Consider Dave, the CEO of a large Midwestern corporation. Dave and I began working together because of issues he was having in controlling his temper. Dave’s anger had landed him in hot water with his board of directors. At home, his wife was threatening to leave him. As we worked together, I taught Dave the principles of E.L.T. Although initially skeptical of what he called my “touchy-feely” approach, Dave soon was seeing the results of E.L.T. in action—and he was sold. By the end of our work together, Dave’s relationship with his board of directors was back on solid ground, and so was his marriage.


Remember Sarah? Here are five E.L.T. tips you can draw from Sarah’s experience that will help you unlock the power of your Centaur:

1. Develop a Mindful Curiosity.
Take a hint from world-famous scientists and become mindfully curious about what is going on around you. Deeply rooted in the martial arts tradition, mindfulness is a strategy designed to increase your awareness. Practice mindful curiosity by paying attention to what happens to you when you lead—mentally, emotionally, and physically. Do you hold your breath? How tight are your shoulders right now? What happens to your toes when you sit through your third meeting of the day?

For example, as Sarah and I deconstructed how she had been drawn into the argument, I encouraged her to attend more deeply to how she had responded physically, mentally and emotionally to the argument. Through mindful curiosity, Sarah was able to uncover a deeply rooted belief of hers that was, as we discovered in subsequent sessions, actively interfering with her job performance at several levels.

2. Take Up a Physical Practice.
Fortunately for her, Sarah had been practicing yoga for several years, which gave us a well of experience from which to draw upon during our coaching sessions. Yoga, Aikido, T’ai Chi, dance, and other body-oriented disciplines can go a long way toward upgrading your E.L.T. Even running or walking—when done mindfully—can be powerful leadership training tools. Not practicing anything yet? Draw on your body’s wisdom by enrolling in whatever physical practice arouses your curiosity. Already practicing? Set specific goals for yourself in order to deepen your practice.

3. Attend to Your Breathing.
When we revisited the argument, Sarah realized she had been holding her breath. Proper breathing is the royal road to embodied awareness. When encountering problems, most of us—like Sarah was doing—breathe in shallow ways, which decreases our oxygen intake. Breathing deeply in the face of problems increases oxygen levels in your body, which in turn helps you function better as a leader. You can practice breathing through meditation, breathing exercises, swimming, Aikido, and other physical activities.

4. Expand Your Emotional Intelligence.
When I invited Sarah to breathe more deeply, she experienced a flood of emotions. When difficult emotions arise, poor leaders close themselves off in denial, decreasing their emotional intelligence. Effective leaders like Sarah build their emotional intelligence by staying aware of their emotional states. By using a coach to talk through the various emotions she experienced in the argument, Sarah was stepping closer to Centauric consciousness by improving her ability to contain powerful emotions.

5. Get Coached!
Sarah was wise because she understood that leadership, like E.L.T., is first and foremost a relational process. Centauric leadership skills must be learned in relationship. None of us can step up to post-rational leadership levels without the help of others. Sarah and Dave worked with me. I have my own coaches and teachers. Find yours. Seek out a skilled coach, therapist or mentor who can show you how to harness your Centauric power. Your investment will pay off as you sail to new heights as a leader!

The Bottom Line
Like Sarah and Dave, most leaders today have fallen prey to flatland perspectives and, as a result, fail to tap into the power of the Centaur. By coherently organizing the greatest number of truths out of the greatest number of valid leadership sources, integral leadership offers you a fresh and exciting new alternative to dominant flatland leadership paradigms. When you focus on your embodied existence in an integral manner—by attending to your breathing as you meet with your direct reports or noticing the tension in your stomach the next time conflicts arise in your organization—you will have made significant strides toward becoming a Centaur. By increasing your embodied awareness, you will be leading your organization—and collectively, our world—out of flatland. In the end, the responsibility rests with leaders like Sarah and Dave─and like you and me—to lead the way into Centauric body/mind integration. The Kosmos demands no less.

* Names and other identifying information have been changed.

About the Author: Tim Warneka is an integral coach, consultant and keynote speaker living near Cleveland, Ohio. The author of Leading People the Black Belt Way: Conquering the Five Core Problems Facing Leaders Today, and Healing Katrina: Volunteering in Post-Hurricane Mississippi, and co-author (with Patrick Warneka) of The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching, Warneka holds a black belt in the revolutionary non-violent Japanese martial art of Aikido, the principles of which he uses in all aspects of his work. Visit Tim on-line at: www.timwarneka.com. The author would like to thank his colleague Angela Nicolosi for her gracious and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Permission is hereby granted to journalists, newsletter publishers, bloggers and others to reproduce this article in full providing that the "About the Author" paragraph is included in full.

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Change One Thing … and Everything Changes.

By Tim Warneka

“Oh Lord, am I scared,” I thought, “please don’t let it be cancer.”

I sat there, worried, in the doctor’s waiting room, having re-read the same page in the magazine for the third time. I was thirty-three years old and in good health. I exercised regularly. I watched what I ate. But then it started happening. A few months prior, I noticed that my hair had started to fall out. At first, I ignored it.
Then my hair began falling out too fast to ignore. The hair began coming off in my brush in handfulls.

I was scared. Being in good health, the only thing that I could connect hair loss with was cancer. So I began to worry about dying. And I was too young to die! I had a wonderful wife, and two beautiful children. I was doing work that I was passionate about – counseling behaviorally disturbed children and adolescents at a community mental health center near Cleveland, Ohio.

I knew I had to go see a doctor. But I put off making an appointment. Frankly, I wasn’t all that eager to see a doctor. With the pressures of managed care, most medical professionals whom I had seen were simply too rushed for time for my comfort level. I wanted to delay the appointment as long as possible. Finally, unable to ignore the hair falling from my head, I made the appointment.

As I sat in the doctor’s office, I really began to panic. My greatest fear was that I would be diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t know what to do or whom to turn to. A life-long Catholic, I did the thing that I learned from the nuns in my elementary school years: pray. “God,” I prayed, “please don’t let it be cancer.” And then my name was called.

Walking into that doctor’s office was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I was preparing myself to receive a death sentence.

The doctor came into the small room that I was waiting in, took one look at my head and said, “Oh. You have alopecia.”

“Alo-what-ia?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“Alopecia,” she explained. “Alopecia is when the hair falls out in your scalp and other places on your body. It seems to have something to do with our autoimmune system.” The doctor and I talked a little more, then she suggested that I go to a dermatologist to confirm the diagnosis.

I walked out of her office and breathed a sigh of relief. Now that I knew what was wrong, my fears about cancer seemed unfounded and rather silly. But I had really been scared there for a moment.

I went home and explored the Internet to see what I could find out about this disease. Online, I found the National Alopecia Areata Foundation (www.alopeciaareata.com), where I learned that over alopecia occurs in males and females of all races, and that the disease typically strikes in childhood. Statistics estimate that approximately two percent of the U.S. population will be affected, which is slightly over 4.5 million people in the U.S.

I learned that the disease is not disabling in any way, and that the only effects are hair loss. I learned that alopecia is not due to stress or nerves, knowledge that would come in handy when people would say, somewhat callously, about my hair loss, “I’m not surprised. You’ve been pretty stressed with your job.”

I went to see the dermatologist who did indeed confirm the diagnosis. After reviewing the treatment options with him, I decided to shave my head and leave well enough alone. Now, I am a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy. For me, the less attention I can pay to my appearance, the better. So I didn’t think that shaving my head would be a big deal. In fact, as a martial artist, I had often day-dreamed about shaving my head. (I guess I watched too many re-runs of Kung fu when I was growing up!)

As a psychotherapist, I have learned that there is a maxim -- if a person changes one thing in her life, then many other things will often change. Because I thought that I was not that influenced by external things, I didn’t think that shaving my head would be that big of a deal. What could change?

How wrong I was. Over the next few months, I began to see how God was using my alopecia as a wake up call for me.

After my appointment with the dermatologist, my wife helped me shave my head completely. Afterwards, I jumped in the shower to wash the hair from my head. When the water hit my bald head, I was so surprised that I almost lost my balance. The feeling of water on my bare head was different than I had imagined it would be.

And that was only the start.

Being in the world with a shaved head, everything was indeed different. I learned about the magical insulating properties of hair. Without hair I was hotter on hot days and colder on cool days. I noticed that people treated me differently. Some people assumed I had cancer and treated me with kid gloves. Clerks, it seemed, would wait on me faster. Fortunately, the winds of fashion were in my favor. The “bald look” for guys seem to be in style. And most of the bald guys (in the movies at least) seemed to be in the tough guy role. (Maybe that’s why clerks were waiting on me faster!)

Not only were things on the outside different, I also noticed that I was changing on the inside. I began noticing things about my life that I hadn’t seen before. Soon after my visit to the dermatologist, I entered into a post-graduate training program at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland (GIC). The training program at GIC requires a great deal of both personal and professional growth. For the first time in a long while, I was with a community of people who were interested in personal growth, spirituality and health. And I was with a group of people who knew me only as a man with a shaved head.

I began to grow restless with my life as it was. At the community mental health center, I was working with two very difficult population - juvenile sex offenders and violent adolescents. As much as I loved the work and was committed to both populations, the work was so draining. I was routinely putting in 12 – 14 hour days, and I would still be behind in my paperwork! And I slowly began to see how little emotional life I had left over for my wife and children.

Over time, and with the support of my wife and my GIC training class, I made the decision to leave my job. I again became frightened. I felt that God was calling me toward something new vocation, but I had no idea what it was.

That was years ago.

Now, while I still maintain a small private practice, I have found my passion in working with leaders as a keynote speaker and leadership coach. I have written three books on leadership. Most important of all, I have more time for my wife and kids.

And when I look in the mirror, I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that the bald man in the mirror is me. I have grown comfortable with my new self. I can even laugh about it. My daughter and I have a running joke where, after I brush her hair, I ask her to brush my hair. “But daddy,” she laughs with delight at our joke, “you don’t HAVE any hair!”

And I don't. But in losing my hair, I found my passion.

About the Author: Tim Warneka is an integral coach, consultant and keynote speaker living near Cleveland, Ohio. The author of Leading People the Black Belt Way: Conquering the Five Core Problems Facing Leaders Today, and Healing Katrina: Volunteering in Post-Hurricane Mississippi, and co-author (with Patrick Warneka) of The Way of Leading People: Unlocking Your Integral Leadership Skills with the Tao Te Ching, Warneka holds a black belt in the revolutionary non-violent Japanese martial art of Aikido, the principles of which he uses in all aspects of his work. Visit Tim on-line at: www.timwarneka.com.

Permission is hereby granted to journalists, newsletter publishers, bloggers and others to reproduce this article in full providing that the "About the Author" paragraph is included in full.