Jerry’s foundational works

Books that bring the central themes of this work together.

Name: 100 Questions I've Been Asked by Emerging Leaders
Author: Jerry Forte

Each book approaches the journey from a different direction, offering stories, practical wisdom, and thoughtful questions about purpose, leadership, faith, and the kind of people we are becoming.

Jerry's foundational works

Book · Eight-week guided journey

Discovering Your Life Purpose

Exploring God's Calling and Fingerprints on Your Unique Life Story

Your life is not a collection of disconnected events. Across your experiences, relationships, abilities, passions, disappointments, and recurring longings, God has been leaving fingerprints—clues to the person He created you to become and the particular contribution your life is meant to make.

Much of the material in Discovering Your Life Purpose evolved over several decades as I helped hundreds of emerging leaders in marketplace settings examine their lives, recognize recurring patterns, and put language around their purpose. It also reflects more than five decades of daily life with God. Rather than handing you a generic answer, the book helps you look carefully at your own story and notice what has been present all along.

Through Scripture, personal reflection, assessments, and practical exercises, you will examine formative experiences, energizing abilities, important relationships, deep concerns, and the ways God has already used you. The process culminates in a personal life-purpose statement that is specific enough to guide real choices without reducing your calling to a job title.

The journey can be completed individually, with a mentor, or in a group. Its purpose reaches beyond greater self-understanding. It will help you celebrate the unique fingerprints of God on your life and live more intentionally now.

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Forthcoming · Leadership · Character · Crisis

Lighthouse Leadership

Becoming the Leader Others Need When the Storm Arrives

Leadership is often discussed in terms of position, influence, or results. Yet the truest test of a leader usually comes under pressure—when circumstances are uncertain, people are anxious, and there is no simple answer. In those moments, people do not merely need a more forceful leader. They need someone whose character and competence can carry the weight of responsibility.

Lighthouse Leadership grows out of more than forty-one years of marketplace leadership, including more than thirteen years as CEO of Colorado Springs Utilities. The book brings together real decisions, failures, mentors, historic lives, and defining experiences such as the Waldo Canyon Fire to explore ten enduring qualities: listening, integrity, guidance, hope, trustworthiness, humility, ownership, unity, steadiness, and execution.

This is not a collection of leadership formulas. It is an invitation to become the kind of person others can trust when the path is unclear. Each chapter combines story, practical wisdom, reflection, and concrete ways to strengthen the quality being explored. It is written for anyone who has been entrusted with people and wants to bring clarity, courage, care, and faithful direction when responsibility is greatest.

Publication details to be announced

In development

Books now being written.

In development · Spiritual memoir · Formation · Life with God

Toward a Whole Heart

My Journey into a Deeper Life with God

For much of my life, I knew how to work, lead, solve problems, and carry responsibility. I also sincerely loved God. Yet after retirement brought a quieter season, I began to recognize how often even my life with God had been connected to what I needed to accomplish next.

Toward a Whole Heart follows the inward journey that emerged from that discovery. Through memories of childhood, family, faith, leadership, failure, marriage, mentoring, and retirement, I look honestly at the experiences that formed me—and at the patient ways God has continued gathering the divided and unfinished places of my heart.

This is not a formula for becoming whole or a complete autobiography. It is a personal story about learning to receive God's love without first proving my usefulness, allowing grace to reach the places I once protected, and becoming increasingly free to give my life away. I hope it feels less like a speech and more like an unhurried conversation with someone who is still learning.

Publication details to be announced

In development · Leadership · Mentoring · Practical wisdom

100 Questions I've Been Asked by Emerging Leaders

Leadership often becomes real through questions. Some arise when a new responsibility begins. Others come in moments of conflict, disappointment, uncertainty, or difficult choice—when familiar answers no longer seem sufficient.

Over many years of mentoring and walking alongside emerging leaders, I have been asked questions about character, calling, ambition, failure, relationships, decision-making, organizational life, faith, and the personal cost of carrying responsibility. The questions have come from leaders in the marketplace, churches, community organizations, and many other places where people are entrusted with influence.

This book will bring one hundred of those questions into a series of honest, practical conversations. It will not offer quick formulas or pretend that every situation has a simple answer. Instead, it will draw upon a lifetime of leadership, mentoring, mistakes, and lessons learned from others to help emerging leaders think more clearly, lead more faithfully, and become people others can trust.

Publication details to be announced

Books that bring the central themes of this work together.

Discovering Your Life Purpose

Lighthouse Leadership

Books now being written.

Toward a Whole Heart

100 Questions I've Been Asked by Emerging Leaders

Notes from Jerry