Trade Up!: Five Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out

Silicon Valley wunderkind Rayona Sharpnack has been a schoolteacher, tennis champion, manager and player for a women's professional softball team, and a celebrity who coaches some of the most successful leaders in business. Trade Up! draws on Sharpnack&'s experience, as well as stories of successful leaders she has worked with, to reveal how leaders limit themselves by holding on to ideas or assumptions about ourselves—what she calls your “context” —that are no longer valid. Trade Up! outlines the 5 steps to help leaders gain awareness of these assumptions and trade up from limiting beliefs and behaviors to those that will help them change the world. The 5 steps are

• Reveal your context: what do you believe about yourself? What holds you back? How do you impact others?
• Own your context: take stock of the upside and downside of your context, and examine the intended and unintended consequences of it!
• Design a new context that gets you what you want: begin by asking yourself "how good are you willing to have life be?"
• Sustain your new context: develop new practices to get this new context to stick!
• Activate your context and engage with the world: move out of your own concerns and into partnership and community with others to help change the world around you!

Rayona Sharpnack is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Women's Leadership (IWL), where she teaches and mentors some of the most powerful leaders in the world through her IWL workshops—Women Leading Change and the advanced Executives Leading Sustainable Change. She has been training both women and men in the principles and skills of leadership since 1992 and is a popular speaker.