Trade-Up!: 5 Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out

By Rayona Sharpnack

Book Overview

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limit themselves by holding on to ideas or assumptions about ourselves--what she calls your "context" --that are no longer valid.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!

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1118767330
• ISBN13: 9781118767337
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent!

An easy read. This book lays out a straightforward approach that will enable you to examine your current belief system and map your way to your future goals. The real life examples are very helpful.

How to be a true leader

When I met Rayona Sharpnack in 1999 I was surprised she wasn't even better known. I think "Trade Up!" will put her on the map and, that, as they say, is a good thing. She's one of the biggest thinkers I know - Rayona looks at things on a global scale. This book makes her accessible and gives you steps on how to put her big concepts for redesigning your leadership and your life into action. She's inspiring. As she says in this book, "Leadership is not a role, or a job, or a title; it's a way of dwelling in the world, a decision to be aware, intentional, active, and engaged." I love her legacy for future generations, which starts out, "Not every conversation makes a difference...but any conversation could."

Freedom to be true to yourself

I found Trade-up! to be absorbing, validating and freeing in a practical and yet exceptional way. Because the author guides one to work from "the inside out", the results are transformative and all-encompassing. In designing a new mind-set for a professional situation, I ended up to my great delight able to apply it positively in personal settings as well. The author uses a down-to-earth tone and examples that ring true and make sense. Upon completing this book, instead of putting in on a shelf, I have left it on my desk where I can refer to it easily and frequently, and, I have sent copies to my colleagues and friends.

Dr. Amy Levine

This easy to read, practical and enaging book is an invaluable tool for assessing your leadership skills. It provides concrete information that allows you to understand the context by which you view the world and shape your talents. The book provides extremely useful tools to take you to the next step in advancing your career. I highly recommend it!

Change your business, your organization and your life!

Rayona Sharpneck provides clear cut strategies for changing your business, your organization and your life. The tools and examples she provides in this book allows you to think in a different way, and therefore, live in a different way. Starting with changing your core being, and working out, you can produce the results, and the life you want. I hightly recommend this book.