Confidence Classic: The Secret To OWNING Your Power With Dalia Feldheim Founder of Uppiness & Flow Leadership Consultancy

Do you ever feel stuck—like you’re just going through the motions instead of doing something really meaningful? Have you recently experienced upheaval in your life and don’t know what to do now? In Built Through Courage, motivational speaker, CEO, and former Disney executive Dave Hollis offers a solution to these common problems. According to Hollis, the key to living a happy and fulfilled life is achieving your unique purpose—a specific role you’re meant to fill.

In this guide, we’ll explore what purpose is, how to identify yours, and how to achieve it. We’ll compare Hollis’s ideas to those of other self-help authors like Tony Robbins, Mark Manson, and Greg McKeown, and we’ll examine the neuroscience behind Hollis’s ideas.

Lean In, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, explores the professional, personal and societal hurdles holding women back from leadership positions in the workforce. The hurdles include discrimination, family-unfriendly policies, and a lack of help at home. To get more women into leadership positions and make true changes, Sandberg urges women to “lean in” to their careers, taking risks and being ambitious in their professional goals, while demanding more help at home. To do this, women must fight a lack of self-confidence and internalized gender stereotypes to forge fulfilling and rewarding personal and professional lives.

Even though we’re all human, most of us don’t understand what drives people (including ourselves) to feel and behave the way we do. In The Laws of Human Nature, author Robert Greene looks at several laws that explain, among other things, why we self-sabotage, behave differently in groups, and want the wrong things.

Armed with the knowledge of these fundamentals of human nature, you can manage toxic people, become more empathetic, make people like you, and control your own nature.

Vulnerability is all too often engineered out of today’s work cultures, in a bid to make employees more efficient and less susceptible to emotions—but brave leaders who have the courage to allow vulnerability are essential to thriving work cultures. Dare to Lead breaks down the four courage-building skills that make up brave leadership, so that you can create an organization that takes risk, uncertainty, and failure in stride. You’ll learn how to lead your team in engaging with vulnerability, acting with integrity, having more productive and honest conversations, and moving on quickly from failure—skills that will allow your work culture to meet today’s ever-increasing innovative and creative demands.

What’s the secret to being a great leader? Whether you’re in a warzone or on the front lines of a corporate battle, Extreme Ownership argues that the best leaders take full responsibility for everything in their world: not only their actions, decisions, and failures, but also those of everyone on their team. By practicing Extreme Ownership, great leaders achieve victory by prioritizing the team above all else and focusing on constant improvement—and in this guide, we’ll show how you can, too.

Authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin are former US Navy SEAL officers who served in one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They honed the principles of Extreme Ownership on the battlefield, then applied the same tenets to the corporate world as business consultants. In this guide, we’ll add broader context from other leadership books such as Built to Last and Team of Teams to better illustrate how to apply Willink and Babin’s leadership principles to your life.

In The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp argue that many leadership models are unsustainable because they don’t prioritize self-management and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. This causes leaders to burn out, lose their passion, and succumb to an unhealthy culture of competition and greed. As a result, employees disengage, turnover soars, and organizations break down from within. To overcome these issues, the authors argue that leaders must learn to understand and manage their emotions and mindset, communicate effectively with others, and align their actions and behaviors with their goals and commitments.

Dethmer, Chapman, and Klemp present 15 commitments that conscious leaders must uphold to run an effective organization, which we’ve synthesized into eight primary behaviors. We’ll explain what each behavior is, why it’s important, and how to put it into action. In our commentary, we’ll further discuss how to improve your leadership abilities and adopt the authors’ recommended behaviors, citing experts like Brené Brown (Dare to Lead) and Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth).

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

Even a successful, long-lasting business can be undone by a harmful workplace culture. If a company fails to trust its employees, focuses on blame instead of solving problems, and drowns every decision in a sea of red tape, its rivals will outpace it in the market. In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim presents a fictional case study of a business that falls behind its competitors because of its soul-crushing work conditions, leading a band of rebellious employees to figure out a new, more productive way of working.

In this guide, we’ll look at Kim’s diagnosis of the problems that exist in a toxic workplace, as well as the changes he recommends to foster creativity and productivity. We’ll discuss how Kim’s themes align with those of other business experts, and because Kim demonstrates his ideas through fiction, we’ll direct you to other nonfiction works in which his core concepts are fully explained.