Learn how to take the right risks for lasting success. Begin Boldly provides a framework for making the kind of bold moves that will get your career off to its best start!

Many women enter the workforce feeling like they can never make a mistake, and as a result, they don't take risks in the crucial early stages of their careers. Women, and BIPOC women especially, are disproportionally penalized for mistakes, so any risk begins to feel like a bad risk. A 2019 KPMG study found that fewer than 43 percent of women surveyed were willing to take “big” risks, including volunteering to do a major presentation or asking for a pay raise.

Christie Hunter Arscott equips readers with the ability to differentiate between reckless and intelligent risks using an actionable model built around three mindsets: a curious mindset, a courageous mindset, and an agile mindset. With a step-by-step method for taking risks, making refinements, and assessing rewards, Arscott's approach gives women a flexible and repeatable framework to guide them through this critical career skill.

Liftoff empowers women to take chances on themselves so that risk-taking becomes an enlightening and empowering antidote for self-doubt.

This book will include a discussion guide.

Bridging insights from both East and West, Murphy-Shigematsu provides a fresh way of looking at mindfulness that incorporates compassion, spirituality, and a concern for the greater good. The author's approach has been celebrated both in Japan and in the US.

As the mindfulness craze has spread in the West it's becoming too commercialized, intellectualized, and diluted. Mindfulness as stress-reducer and attention-enhancer keeps it on a purely cognitive level, missing the emotional, spiritual, and compassionate aspects that have traditionally been an integral part of the practice. In this book (a bestseller in Japan), Murphy-Shigematsu describes what he calls heartfulness, which returns mindfulness to its roots by adding seven additional elements:
-Attention as respect and deep listening
-Vulnerability as humility and courage
-Authenticity as genuineness
-Acceptance of things we cannot change
-Gratitude for what we receive
-Connectedness to ourselves, others, and the world
-Responsibility for ourselves and others

A practical and irreverent guide to taking the sting out of feedback and reclaiming it as a motivating, empowering experience for everyone involved.


Feedback! Ugh. Say the word to a colleague, your spouse, or a friend, and watch the person's blood pressure rise and defenses go up. For most of us, it's a word loaded with experiences that may include bias, politics, pain, regret, and anger. However, if we take a step back and think about its true intent, we realize that feedback needn't be a bad thing. We humans want to improve, grow, and advance, and we need insights that can help us move in the right direction. If we close ourselves off from understanding how others experience us, then we close ourselves off to a life of learning and growth. The authors address how feedback got such a bad rap and how we can fix it. They provide three key Fs (focused, fair, and frequent) for positive feedback. They also include a slew of practical exercises and strategies to change how we view and experience feedback.

This compelling and inspiring call to action for leaders at every level helps them find their role and voice in affecting societal and workplace change.


In a world where women and communities of color were disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's more important than ever for leaders to truly understand how to support inclusion in the postpandemic workplace.

Drawing on years of work with many leading organizations, Jennifer Brown shows what leaders at any level can do to spark real change and navigate uncharted waters. She guides readers through anti-racism using the Inclusive Leader Continuum, a set of four developmental stages: unaware, aware, active, and advocate. Brown describes the hallmarks of each stage, the behaviors and mindsets that inform it, and what readers can do to keep progressing.

This second edition includes a new introduction and addresses challenges posed by the pandemic-including remote work, flexibility, and mental health. It also gives increased attention to embedding equity, empathy, and anti-racism in the inclusive leader framework.

Once vilified by pro-life and pro-choice supporters alike, Aspen Baker has now shown that “pro-voice” might be the best method to move past conflict and hatred around abortion. With her nonprofit, Exhale, she has demonstrated that it's possible to get people talking respectfully even about the most polarizing topics.

When Aspen Baker had an abortion at the age of twenty-four, she felt caught between the warring pro-life and pro-choice factions, with no safe space to share her conflicted feelings, which didn't fit into either side's party line. In this hopeful and moving book, Baker shows how she and Exhale, the organization she cofounded, developed a philosophy and a set of tools that enables anyone to have respectful, compassionate exchanges about even the most divisive topics. Initially distrusted by both sides, Exhale now receives post-abortion referrals from pro-life and pro-choice organizations and has become a leader and innovator by pioneering a more respectful, supportive dialogue about this highly emotional issue.

Baker examines the history of the abortion debate, identifying the mistakes and misunderstandings on both sides that have led us to the current painful divide. She shares how Exhale discovered creative ways to build a caring, nonjudgmental space for women and men to share their feelings about abortion, such as starting a post-abortion telephone service and piloting a nationwide story-sharing tour led by women who'd had abortion experiences. They call their approach “pro-voice.”

This book shows how pro-voice can be adopted by anyone interested in dialogue rather than dogma. Peace, in this perspective, isn't a world without fighting or conflict but one where conflict can be engaged in-fiercely and directly-without dehumanizing ourselves or our opponents. Our world is full of gray areas. It's vital we learn practices like pro-voice to help us move from paralysis to progress.

Ditch the negative mental habits that derail conversations and destroy projects, and discover a framework for forging authentic, enduring, and productive connections.

All too often, we find our conversations stuck in cyclical patterns of unproductive behavior. We listen half-heartedly, react emotionally, and respond habitually, or what Chuck Wisner calls “sleep talking.”

Conscious Conversations explores the way we can reframe our thoughts, emotions, reactions, and interactions so we form a connection from the very first conversation and keep our discourse positive and productive throughout any endeavor. Wisner identifies four universal types of conversations and offers specific advice on maximizing the effectiveness of each:

• Storytelling-Acknowledging and investigating the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others
• Collaborating-Exploring the way our stories interact with other people's stories
• Creating-Cocreating possibilities and discovering unforeseen solutions to sticky problems
• Committing-Coordinating our actions with others to get things done

These conversations unfold sequentially: our awareness of our stories transforms our ability to listen and collaborate, which opens our thoughts to creative possibilities, guiding us toward mindful agreements. This framework makes it possible to identify, understand, and deactivate disruptive emotional triggers; listen with empathy to people with opposing perspectives; and forge relationships built on trust.

The must-have book for everyone who wants to be heard. More than just a book on business speech, it looks at the range of common communication mistakes--from repeating oneself to speaking too quickly--that can result in a poor impression

Collaborative strategies work when they're designed by teams-where each person is heard, valued, and held accountable. This book is a practical guide for project team leaders and individual contributors who want their teams to play by a better set of rules.

Where do teams go wrong? Having the right people with the right skills doesn't mean they'll know how to work together as a team. David and Mary Sherwin maintain it's all in the design. Through a blend of straightforward activities, conversational stories, and dialogues that help model different forms of team interaction, this book will help teams:
• Create workday rituals that aid them in making better decisions and following through on their work responsibilities

• Identify patterns of behavior that are getting in the way of team performance, and design and test potential ways to them 

• Reinforce habits that help team members bring the human element into their interactions and foster open communication
Readers of this book will be more prepared to set up and survive challenging projects alongside their coworkers with a shared sense of ownership, and an eye towards retaining the integrity of their teams in the long term. Using a process that has worked at some of the world's cutting edge companies, the authors detail the steps to take control of team design and plan for success. The key is to give every team member a voice in designing the team's rules, and in keeping it aligned with the design over the life of the team.