Trade-Up!

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leaders limit themselves by holding on to ideas or assumptions about ourselves—what she calls your “context” —that are no longer valid.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!

Introduction: Beyond Business as Usual 1

1. It’s All About You 35

Step 1. Reveal Your Prevailing Context

2. From Bug Soup to Butterfl y 65

Step 2. Own Your Context

3. I Am the Author of My Own Story 103

Step 3. Design a New Context

4. Practice Leads to Mastery 125

Step 4. Sustain Your New Context

5. Traversing the Spiral 157

Step 5. Engage Your New Context

Epilogue: Ruminations and New Beginnings 193

Acknowledgments 197

About the Author 199

Index 201

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.

Praise for Trade Up!

"Rayona Sharpnack is uniquely qualified to shake up your personal and professional paradigm with her new book, Trade Up! At her Institute for Women's Leadership, Rayona has helped an entire generation of top women leaders to find their best selves. Now we can all benefit from Rayona's methods, her ideas, and her wisdom. Trade Up! will leave you invigorated, inspired, and ready for the? most meaningful years of your life."
—Carol Evans, CEO, Working Mother Magazine

"I highly recommend Trade Up! for every leader—from MBA students to seasoned CEOs. In this book Rayona demonstrates her gift for making the 5 most important skills of sustaining great leadership come alive!"
—Carol Bartz, chairman of the board, Autodesk

"Rayona has a powerful way of cutting to the chase and providing a meaningful context for leadership success. Her message is quite clear: leadership is not for the faint of heart. You must jump in with both feet and commit if you truly want to make a difference. If you're looking for ways to up the ante in terms of your leadership capacity, this book is for you."
—Larry Downey, CEO, Teva Neuroscience

"Trade Up! is a leadership book that belongs in everyone's hands—CEO, COO, manager, or those of you navigating the crossroads in your everyday life. It's cogent, warm, inspirational, and pragmatic. I unequivocally recommend Rayona Sharpnack and her work to anyone who is interested in living a life of purpose, calling, and being a contribution to others.
—Richard Strozzi-Heckler, author, The Leadership Dojo and Being Human at Work

"If you are ready to soar to new heights this book will provide you with the tools, insight, and methodology to ascend beyond your imagination."
—Angela Airall, CLO, Girl Scouts USA

"Essential reading! In today's intense 24/7 environment, we have to know ourselves or we'll get eaten alive. Rayona provides a primer for developing profound self-knowledge."
—Sally Helgesen, author, The Female Advantage and Thriving in 24/7