This book is for the millions of people who look like they have it all on the outside, but on the inside, they harbor secrets—stress, anxiety, and insecurity they never reveal. There’s a tiny voice telling them something’s off or not quite right, or there’s a void they cannot fill no matter how hard they work or how many things they check off their to-do list.

If you’re one of those people, you don’t have to live that way. This book will help you identify the things that make you feel like you have to pretend, so you can liberate yourself from pain and feel happier and more confident.

Amal is a leadership coach who works with leaders from all walks of life. Her clients are amazing people who are motivated to continually grow and improve. Although they each have a variety of goals, the following three come up most often:

1. They want to make a positive impact on others.

2. They want to achieve financial success.

3. They want to feel less stress and more peace.

This book will give you access to the simple, yet powerful method Amal uses to help clients reach these goals. It will give you tools to reach your highest potential.

Amal’s coaching method was born out of her own experiences. Like her clients, she had blind spots and behavioral patterns that limited her. For most of her life, she pretended she was perfect. She pretended she was happy when what she was really feeling was far from it. She had a constant uneasy feeling, and a low-grade anxiety that never really went away. She wanted nothing more than to change the way she was feeling and acting but didn’t know how.

Then a few things happened that forced her to take a closer look at what wasn’t working in her life: she blacked out briefly while driving on the highway; her mother died; she got fired. With each event, she made progress toward positive change, but it wasn’t until the last one that she made profound changes by getting honest with herself at depths she’d never reached before. She finally got real. Real enough to ask herself the following questions: What really matters to me? How can I lead myself at my best? What needs to change for me to feel happy? The answers to those questions started her on a long journey to discover and live her purpose – helping others who are going through what she went through.

This book will help you get real too. Amal will guide you to do some inner work to identify the things from your past that might be subconsciously blocking you from feeling your best. You’ll take a hard look at how you’ve been living your life, and you’ll get honest with yourself about what needs to change. Then, you’ll learn how to create those changes by making small, incremental shifts every day. Finally, you’ll learn how to:

• achieve success by doing the work then surrendering the outcome to something greater

• let go of perfectionism so you can love yourself

• harness the power of mindfulness to reduce stress and feel more joy

• increase vitality by managing your energy instead of your time

This book contains ideas, stories, and principles that will help you understand and prepare for the exercises you’ll complete throughout the book. Each exercise includes a question that will challenge you to take specific actions in your daily life.