The inspiring, unlikely, laugh-out-loud story of how one woman learned to lead–and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them. This is the story of how Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even while they’re mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. It’s the story of how she went from being an almost comically inept leader to a sought-after CEO who teaches others how to lead. Hadeed unintentionally launched Student Maid while attending college ten years ago. Since then, Student Maid has employed hundreds of students and is widely recognized for its industry-leading retention rate and its culture of trust and accountability. But Kristen and her company were no overnight sensa­tion. In fact, they were almost nothing at all. Along the way, Kristen got it wrong almost as often as she got it right. Giving out hugs instead of feed­back, fixing errors instead of enforcing accountability, and hosting parties instead of cultivating meaning­ful relationships were just a few of her many mistakes. But Kristen’s willingness to admit and learn from those mistakes helped her give her people the chance to learn from their own screwups too. Permission to Screw Up dismisses the idea that leaders and orga­nizations should try to be perfect. It encourages people of all ages to go for it and learn to lead by acting, rather than waiting or thinking. Through a brutally honest and often hilarious account of her own strug­gles, Kristen encourages us to embrace our failures and proves that we’ll be better leaders when we do.

"Priya Rana Kapoor takes you on The Permission JourneyTM, a step-by-step guide that will equip you with the strength and courage to: have newfound self-confidence, realise your dreams, and know you are not alone on your journey. Give Yourself Permission to Live Your Life is complemented with candid anecdotes from Priya's personal experience. She leads by example as she tells her story of illness, self-doubt, and a chronic need-to-please, how she got through it all, and how you can do the same." -- Page 4 of cover.

What's your dream? If you could be anything, what would you be? Are you afraid to share it? Worried someone will laugh and make fun of you? You are not alone. "Your son will be the leader of a gang and dead by the time he's sixteen. You might as well give up on him." These are the words my mother heard at my 6th grade parent-teacher conference. At the age of twelve, my potential had already been limited. Like so many other young people in this world, I was faced with a decision. My choice was to either surrender to the opinions and expectations of others or I could tap into my passions and follow my dreams. This book is my story on how I went from a little boy with no hope, to a determined young man receiving a full athletic scholarship. I want to remind you . . . you have Permission to Dream. Thomas R. Williams

In the spirit of The Last Lecture, The Secret, and The Alchemist, this small book presents BIG ideas for turning your “one day” into today, including the generational transfer of a dream and a powerful blueprint for a masterpiece life—from the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and major motion picture The Pursuit of Happyness. On a winter’s day, Chris Gardner set off with his nine-year-old granddaughter Brooke to find the harmonica of her dreams. The search sends them North “beyond the wall” into a foreboding Chicago neighborhood and, soon, on a harrowing adventure that will change both of their lives—and ours. Chris is still mourning the loss of his girlfriend to brain cancer. Her question haunts him: “Now that we know how short life can be, what will you do with the time you have left?” After five years, he feels an urgency—what he calls, “Atomic Time” in which every second counts—to find an answer, but is stuck. Even while giving Brooke permission to aspire to one day become President of the United States, he knows it’s time to reclaim his own permission to dream. Lost, Chris and his granddaughter board a bus, reminding him of earlier rides through dark times when dreams of a better life kept him alive. As the two wind through a changing cityscape, Chris reflects on past lessons that offer powerful guidance for dreaming your way to monumental success. At its heart, this book lays out a blueprint for building a dream-come-true life—even during uncertainty. Gardner delivers the secrets to achieving a prosperous career—from a method for identifying your ultimate dream to a playbook for becoming world class at it. His tools include the “new 3 R’s”—or the Rep, the Rap and the Rolodex—which reveal how to earn a stellar reputation, develop a rap for marketing yourself, and amass a Rolodex of rewarding relationships. No matter how much wealth you achieve, Chris notes, true success comes from enriching the lives of others—so all can still have access to the American Dream. Toward the end, Brooke observes that in Atomic Time it’s never too late for anyone to reinvent themselves and change their fortune. Chris, hearing her, realizes what his next pursuit will be—to go back to high school and give permission to dream to the next generation of problem solvers and change makers. A true fable, Permission to Dream is a timeless and timely manifesto for turning dreams into action—beginning right now.

False beliefs about money so often rob us of our best opportunity to serve God, to love people, and to steward the wealth He gives us. Our cultural programming has embedded deep within us wrong ideas about wealth, money, and morality. These wrong ideas, and not greed or avarice, are the biggest source of poverty in the world. In Permission to Prosper, Ray Edwards offers three startling premises. First, God has promised you prosperity. Second, God has a purpose behind this prosperity (and it is not necessarily that you give all your money away). And third, the practice of prosperity is a spiritual activity. Not only do you have permission to prosper, but you also have a mandate to multiply. Permission to Prosper gives you the confidence and the keys to do just that.

A revolutionary guide to acknowledging fear and developing the tools we need to build a healthy relationship with this confusing emotion—and use it as a positive force in our lives. We all feel fear. Yet we are often taught to ignore it, overcome it, push past it. But to what benefit? This is the essential question that guides Kristen Ulmer’s remarkable exploration of our most misunderstood emotion in The Art of Fear. Once recognized as the best extreme skier in the world (an honor she held for twelve years), Ulmer knows fear well. In this conversation-changing book, she argues that fear is not here to cause us problems—and that in fact, the only true issue we face with fear is our misguided reaction to it (not the fear itself). Rebuilding our experience with fear from the ground up, Ulmer starts by exploring why we’ve come to view it as a negative. From here, she unpacks fear and shows it to be just one of 10,000 voices that make up our reality, here to help us come alive alongside joy, love, and gratitude. Introducing a mindfulness tool called “Shift,” Ulmer teaches readers how to experience fear in a simpler, more authentic way, transforming our relationship with this emotion from that of a draining battle into one that’s in line with our true nature. Influenced by Ulmer’s own complicated relationship with fear and her over 15 years as a mindset facilitator, The Art of Fear will reconstruct the way we react to and experience fear—empowering us to easily and permanently address the underlying cause of our fear-based problems, and setting us on course to live a happier, more expansive future.

What happens when a girl from the slums dares to dream? She bags an engineering degree and an executive education from Harvard Business School, she becomes a leader in the telecommunications industry, and she mentors other girls and women to do the same. In Be Fearless: Give Yourself Permission to Be You, Jane Egerton-Idehen draws from her more than 15 years of experience as a telecommunication executive in West Africa to help women build lasting careers, especially in the male-dominated STEM industries. Rising from the slums of Ajegunle in Lagos, Nigeria, to brokering million-dollar deals for global telecom giants, hers is a story of hope, of challenging traditional gender roles, and of embracing who you are. This is a book about women for women, as well as the men who love, nurture, support, and work with them at home and in the office.