Product Description

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leaders limit themselves by holding on to ideas or assumptions about ourselves—what she calls your “context” —that are no longer valid.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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89780 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
“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, chief learning officer, 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

From the Inside Flap

Trade Up!

"Sometimes the world seems like it has been and always will be set in its ways; then someone nudges our beliefs or opens our eyes, and a whole new universe of possibility becomes available. That's what trading up can do for individuals, organizations, and societies."—Rayona Sharpnack

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!

Trade Up! will show leaders how the business of context shifting will free them to assert leadership in new realms while dramatically improving the meaningfulness of their lives and the quality of their relationships.

From the Back Cover

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

Customer Reviews

Creating Your Future
Taking pages from Werner Erhard's transformational thinking, executive coach Rayona Sharpnack presents a self-help process for creating your future; creating it as something other than your past masquerading under a new name. And, she does it with wit, clarity, and stories that make this book an informative and enjoyable read. If you are not familiar with this language-based concept of renaming, making declarations about the future, and living life as a series of possibilities, this book is a good place to start. If you are familiar with this 'life is a story so create a new context by creating a new story' process, this book will be an easy-read, refresher course that may add a few new moves to your game.

Based upon the ideas that an individual is responsible for the content and decisions (all of life is a choice) that make up their life and that most everyone will reach a point in their life when the other edge of their double-edged success strategy begins to bite them, Sharpnack offers a 5 step process to move to the next level of performance in life. The step one is to 'name your game' - find words to describe how you see yourself, or your winning formula. The next step is to or 'feel the pain' -- see how this limits your potential or controls you life and this gives you a reason to change. Step three is to 'author a new own story' - find words to describe a new way to succeed at life. Step four is a 'practice to master' bit - observe yourself without criticism. Step five 'invites others into your conversation' - moves you into action toward your new commitments in life.

The above is a gross oversimplification and the author gives each step much more depth, but perhaps you get the idea - change the way you think and you can move the world, or at least that portion of the world centered around you. Read the book, it is not heavy lifting and the benefits might be enormous!

Dennis DeWilde, author of "The Performance Connection"

How to Take Your Life to the Next Level
Getting to the point where we recognize that life will only ever be as good as we make it for ourselves can take some people decades to realize... but when that realization hits, the next obvious question that arises is, "HOW can I make my life the best it can be?" Rayona Sharpnack answers this question brilliantly for those willing to see themselves in a leadership role in life, with her masterful self-help book, TRADE UP.

Sharpnack helps leaders gain awareness of self-limiting beliefs, assumptions and behaviors through examples from her many successful career and life transitions as well as from experiences of those she coaches. We can face some fairly large challenges when we transform our lives from the inside out, since such extensive changes inevitably affect everyone and everything around us, and they seldom happen overnight. As Sharpnack patiently explains, "Trading up to a new context isn't an event, it's an ongoing process."

TRADE UP provides pointers for what we can expect when we begin the five-step process of: revealing our context, owning our context, designing a new context that gets us what we want, sustaining our new context, and activating our context to engage with the world. While these steps may seem deceptively simple and obvious, the real power and beauty of TRADE UP is in the details, where TRADE UP really shines. In the crowded genre of self-help books, it is a rare book that states its case with just the right mix of crystalline clarity and passionate spark... and TRADE UP hits that lofty mark with ease.

When you know that you are in charge of your own life, and your leadership ability is the main thing that makes all the difference in how satisfied you are with how your life turns out, TRADE UP is the book that will help you achieve your dreams. Highly recommended!

Insightful and Inspiring
Rayona Sharpnack transcends the leadership book genre with Trade Up - a truly insightful and inspiring read! Her examples are concrete, her analysis compelling and the advice is always right on.