Leading with Emotional Courage: How to Have Hard Conversations, Create Accountability, and Inspire Action on Your Most Important Work

The Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 18 Minutes unlocks the secrets of highly successful leaders and pinpoints the missing ingredient that makes all the difference

You have the opportunity to lead: to show up with confidence, connected to others, and committed to a purpose in a way that inspires others to follow. Maybe it's in your workplace, or in your relationships, or simply in your own life. But great leadership--leadership that aligns teams, inspires action, and achieves results--is hard. And what makes it hard isn't theoretical, it's practical. It's not about knowing what to say or do. It's about whether you're willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing it. In other words, the most critical challenge of leadership is emotional courage. If you are willing to feel everything, you can do anything.

Leading with Emotional Courage, based on the author's popular blogs for Harvard Business Review, provides practical, real-world advice for building your emotional courage muscle. Each short, easy to read chapter details a distinct step in this emotional "workout," giving you grounded advice for handling the difficult situations without sacrificing professional ground. By building the courage to say the necessary but difficult things, you become a stronger leader and leave the "should'ves" behind.

Theoretically, leadership is straightforward, but how many people actually lead? The gap between theory and practice is huge. Emotional courage is what bridges that gap. It's what sets great leaders apart from the rest. It gets results. It cuts through the distractions, the noise, and the politics to solve problems and get things done. This book is packed with actionable steps you can take to start building these skills now.

• Have the courage to speak up when others remain silent
• Be stable and grounded in the face of uncertainty
• Respond productively to opposition without getting distracted
• Weather others' anger without shutting down or getting defensive

Leading with Emotional Courage coaches you to build your emotional courage, exercise it effectively, and create an environment in which people around you take accountability to get hard things done.

PETER BREGMAN is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a company that helps senior leaders create accountability and inspire collective action on their organization's most important work. He is the bestselling author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, named the best business book of the year on NPR, and selected by Publisher's Weekly and the New York Post as a top 10 business book. He is also the author of Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Replace Counter-Productive Habits with Ones That Really Work, a New York Post top pick for your career in 2015.