People are always talking about “moving up in the world.”

“Climbing the corporate ladder.”

“I upgraded my man.”

No, no, no. I don't want us to “move” up. I want us to rise up.

Rising up doesn't actually mean achieving success in a traditional sense. It means rising above: Rising above stereotypes. Rising above learned behavior. Rising up the level of your self-worth. Rising up to become a version of yourself that's aligned with your values. Making no compromises.

Rising is about having more choices and more clarity. Having higher personal values that complement each other and don't get compromised. It means having the relationships I want, and making them amazing. Having the type of vocation that I want, the kind of physical life that I want, expressing my emotions the way I want to. Not settling, not juggling, not climbing.

Once you've got the foundations right and adopted a “rising” attitude, the other successes will follow:

• You'll get clarity in your business and know which activities to invest your energy in to get the best results.
• You'll feel less mommy-guilt because you'll set your life up to spend time on what's most important, and unapologetically ditch the shit that doesn't matter.
• You'll know how to communicate constructively with your partner about how to run your lives together.
• You'll surround yourself with people who are a good fit for you and instinctively create a culture in your workplace that fosters positivity, productivity, and flow.

So how do we make it happen?

If you want to rise, there are some rules. The type of woman I'm talking about—the type of woman I try to be, and I want you to be—has a few key qualities:

• She's flexible.
• She's strong.
• She's responsive.

And she knows a few things about herself:

• She knows her value and she knows her values.
• She knows how to navigate life according to her values, not her plans.
• She knows what to do when her values are in conflict.
• And she knows how to apply this in all the key areas of her life.

In other words, she's a pretty emotionally sophisticated woman.

Above all, your values need to be nonnegotiable. Once you know yourself well enough to know what your values are, you can learn how to hold them high in every area of life. The rest will fall into place if you stop fighting the things that are most important to you.

This all started to come together for me after I met my coach, Emily Diamond, who provided the exercises for this book.

It was around 2008 or 2009 that I decided I needed a coach. I'd been studying the traits of effective entrepreneurs and one thing they all said was that it was crucial to have a business coach. So I asked my lecturer at the National College of Business if he knew somebody who could coach me. I wanted the coaching to be about more than just business; I wanted somebody who could give me life coaching as well. The first person he referred me to didn't work out, so then he referred me to Emily. We clicked right away; like most good things in my life, it was a gut instinct thing for me. Emily reckons she got a sign, which is crazy because Florian got a sign when he first met me too. That's two significant people in my life.

The way Emily tells it, she was sent in to salvage the relationship after my meeting with that first coach didn't go well. She walked into my office to meet me for the first time and I had one of those day-to-a-page desk calendars with a quote on each page. I had it open to her birthday. And the quote was something about effectiveness of communication, which she loves. That was her sign.

So we started working together. My career has changed so much in the time I've known her, but she's always brought the conversation back to values. It's always been about how to be a better leader, a better partner, a better human. And if I say something that contradicts my values she'll flag it.

Fundamental to how I've managed to stay focused, sane, and honest is having someone who calls me on my values throughout the journey. Throughout our eight years together there have been a lot of tools that I've used across all areas, and now my team is using them. These are techniques and exercises that have enriched my life and given me clarity. I want to share them with you, so they're going to form the basis of this workbook.

In order to help you sort through shit and start blending, the workbook is going to guide you to assess your values based on how you operate in every area of life. Then you can see which areas aren't fulfilling you according to your values, which areas are in conflict, and how to bring it all into alignment.

CATEGORIZE, DON'T COMPARTMENTALIZE

I know what you're thinking: She just spent three chapters telling me to blend my life together and stop compartmentalizing. Now she's saying I have to categorize everything under different areas of my life and consider each area separately!? Is she full of shit with this whole blending thing?

No, I'm not! (At least, not about this.)

Think of these categories as tools for navigation, not a call to compartmentalize. “Life” is a huge category; we need to break it down for the purpose of working through it and identifying the areas that need the most attention. Once you adopt the rising attitude, you'll naturally start to integrate all the areas of your life and blend them together.

Emily has a neuroscience background, so I trust her when she says that compartmentalizing is dangerous, but blending is good for your brain.

I've divided my life into areas that make sense to me, but at the end of the day I want you to approach your life as a whole thing, knowing where to emphasize your energy and where to pull back day to day depending on your priorities.

This is how we're going to approach it for the purposes of this book.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Before you can start doing the work, you need to lay some foundations. That's what the next three chapters are for. They'll set you up with the concepts that you need before you can get into the workbook.

From there, you can go to any section of the book that you like and do the exercises that relate to you. (There's an index of exercises at the back of the book for reference.) Of course, I recommend that you give consideration to all the bits of life in due course. And if you're not sure where to start, just start at the beginning and work through it all.

You can read this book however works best for you—on the plane, on your commute, in bed at night—but when you see a coaching exercise, stop and consider it, or come back to it later. These DIY sessions are best done with a pen and paper. They won't take long, but it's worth setting aside some time and energy to give them your full attention.

If your reading time is limited, just go slowly and thoroughly. If you give yourself a year to work through the whole thing with proper attention, you could spend four weeks working on the area covered in each chapter and have some vacation time left over.

Once you've worked through the exercises in every chapter, you'll have a beautiful bucket list filled with items that cover the whole spectrum of your life and what's important to you. You'll be equipped to create a road map for doing what you want, how you want to do it, when you want to—which is what we'll cover in the final section of this book. And you should find yourself starting to blend without thinking twice, and without compromising on anything important.

If you're burning to address a particular problem or conflict in your life right away, start there. Feel free to jump into whichever area is most important to you right now, or is giving you the least amount of workability.

But don't go there until you've read the next three chapters!