This book is organized into three parts. First, we’ll explore self-disconnection: how grief, trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves pull us away from our center. Next, we’ll practice self-connection: building emotional awareness, cultivating presence, and learning to process discomfort in healthy ways so we can react better to what’s happening in our environment. Finally, we’ll explore what I call “living as a force”: using your voice, boundaries, and resilience to lead with impact. Each chapter ends with prompts and small actions—not to preach, but to help you carry and maintain the work beyond the page.

Before we go further, let me acknowledge the question that may be on your mind: Who am I to write about the relationship you have with yourself? I’m not a psychologist. I don’t claim to be a guru. I’m a human being who has lived across continents, navigated multiple often contradictory identities, and is always observing and making connections between lived experience, science, and spirituality. I was born in Singapore and have also lived in Switzerland, the UAE, and Australia.

Those moves taught me something surprising about identity: other peoples’ perceptions of us are dependent on context. For example, in Australia, I was “that Asian girl” and an immigrant without any industry connections, there I had to work harder to be noticed or given a leg up at the start of my career. When I lived in Dubai, I was “the Australian girl.” In Singapore, I was “the mixed-race girl” who enjoyed privilege because of the bridge of my nose, my Chinese surname and the paleness of my skin, I was able to move up in my career exponentially. These experiences gave me an epiphany, if my identity was completely negotiable by context, I had the complete power to build the self-concept I desired. And maybe this self-concept is the only thing we truly ever own, making it imperative for our personal power to get it right.

For the last several years, I’ve traveled the world speaking to organizations about human connection. Those rooms are full of brilliant people—strategists, scientists and engineers—who can design complex systems and lead high-stakes teams. And yet again and again, I see the same pattern: as successful as someone may be on the outside, they haven’t been incentivized to examine and critique their inner world. They can master the quarterly plan but struggle to understand the workings of their own nervous system. They can negotiate mergers but feel lost, naming their emotional needs. The more externally successful some people become, the more lopsided their development gets—exquisite at achievement, hollow in self-awareness. (I know, because as you’ll read in these pages, I used to be one of them).