There are many ways stress can be viewed in our normal day-to-day struggle, but I’ll do my best to try not to treat it like a superficial topic, and while I wrote this with the intention of it being clear and practical, this is not a how-to guide or a tutorial on deep breathing. This is not the place where you’ll find someone to tell you what to do, it’s a place for you to seek deeper understanding, sometimes seeing something you might not like to see.

My purpose in this book isn’t to eliminate all stress in our lives, whether that’s even possible, but cutting the unnecessary one and learning to thrive under pressure for the stuff that matters to us. To shape and shift our relationship with fear and stress so we can grow and develop with them. This is what stress and leadership are to me: stress is about self-discovery, and leading is about putting that self-discovery into practice and giving back to others.