Introduction
You See Resignation ... I See Renegotiation

Have you ever been woken from a deep sleep and felt utterly disoriented? Jolted awake so violently, you didn't know where you were? It's unsettling, right? Especially if you didn't even realize you were sleeping.

I published my first book, The Calling-a guide to finding your purpose and getting paid to pursue it-in January 2020, when the world was a different place. We were pre-COVID. Pre-Ahmaud Arbery, pre-Breonna Taylor, pre-George Floyd. Pre-January 6 and the near end of American democracy. Back then, people got out of bed in the morning as they always had, commuted to work as they always did, and lived the lives they were accustomed to living. Business as usual.

Then everything changed, so much so, so joltingly, that instead of just getting out of bed, people started waking up-the kind of waking up where you can't make sense of where you are. And one of the things that made the least sense, because it was connected to every part of our lives, because it ruled our lives-was the way we work.

You know what I mean: that sacrificing way. Signing away our precious time and energy; forgoing our mental, spiritual, and physical well-being, squandering our true gifts; sanding down our natural contours-all in the name of chasing a vision of success that for so many is actually unattainable. Or that, if attained, so often feels like what's the point?

I think of the Great Resignation-that mass exodus of American workers, roughly 50 million in 2021 and then again in 2022-as our mutual primal scream upon waking up to a few radical truths: That life is short. That money isn't everything. That we want to show up and make a difference. That what we do isn't who we are, yet how we do it can be everything. And that business as usual isn't going to cut it anymore (and, if we're being honest, it never did). At a time of massive uncertainty about the future, the people who've resigned know two things for sure: We are not going back to the way we were, and we are not going back to the way we used to work.

Even if you haven't quit your job in the past few years, I suspect you've at least experienced the stirrings of such feelings. Maybe you've asked yourself: What am I doing this for? Why am I living like this? Is it worth it? Is it even what I want? And boy, do I get it. My own "no going back" moment took place 28?years ago, when I left corporate America to see if I could help others in search of a better way of living, working, and leading. Today, my coaching and consulting company, Move the Crowd, is one of the places people turn to when they feel as though they've hit the wall. We work with entrepreneurs and mid-level corporate managers, executive assistants and CEOs, budding social-media influencers, and leaders of nonprofit organizations-all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, all of whom are seeking greater purpose and meaning. Recently, I've been paying special attention to one cohort in particular. Historically, they've been the most undervalued in the workplace and yet possibly, at this moment, have the most to offer: Women of color. My data shows that this group has been the most impacted by COVID (especially when we recognize the pressures on frontline workers and mothers, and the national racial reckoning). As such, they have a unique perspective on questioning the status quo and understanding how to make work more bearable-for everyone.

When journalists and analysts started writing about the Great Resignation, there was a lot of surprise involved: Millions of workers! Just up and quitting! Across all industries! Month after month! From where I sat, it was not nearly so surprising. In my view, this major cultural shift, though absolutely catalyzed by recent events, has been brewing for over two decades (just think about our world of work post-9/11). The entire time, I've been working with people who, in a culture that values work-based productivity above all else, have finally reached their breaking point.

Through Move The Crowd, I've helped tens of thousands of these people radically and thrillingly reset their lives by renegotiating their relationship to work: What they do, why they do it, and how to do it so it feels more meaningful and more aligned with who they really are. Demand for our services has grown dramatically as more and more people wake up to the certainty that they want-I would even say need-to do more with their work than just work. They want to contribute and be fulfilled. They want to be doing something of value, for which they want to be valued.

This is especially true for those who feel like being valued is a constant fight. Our most recent work with women of color (WOC) has only underscored this tipping point. They continue to be the most heavily impacted on all fronts post-pandemic (e.g. health, economic, social/political) and the most enthusiastic about the need for change. We've even developed seminars to help fed-up WOC executives architect their own emancipation plans. The results of the work have been game changing as the women who participate emerge with a whole new vision and blueprint for their life and their work. As word continues to spread about the impact, the demand for these seminars continues to grow. WOC are recognizing through this work that they can do it differently and on their own terms.

No one is happier than I am when one of my clients publishes a New York Times bestseller or gives a TED Talk that goes viral or wins a prestigious fellowship. But I see my greatest success as the countless people I've helped create a path to doing work that feels authentic and makes a meaningful contribution to the world-and doing it in a way that lets them go home happier at the end of the day, with more bandwidth to engage with their families. I've helped people give themselves permission to step off the corporate ladder (which for most people is more like a treadmill) to pursue their greatest passions and to prioritize their commitment to doing good both off the job and on.

I call this work-the work of transforming what it means to work-renegotiating.

I help people do it by helping them radically rethink their beliefs about ambition and success. They don't do this in a vacuum, but in the context of an evolving understanding of themselves, the world, their place in the world, and the entrenched and largely invisible systems that attempt to dictate who can succeed and on what terms. That, in a nutshell, is renegotiation, and the insights in this book will help you achieve it. Just as they helped me.

Where I'm Coming From

When my dad passed away in 2016, I was overwhelmed with grief, and my response was to double down on what I'd always done: Work. I threw myself into 20-hour days, stacked meetings back-to-back-to-back, and made my team members' business my business and their problems my own. Without realizing it, I grew a little more miserable every day, felt a little more trapped, and became a little more resentful.

That resentment started seeping into every interaction, no matter what or whom I was dealing with. Yet for the life of me, I couldn't understand how my dream of building my own company had become such a nightmare-until circumstances in the outer world (the white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia; thorny racial and gender dynamics within my team; the entrepreneur's never-ending need to balance mission and revenue-to name just three) crashed into my pressure-cooker inner world, and BAM. It wasn't my first moment of awakening, but it was a big one. So big, it set me on a path to transforming-renegotiating the way I worked. That, in turn, transformed the way we work at Move The Crowd. And this renegotiation has now become central to the work we've helped so many people do-the very work this book is all about.

So, what is the work? In my case: I affirmed that I was in the right place-Move The Crowd was indeed my calling, my dream job-but I was going about it the wrong way. I had to take an honest look at how I'd been working-and hence living. I had to untangle my identity from a way of working that didn't align with or fulfill me. I had to get real with who I was and what I could and could not tolerate. I had to get radically honest about my ambition. Why was I really doing what I was doing? What did I really want? Was success really what I'd thought it was? Was the kind of success I'd bought into even possible? I had to connect the dots between my inner and outer worlds, and when I did, I came to understand that the way I'd overworked myself as a way of hiding from grief wasn't so different from the way I'd always worked-it was only a matter of degree.

And further, my lifelong work MO was tangled up in the unconscious urgency I felt to redeem my father's legacy as a Black man who'd grown up during Jim Crow, intertwined with his deeply ingrained assumptions about survival and success. I came to discover that I was terrified that I would never be able to work hard enough to create the change I wanted or to receive my proper due.

Informed by this new understanding of myself in relation to the world, I then had to give myself...