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    Change Starts Within You
    Change Starts Within You
    Change Starts Within You
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Change Starts Within You

    By Cortney McDermott

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Cortney McDermott had it all—a rising career at a Fortune 500 company, a loving husband, the Jimmy Choos. To an outsider, she was living the dream. But inside, her mind was racing from meetings to e-mails to childcare, and her thoughts were filled with self-doubt.
    She had checked all the boxes, so why was it never enough? Why wasn’t her dream life sustainable?

    Forced to rethink what it means to be successful, Cortney realized that it’s not about achieving goal after goal. It’s about learning to sustain yourself. To live a life of purpose, you must first look within.

    Whatever your aspirations might be, Cortney’s journey will encourage you to make them a reality. With a fresh take on personal empowerment, inspiring anecdotes, and introspective tools and exercises to help you rebuild confidence in your life’s vision, Change Starts Within You teaches us to look inside ourselves to create a brighter tomorrow.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCortney McDermott
    Release dateJul 3, 2017
    ISBN9780998955216
    Change Starts Within You
    Author

    Cortney McDermott

    Cortney McDermott is an award-winning writer, speaker, and strategist to industry leaders and think tanks around the world. Driven by a mission to inspire, educate, and activate your potential, she redefines sustainability as the ability to sustain yourself. By looking within to make yourself a better person, you’re making the world a better place. A graduate of the London School of Economics and a certified cultural mediator in multiple languages, Cortney also writes for a number of international publications, including “She Owns It” and the “Huffington Post.” Cortney lives with her family in the United States and Italy.

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      Book preview

      Change Starts Within You - Cortney McDermott

      Sometimes rock bottom can look a lot like being at the top to everyone else.

      Flash back six years: I’m sitting on a private jet, sipping an espresso, newspapers from all over the world neatly stacked beside me, on my way to Brussels for work, and . . . an essential piece of my life is broken.

      It’s my BlackBerry.

      It’s locked, courtesy of my two-year-old daughter, and I want to chuck it out the window, I’m so overwhelmed. My mind’s racing ahead to all the unanswered e-mails, all the missed calls, the headache of figuring out how to get it fixed while traveling and racing from one meeting to the next.

      And that’s when a quiet calm sets in and I hear, Whose dream is this, anyway?

      By society’s definitions of success I had it all: a rising career at a Fortune 500 company, publications, awards, husband, daughter, marathon medals, Jimmy Choo heels . . .

      Yet inside those designer shoes, I felt cramped. And that wasn’t the only signal of stress, or distress, that my body was sending. My skin was dry. My hair was fried with yet another straightening treatment. My smile was gone. (And you know you can’t fake a smile—it’s in the crow’s-feet.)

      And here’s what the layer under the surface looked like: frantically packing for yet another trip, freaking when my daughter decided my BlackBerry was a toy, scrambling all the way to the airport in failed attempts to reconnect . . .

      On that plane, flying toward Brussels, while everything in my body was flying in the opposite direction, what really worried me was realizing that even if I’d had a working BlackBerry I’d still be in this Mayday mode.

      How come no one told me that being successful could feel so miserable?

      It was becoming increasingly clear: chasing gold star after gold star, coupled with unrealistic ideas about work-life balance, was not sustainable.

      Yet it’s very likely I could have gone on collecting badges at an ever-increasing pace if it hadn’t been for that visceral nudge that day on the plane:

      Whose dream is this, anyway?

      Was I living for me? Was I honoring my values? What were my values? If I wasn’t living for me, then who—or what—was it all for?

      And that’s when I realized: we all care about living and working sustainably; we’ve just been defining that inadequately. We think sustainability means consuming less energy and reducing waste. And while these things absolutely do matter, that macro view has made our micro solution invisible.

      We are the missing variable in this equation. It’s time to stop looking outside for the solution.

      I wrote this book to share what I learned after that fateful day on the plane: how to tune back in, confidently lead from your values, and create a truly sustainable vision.

      Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

      —Leo Tolstoy

      Simple Sustain Ability

      My theory of sustainability is simple: change starts within you. If you’re making yourself a better person, you’re making the world a better place.

      And what I mean by that is each of us is like a cell that serves the larger body—whether that body is a community, a company, or the natural world we live in. We each have specific advantages and DNA that only we can contribute. But if we lose sight of what that individual contribution is, we start chasing everyone

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