The Policy Circle’s 2021 Holiday Gift Guide

Trust Your Voice: A Roadmap to Focus and Influence | Sylvie Légère

Confidence. Trust. Where do these qualities come from? How can you trust that your voice matters? How can you begin to have the confidence to trust in yourself, others, and even the process of building something significant?

Trust is essential if we are to become all that we are meant to be. No one knows this better than Sylvie Légère, co-founder and board chair of The Policy Circle with 20 years of experience in technology, process, and change management with Fortune 500 companies. She has used her vision and strategy to help organizations and movements develop innovative solutions that unite people for the common good, ignite potential in others, and advance the next generation of female changemakers. Légère co-founded The Policy Circle in 2015, which has grown to become a thriving nonpartisan, non-profit organization transforming communities in 42 states.

But Légère didn’t always believe in herself: “For many years, I kept waiting for confidence to
somehow show up. Eventually, I realized that I needed to trust my own voice, even when it
was shaking. I needed to let go of doing it all alone and intentionally surround myself with
people who I could trust to help me achieve my potential. I also needed to be willing to help
them ignite their potential.”

“Over the past six years, as my co-founders and I built The Policy Circle, we’ve seen the value that women bring to shaping public policy, because they bring a fresh perspective to the table. This book, Trust Your Voice, is about what I have learned by trying new things as an entrepreneur—succeeding sometimes and learning by mistakes at other times. I hope that my story will help you to do the same.”

In Trust Your Voice, Légère draws on her own experiences and knowledge, offering practical advice and hard-won insights, to explore seven essential “trusts” that fuel a person’s confidence:

• Trust the Features of Human Nature
• Trust That You are Building Something Bigger Than You
• Trust That Your Voice Will Spark Others
• Trust Your Mind and Spirit
• Trust That You can Build a Strong Network
• Trust in the Process, Even if It Takes a While
• Trust Yourself as You Step Into New Experiences

Sylvie Légère’s Trust Your Voice will guide the reader toward both personal and professional
growth. Proceeds from this book are generously donated to The Policy Circle.

Find Your Fire: Stories and Strategies to Inspire the Changemaker Inside You | Terri Broussard Williams

The new book by phenomenal #Firestarter Terri Broussard Williams. Get the inspiration and the tools you need to change the world!

In Find Your Fire, Terri Broussard Williams — a groundbreaking lobbyist and the voice of the popular MovementMakerCollective blog — captures powerful stories and no-nonsense advice from extraordinary changemakers on a mission to create social good. She also shares the tools to turn the vision for your own movement into a reality. Find Your Fire is an invaluable companion for current or aspiring politicians, activists, nonprofit professionals, social entrepreneurs, visionaries and movement makers. It’s Terri’s way of kindling more #Firestarters and keeping their light burning strong.

This book is dedicated to the #Firestarters of the world, whose lights shine brighter than any darkness. You see the needs that others ignore. You yearn to make an impact and use your gifts to spark something big. You advocate for social change by honoring the fire in your heart. You are a true changemaker. And this is your time. Find Your Fire will ignite your potential with both inspiration and no-nonsense advice. You’ll meet elected leaders, activists, social entrepreneurs and other extraordinary women on a mission of change. And you’ll get the tools to turn the vision for your own movement into a reality.

Work Reimagined: How the power of pace can help your organization achieve a new level of focus, engagement and satisfaction | Elizabeth Knox

We are at a pivotal point in how our culture approaches work. Workplace burnout is at an all-time high. Employees are choosing organizations that prioritize work-life balance, flexibility, and remote work, and align with their personal values. As a result, organizations are forced to reevaluate their structure, priorities, and communication, but often have no idea where or how to begin.

Elizabeth Knox knows that work matters. Work is what drives necessary change in our world, as well as our economy, passions, goals. And more important than work is working well, which is only possible when work allows us to also live well.

To accomplish this, we have to reimagine what work is, and what it isn’t. Work Reimagined: How the Power of Pace Can Help Your Organization Achieve a New Level of Focus, Engagement, and Satisfaction walks organizational leaders and team members through how to transform their workplaces at an individual and organizational level so their members can both work and live well.

How? By understanding the importance of pace: the established rhythms and expectations of the workplace that enable organizations and their employees to work at a healthy, sustainable rate and accomplish their mission over the long term without burning out. Without a sustainable pace, organizations will only continue to battle low energy and high turnover rates. Knox has found that the secret to effective and satisfying work is finding a sustainable pace, at both an individual and organizational level. With years of experience helping organizations reimagine their identities, communication, and effectiveness to create a more productive workplace, Knox details her experience and data-driven strategies to help readers evaluate and discover a pace that allows both their organization and employees to succeed. Complete with activities and exercises for personal and organizational evaluation, Knox pushes readers to look inward, and question if the way they are working is truly sustainable.

You Can Be Perfect or You Can Be Happy | Karith Foster

In You Can Be Perfect or You Can Be Happy, Karith reveals the lessons learned as a wife, mother, comic, radio host, and TV personality that showed her how to let go of social media perfection and embrace the beautiful mess that makes a happy life. Whether it’s dealing with baristas who can’t quite spell her name right or the little joys that only children can bring, she has learned to how love being imperfectly happy.

Through her real-life anecdotes of life on the road and navigating the ups and downs of family life, you’ll learn:

• Why perfection is a game you will never win, but happiness will prevail every time you choose it
• The B.A.S.I.C.S. of a happy life
• How you can achieve your goals by doing just 5 things a day
• Why investing in yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself and those you love.
• And, most importantly, how to say YES and how to say NO

Perfection is overrated. Join Karith as she shows you how to find bliss in your everyday life.

Humorist, motivational speaker, TV & radio personality, actress, author, blogger, and entrepreneur are all titles fitting for Karith Foster. She is one of the hottest comics to come out of New York City, according to both The Hollywood Reporter and Backstage Magazine, who named her one of the “Top 10 Comics to Watch.” She has made a name for herself as a national headliner for being a clean, funny African-American comedian. Karith travels nationally and abroad bringing humor and inspiration to all of her audiences.

Be Board Ready: The Secrets to Landing a Board Seat and Being a Great Director | Betsy Atkins

Betsy Atkins is often asked “How can I get on a board?” So after 20+ years in the boardroom and multiple roles in public and private companies she is ready to share her secrets. In this book, she teaches you how to build your own personal brand as well as how to keep yourself relevant and growing. She shares tips on how to make your personal network the most effective (and the most enjoyable.) Betsy covers the best ways to present your skills and credentials in order to get that board interview as well as detailed information on how to prepare for it. But getting that board seat won’t be the end of your journey. Once you are on the board, you’ll want to be the best board member you can, helping your companies grow and prosper so you’ll be able to get that next, even better board seat.

For new CEOs and entrepreneurs she covers how to make your board work for you and be a true accelerant for your company; the role of the board, choosing new board members (and getting rid of the bad ones), maximizing your board meetings and building board relationships to ensure success for you as a CEO and for your company.

Also included is a collection of articles and learnings from Betsy’s experiences as an operator, board member and advisor to some of America’s largest and most notable public companies.

After reading this book, prospective board members will be energized and motivated to create their own personal brand, cultivate it to gain a board seat, be a better board member and CEO and continue to educate on the issues boards are looking at today.  

Green Panties, Ulcers & Corns: Commitment, Sacrifice and Responsibility of Women In Servant Leadership | Necole K Muhammad

Do you ever feel like you’re going through the motions of every day, living your life on autopilot, but not really sure why you’re doing what you’re doing or even if you really want to be doing it? Have you ever lost sight of who you are in the process of trying to help everybody else? Do you tell yourself that your family is important to you but then miss out on time with your family because of that pressing work assignment?

Most likely, you have experienced at least one of these struggles. Necole Muhammad has gone through all of them, and she shares her personal journey of overcoming them in her book, Green Panties, Ulcers & Corns: Commitment, Sacrifice and Responsibility of Women In Servant Leadership. Too many of us get caught in the vicious cycle of going through our daily motions without reflecting and assessing whether we are on the right path, causing us to crash and burn. The lessons laid out in this book help keep you on track to living your best life in accordance with your values and your purpose.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure | Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen?

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures.  Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction.

This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.