Leadership begins with leading yourself
Bestselling books on authenticity, ownership, and heart-led leadership — and a new book on the way.
Two bestselling books on authenticity, ownership, and heart-led leadership — complete with worksheets, exercises, and coaching insights to help you lead and live as your whole self.
Heart + Strategy
How the Best Leaders Navigate Uncertainty
What do you do when the strategy is no longer clear, the pressure is high, and the people around you are looking to you for answers you may not have yet?
Heart + Strategy is about what leadership asks of us in those moments.
Drawing on more than fifteen years of coaching CEOs, executives, and leadership teams — and her own journey through profound change — Melissa Dawn explores why navigating uncertainty starts long before the crisis arrives. It starts with knowing yourself.
Through real stories, practical tools, and deeply human questions, Heart + Strategy explores how our values, Inner Critic, self-awareness, courage, relationships, and capacity to trust ourselves shape the way we lead when the ground shifts.
Because the best leaders don’t choose between heart and strategy. They bring both to the room. And before we can lead others through change, we have to know how to lead ourselves through it first.
Why Can’t I Just Be Me?
Remove the masks that hide you from the world — and from yourself.
After coaching thousands of people over the past decade, one thread is clear: most people hold back. They wear masks, conform to expectations, and struggle to bring their full selves forward — creating isolation, disconnection, and a barrier to deep relationships, with others and with themselves.
In Why Can’t I Just Be Me?, Melissa Dawn guides you to identify what stands in your way, break unhelpful patterns, and step into full ownership of yourself and your story. This is more than a book — it’s a guidebook for your evolution:
- Identify the barriers keeping you from wholeness and integrity
- Break the self-protective patterns that keep you playing small
- Reconnect with every part of who you are — even the shadows
- Lead and live as your most powerful, whole, heart-led self
I Attract What I Am
Transform failure into a joyful, meaningful life & business.
Taking authorship of your life begins with fully accepting where you are, right now, and owning your role in creating the world around you. When Melissa found herself failing both personally and professionally, she realized one powerful thing: even when circumstances are beyond your control, you can always control how you show up and the energy you bring.
- Become the CEO of your own life — making life happen for you, not to you
- Practical steps, tips, and strategies to get from where you are to where you want to be
- Connect with your core values, strengths, and life purpose
- Powerful teachings from Melissa’s interviews with five experts
What readers are saying.
“Most books will change the way you think about life. This one will change your life.”
“Melissa shares her journey in a generous and vulnerable way that will make you feel safe to take a deeper look at yourself, and choose what’s next for you.”
Heart-centered leadership, not just strategy.
Melissa Dawn is the founder of CEO of Your Life and a Master Certified Coach (MCC) who helps leaders and organizations embrace heart-centered leadership — leading with courage, empathy, and purpose, not just strategy. She is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and executive retreat facilitator.
With certifications including CPCC and CTPC and a Bachelor of Commerce, Melissa blends business acumen with deep personal transformation. She has contributed to Huffington Post, Thrive Global, and Entrepreneur, and been featured on Entrepreneur on Fire, Breakfast Television, and CJAD Radio. She believes the best leaders treat people as humans, not objects.
CEO of Your Life has been trusted by several top organizations.
