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Femme Led
Femme Led: Hard-Learned Lessons from Women in Leadership is an anthology of women’s leadership stories that asks what becomes possible when leadership is no longer treated as control, performance, or self-erasure, but as truth lived in public. Across its chapters, the book moves from Sierra Melcher and Stephanie Mikulasek’s framing of the “leadership leap” to stories of reinvention, illness, entrepreneurship, grief, courage, and generosity. Catalina Escobar Bravo’s memories of growing up in Medellín, sleeping with taped windows during years of violence, eventually deepen into her purpose-driven work with Makaia. Carol Britton’s account of stepping into a high-pressure procurement role at the Bank of New York turns fear into a managerial instrument rather than an obstacle. Anna Dravland’s stroke and her transformation from a woman who did everything into a leader who built like a starfish instead of a spider web may be the book’s most tender image of all. Together, these essays argue that leadership isn’t a costume women must wear correctly. It’s a reckoning with one’s own voice, limits, power, and capacity to keep becoming.
What moved me most was the book’s assertion that the body often knows before the résumé does. I felt that idea gathering force each time a woman chose alignment over appearances: Tracy Macdonald turning in her badge and weapon after realizing the Secret Service no longer fit the life or values she could carry, Catalina stepping aside from the CEO role at Makaia to protect the mission rather than her title, Stephanie admitting that certainty itself had become a cage. These aren’t tidy triumphs. They ache. The book does a great job of showing how the emotional truth of leadership is often found in unmarketable moments: fatigue that rest doesn’t fix, ambition that has gone hollow, success that starts to feel like betrayal. I admired the way the authors return again and again to intuition without making it flimsy. Here, intuition is data of another kind, less quantifiable, perhaps, but no less exacting.
Some chapters read like polished keynote addresses, clear, instructive, almost ceremonious. Others arrive closer to confession, with rougher edges and a more immediate heat. Anna’s chapter, shaped around the aftermath of brain injury, resists a conventional arc, and I found that choice not only compassionate but artistically right. It lets form carry meaning. I was also struck by the range of metaphors the book earns rather than merely decorates with: the “leadership leap,” the internal flame, the spider web in a storm, the starfish that can keep functioning while it heals. The ideas circle familiar territory around purpose, resilience, and authenticity, but the best pieces refresh those words by grounding them in the particulars that people actually lived through, like Janice Marquardt leasing an office so her work would stop being absorbed by the quiet gravity of household labor, or Alexandra Yung reframing business as giving rather than transaction.
Femme Led respects uncertainty as part of the work. Leadership becomes most humane when women stop asking permission to be whole. I’d recommend this book to women in transition, founders, executives, coaches, nonprofit leaders, creatives, and anyone who has achieved the thing they thought they wanted only to feel some private truth pressing against the edges of it. This book’s gift is reminding us that crossing over can be frightening, scary, and necessary all at once.
Pages: 200 | ASIN : B0GQJPDW8Q
Rise in Courage
In Aimed & Ready, you emphasize that the seasons of delay, silence, loss, and backward movement can actually be forms of divine preparation. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wrote this book to address a need I kept seeing in people’s lives. Many Christians know how to celebrate seasons of success, blessing, and prosperity, but often lack a framework for navigating hardship, uncertainty, delay, and disappointment. Over the past six months, this burden grew strongly in my heart, and I felt compelled to put into words the hope and perspective people need during difficult seasons.
The core message of the book is that when life doesn’t make sense, there is still purpose, hope, and destiny available when we choose to trust God and surrender our struggles to Him. Rather than seeing trials as endings, I want readers to recognize that something beautiful may be forming just beyond the present challenge.
I also wanted to provide prophetic encouragement by exploring the emotions people experience in seasons of stretching, waiting, discomfort, and shaking. The book not only acknowledges those feelings but also offers insight into why we experience them and how we can respond in faith.
One of the key metaphors I use is that of an archer pulling back an arrow. The Archer’s aim is never careless. Although the pressure of being pulled back can feel intense, it is actually preparation for forward movement. In the same way, I believe God often uses seasons of tension to position us for growth, blessing, and His greater purpose.
Ultimately, the book challenges readers to rise in courage, break limiting mindsets, and step confidently into God’s calling. I want people to understand that their trials can transform them and become a powerful testimony of God’s faithfulness.
When did the bow-and-arrow metaphor first come to you, and why did it feel central?
The book really began with one simple thought: your pullback is a setup for your comeback. That idea immediately gave me the picture of an archer with a bow fully drawn back. What feels like strain is often actually alignment, and what looks like a setback may be God positioning you for greater impact.
In a world where many people feel like targets, I wanted to remind readers that God didn’t create them to be victims of circumstance—He crafted them to be the arrow. Sometimes the pullback isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning of something greater. That’s why the bow-and-arrow metaphor felt so powerful and fitting for this message.
A major theme in the book is surrender. In God’s Kingdom, surrender is never defeat. In His hands, surrender becomes strength, stability, and precision. It allows your life to go farther than human effort alone ever could. Many people think surrender means losing control or identity, but I believe the opposite is true—it places your life in the hands of Someone who knows you completely and sees further than you can see.
Just as an archer never draws back an arrow without intention, God never allows seasons of waiting, silence, or tension without purpose. He sees the obstacles, opportunities, and timing that we often cannot. Sometimes what feels like delay is really a divine reset to align our trajectory with His greater vision.
Ultimately, the message of the book is that every arrow finds its meaning when it yields to the Archer. When we surrender to God, our lives can move with greater clarity, purpose, and precision toward the calling He has set before us. This book, along with its devotional workbook, is designed to help readers grow stronger in the tension, realign with Heaven’s purpose, and step confidently into their God-given destiny.
How can readers tell the difference between spiritual stillness and spiritual distance?
One of the key messages I wanted to communicate is that trust in God must always be the foundation of faith. There are seasons when God can feel distant, but often that sense of distance comes because something is clouding our perspective, or because the answer we’re looking for is not yet visible. It doesn’t mean God has moved away.
I also talk about stillness, because stillness is not the absence of God. I describe it as a holy hush—an intentional choice to silence the noise around us so we can hear, see, and discern what God is doing in that moment. Rather than being empty, stillness can become a place of deep intimacy with Him.
When people feel distance from God, they often assume He is far away or hard to reach. But that is never His heart. God desires closeness and a relationship with His people. Scripture asks, What can separate us from the love of God? and the answer is clear: nothing.
So any feeling of separation is not a truth we should accept, but often a perception shaped by fear, disappointment, or misunderstanding. The reality is that God remains near, loving, and fully present—even in the quiet seasons. My hope is that readers come to see silence not as abandonment, but as an invitation into deeper trust and intimacy with Him.
How do you respond to readers who feel that their pain has no visible outcome?
One of the important truths I explore in the book is that while difficult seasons can feel confusing and unclear, we must be careful not to let that drift into fatalism or hopelessness. Just because we cannot see the outcome doesn’t mean there is no purpose or direction. Often, it simply means the perspective belongs to Someone greater than us. As I say in the book, the archer sees what the arrow cannot yet perceive.
That perspective changes how we view our battles. What looks like an obstacle may actually be the very thing God uses to launch us into what He has already prepared. Your Goliath may not be there to destroy you—it may be the catapult into your next season of purpose and victory. That’s why I encourage readers not to be afraid, but to trust God completely, because true breakthrough happens when His power is behind what He has placed in your hand.
My prayer is that this book would saturate people with faith and hope, bring their hearts into alignment with God, and strengthen their confidence in His purpose. If someone is in a season of waiting, stretching, or feeling hidden, I believe this message can be a real lifeline. It is designed to help readers rest again, realign with God’s perspective, and trust His heart in a fresh way.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Nico Smit | Amazon
With prophetic insight and pastoral clarity, Nico Smit reframes seasons of tension, delay, and apparent retreat-not as disqualification, but as divine preparation. Drawing from a powerful vision of a bow drawn tight and an arrow held under pressure, ‘Aimed & Ready’ reveals a profound truth: what feels like strain is often alignment, and what looks like setback may be God positioning you for greater impact.
This powerful cutting-edge prophetic book speaks to those who feel buried, forgotten, or off-track, reminding them that God does not waste His arrows. The pullback is not punishment-it is precision. The pressure is not abandonment-it is proof of purpose.
With prophetic revelation, biblical insight, and hope-filled exhortation, these pages restore faith for the waiting, courage for the weary, and vision for those standing between promise and fulfillment.
You are not retreating. You are being aligned, sharpened, and prepared. ‘Aimed & Ready’ will restore your perspective and strengthen your faith.
Will you let God aim you?
If your answer is yes, your comeback has already begun.
FOREWORD by Stacey Campbell
This book also has a Devotional Workbook available on Amazon.
Professional Endorsements by: Gary Heyes, Ryan Laubscher, Chelsea Hagen, Elaine Tavolacci, Joshua Sawiris, Ada Boland and Melvain Donyes
Aimed & Ready
I found Aimed & Ready to be a spiritually focused book about how seasons of delay, silence, loss, and apparent backward movement can actually be forms of divine preparation. Author Nico Smit’s central image is the bow and arrow: the life that feels pulled back is not abandoned, but being aimed. From there, he builds a sustained meditation on surrender, waiting, spiritual alignment, and eventual release, moving through ideas like the “holy hush,” the reset that becomes a re-aim, David’s devastation at Ziklag, and the insistence that hope is not sentimental optimism but evidence that God is still at work. It’s a book written for readers who feel stalled and bruised, and it keeps returning to the same steady conviction that what looks like burial may be the first stage of resurrection.
What stayed with me most was the emotional steadiness of the book. Smit writes with the urgency of a preacher, but also with a pastoral tenderness that keeps the message from feeling harsh or abstract. I liked the way he lingers over images until they start to feel lived in. The bare fruit tree, the buried seed, the rowers facing one way while still moving forward, the ruined city of Ziklag, all of it feeds the same argument from slightly different angles, and that repetition gives the book a kind of devotional pulse. At its best, the writing has real lift. There are passages that feel genuinely bracing, especially when he reframes pressure as alignment and refuses the easy language of defeat. I also appreciated that he opens by reminding readers that this book is not Scripture and shouldn’t replace Scripture. That note of humility matters, and it gives the book a better spiritual proportion than it might otherwise have had.
Smit is so committed to the pullback/comeback framework that nearly everything gets absorbed into it. For readers already attuned to prophetic Christian language, that will probably feel clarifying and consoling. I admired the conviction. The prose can also swell into exhortation. Still, even when I felt the book pressing too insistently on one note, I couldn’t deny the sincerity behind it. Smit clearly believes these ideas down to the bone, and that kind of belief gives the book warmth, gravity, and a persuasive emotional center.
The book gives discouragement a shape people can actually work with. Smit turns spiritual exhaustion into something legible through the bow-and-arrow metaphor, the “holy hush,” and the Ziklag section, so a reader in a hard season can feel less lost inside their own experience. A lot of encouraging books tell you to hold on, but this one tries to explain what holding on feels like from the inside. I think that interpretive quality is one of its real strengths.
I found Aimed & Ready earnest, vivid, and often moving. It’s a book that wants to steady the heart, reframe suffering, and call the reader back into trust. I’d especially recommend it to Christians who are living through a season of disappointment, transition, spiritual fatigue, or long waiting, and to readers who respond to devotional writing that leans on metaphor, exhortation, and hope. For the right reader, this will feel less like a lecture than a hand at the shoulder, firm, warm, and convinced that the story isn’t over yet.
Pages: 168 | ASIN : B0GK9NMGRY
Suffering Leads to Hope
James Velissaris’s Suffering Leads to Hope is part prison memoir, part devotional theology, and part spiritual self-audit. It traces a deliberate movement from denial, anger, bitterness, and surrender into repentance, humility, forgiveness, sanctification, faith, peace, freedom, and finally hope, love, joy, and glorification. What gives the book its shape is not just Romans 5:3-4 as a governing text, but the author’s insistence that suffering can become a furnace of transformation rather than a dead end. He writes out of corporate fraud, prison, family grief, divorce, childhood abuse, addiction, and the death of his stepfather, and he keeps returning to the same hard-won claim: pain doesn’t become meaningful by shrinking, only by being faced and yielded.
Velissaris is at his strongest when he lets the argument rise naturally out of lived moments: arriving at MDC Brooklyn in a fitted navy suit still half-believing the ordeal is temporary, watching Catracho drift through prison in a haze of deuce and longing for the daughter he can’t bear to see, or witnessing Abu lose what might have been his way home in a single eruption of anger. Those scenes have real force because they aren’t presented as sermon illustrations first. They feel observed, inhabited, and earned. I also found myself drawn to the way he describes interior states. His account of denial as “the mind’s final illusion of control” has a stark clarity to it, and the book is often most persuasive when it sounds wounded, chastened, and unsparing toward the self. The writing can be genuinely vivid, sometimes almost lyrical, especially when he slows down and trusts image, memory, and rhythm to do the work.
The book’s ideas are earnest and often moving. Velissaris wants to make every affliction legible inside a Christian framework. When he’s wrestling with bitterness, forgiveness, or the slow discipline of service, I felt the texture of genuine struggle. When he shifts into more explanatory, doctrinal passages, especially where he presses psychological or social analysis into firm theological conclusions, the prose can harden and the complexity thins out. Still, even there, I respected the seriousness of his attempt. He is not writing from a safe distance, and that matters. The sections on repentance, discipleship, and joy are most convincing when they show that transformation is not clean, triumphant, or instant, but repetitive, humiliating, and daily. I appreciated, too, that the book does not confuse joy with cheerfulness. Its better insight is sadder and truer: grief remains, but it is no longer sovereign.
I found Suffering Leads to Hope sincere and often affecting. It’s a book written by someone trying to tell the truth about what broke him and what he believes remade him, and that gives it a gravity that polished self-help books rarely have. I never doubted the depth of conviction behind the book. I’d recommend it most to Christian readers who are living through loss, guilt, addiction, or long seasons of unanswered prayer, and to anyone interested in spiritual memoirs. It’s a book for readers who don’t need suffering explained away, but do want to see what it looks like when someone tries, stubbornly and imperfectly, to wrestle it into meaning.
Pages: 223 | ASIN : B0GQHT9J1R
Generational Healing
In Wisdom from My Grandmothers, you share with readers recovered family history and spiritual dialogue gained from a series of channeling sessions in which you interviewed the spirits of your ancestors. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wanted to connect with my ancestors and know more about their lives since I didn’t know most of them when they were alive. I wanted to hear how they used their voices as women during their lifetimes. I wanted to learn about patterns they may have passed down to me. I wanted to see if generational healing was possible. The United States is currently experiencing much turmoil, change, and uncertainty. The patriarchal system has left society in a mess. After the 2024 presidential election, I felt that it was important to provide hope and positive messages for others. I hope that the readers will know that they are important, lovable, and capable of being catalysts for change.
The book is built around channeling sessions with the Hedda Foundation. How did that process begin for you?
I had a psychic reading a few years ago, and my ancestors expressed their desire for me to tell their stories so that they could help other women in their healing journeys. I was already working with the Hedda Foundation. I thought, “Why not interview Mom and my grandmothers in her line as the way to learn their stories?” I was guided as to the questions I should ask. Thus began a process that took about eight months of interviews with five deceased ancestors, plus my living older sister.
Did your understanding of truth and memory change as you worked through these sessions?
My mother and her mother never wanted to discuss their personal history. I know now that it is very common for people in those generations. I was thrilled to learn the truth about their past and their experiences, even though some were painful. The deceased have no fear or anxiety about what people will say about their information. They were happy to share things they couldn’t have expressed when alive. I applaud their candor and bravery.
If someone feels stuck in patterns they don’t fully understand, where would you suggest they begin?
I would suggest they find a good therapist. They might also attend meetings of Co-Dependents Anonymous or Al-Anon. Journaling is a good way to record one’s thoughts and feelings.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Jo Ann Fawcett | Website
Wisdom From My Grandmothers
Jo Ann Fawcett’s third memoir is an unusual act of intergenerational excavation. Through a series of channeling sessions with the Hedda Foundation, Fawcett interviews the spirits of five maternal and paternal ancestors, beginning with Rosanna Blue, a full-blood Cherokee woman born in 1764, and moving forward through generations of German immigrant farmwives, a Depression-era single mother, and finally Fawcett’s own mother, Betty. Each woman’s chapter blends recovered family history with spiritual dialogue and closes with a curated list of wisdom teachings. The book’s animating thesis is that generational trauma, specifically the suppression of women’s voices and autonomy across centuries of patriarchal society, flows invisibly through family lines, and that naming it is the first step toward breaking it.
What surprised me most was how genuinely moving some of these portraits are. Dorha, Fawcett’s great-grandmother, is particularly vivid: a farm wife who quietly asserted herself in her marriage bed, who gave up her dream of becoming a pianist, who baked mile-high apple pies during the Depression and infused them with a love her circumstances rarely permitted her to express openly. There’s real tenderness in how Fawcett renders these women, and it comes through even in the plainest prose. The writing itself oscillates between genuinely lyrical observations and passages that read like transcribed notes, but when Fawcett slows down, something quietly profound emerges. The thread connecting Rosanna’s forced silence in the white man’s world to Grandma Lella’s workplace navigation of predatory male colleagues to Fawcett’s own seven marriages is drawn with honesty rather than melodrama, and that restraint earns the reader’s trust.
Readers who approach the channeling premise with open curiosity will get more from it than those who don’t, particularly in the wisdom summaries that close each chapter. I found myself caring less about the literal veracity of these communications than about what the project represents: a woman in her seventies doing the painstaking work of understanding why she kept choosing partners who diminished her, and finding, through imagination or spirit or sheer willpower, the language her ancestors never got to use. The book is most affecting when Fawcett is honest about her own damage. Her admission that she didn’t fully reckon with her own molestation until she was seventy, or her mother stating that loving her father was like pouring water into a cup full of holes, are the moments where the memoir earns its emotional weight. The underlying impulse, to locate yourself within a lineage and decide consciously which parts of it you’ll carry forward, is genuinely valuable.
Wisdom from My Grandmothers is not a conventional memoir. It’s a personal reckoning. I’d recommend it to anyone navigating the aftermath of difficult relationships, anyone curious about ancestral healing frameworks, or anyone who has looked at their own patterns and suspected they didn’t start with them.
The 7 Universal Laws: The Hidden Rules Behind the Mind, Emotions, and the Architecture of the Universe
The 7 Universal Laws lays out a framework that blends psychology, physics, personal development, and storytelling. Monica Ion and Stefan Irimia explore seven core principles that they believe govern both the universe and human behavior. These laws include duality, reflection, transformation, synchronicity, eristic escalation, order, and fractals. Each law is illustrated through real client cases and personal stories, showing how perception shapes emotions, decisions, and outcomes. The book positions these laws as tools for resolving inner conflicts and creating meaningful change.
I was pulled in by the mix of scientific language and simple, emotional storytelling. The authors lean on the idea that perception is the root of human experience. I like how they frame events as neutral until the mind assigns meaning. Their examples feel authentic and honest. Sara’s transformation while traveling through the mountains, for example, stirred something in me because of how quietly powerful it was. The writing style is clear and patient, and it feels like the authors genuinely want the reader to walk away with a new way of seeing the world.
The laws are presented as universal truths, yet some explanations feel more metaphorical than scientific, which I didn’t mind. I also enjoyed how they weave in history, philosophy, and neuroscience, and while some simplifications are bold, they make the book more approachable. What impressed me most was how the real stories are used. They are vulnerable and detailed enough to feel authentic. They show how messy people are and how quickly things can shift when the mind reframes meaning.
By the end, I felt a mix of curiosity, calm, and an urge to test some of these laws myself. I kept thinking about how much of my own life has been shaped by hidden assumptions and unexamined fears. That is where this book shines. It invites reflection without preaching. It offers structure without demanding belief. I walked away with a deeper appreciation for how perception shapes reality, and I felt a gentle push to rethink how I label my own experiences.
I recommend The 7 Universal Laws to readers who enjoy personal development, psychology, or spiritually influenced frameworks that are grounded in practical storytelling. If you like books that make you rethink your emotional patterns and give you tools to shift them, this will land well for you. It is especially good for anyone who wants a fresh perspective on why they feel stuck and how to create meaningful internal change.
Pages: 321 | ASIN : B0FPRPNBFK
Nurturing the Mystic Within
Nurturing the Mystic Within follows Catherine S. Tuggle’s journey to understand the message that arrived through a vivid dream. The dream delivered five simple words. Those words shook her ideas about God, fear, and love, and eventually inspired her to explore belief, trauma, and spiritual healing. Through autobiography, psychology, and a reinterpretation of the Genesis story, she builds a pathway that helps readers uncover the fears that shape their reality and block their ability to perceive life as Paradise. Much of the book focuses on the unconscious roots of fear, the formation of beliefs, and the personal exercises she developed to help dissolve the veil that hides unconditional love.
Tuggle’s writing blends intimate storytelling with big ideas; she writes plainly and openly. She doesn’t try to sound like a guru. Her willingness to expose painful memories gives the book a raw honesty that made me trust her voice. I found myself wincing at the childhood scenes. The moment Agnes threw the valentines on the floor, or the wrenching knife incident, forced me to stop for a breath. Those stories aren’t there for drama. They serve the purpose she claims for them. They show how beliefs take root long before we know the meaning of the word belief. I felt myself wishing she had lingered a little less on theory and more on lived moments, because her lived moments are where the book shines.
I also found myself moved by her interpretation of Genesis. I appreciated how she questions long-held assumptions without attacking them. The way she ties Adam and Eve’s fear to our own unconscious habits made the old story feel surprisingly fresh. The shifts between memoir, theology, and psychology come a little fast, but the blend mostly worked for me. I liked the sense of searching. I liked watching her move from confusion to clarity. The dream sequence she shares in the preface kept me thinking about the idea that love is all that exists. It sounds simple on the surface, almost too simple, and yet the book spends hundreds of pages showing just how hard it is to believe that in everyday life.
I would recommend Nurturing the Mystic Within to readers who enjoy spiritual memoirs, especially ones that grapple with fear, trauma, and the desire for inner peace. It would also suit people who like gentle psychological insight wrapped in a story rather than textbook-style instruction. Anyone who has ever felt trapped inside old beliefs or puzzled by the tension between the world’s harshness and the idea of a loving presence will find something worth holding onto here.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0G2DLBVHQ
