Celebrating the 2026 NYC Big Book Award and the Idea Behind CORE Leadership

I’m thrilled to share that CORE Leadership: A Four-Step Framework to Lead Yourself, Grow Your Influence, and Amplify Your Impact has been named the Winner in the Leadership category of the 2026 NYC Big Book Award.

This is the second award the book has received, following its Silver Nonfiction Book Award, and I’m incredibly grateful.

I wrote CORE Leadership from a belief that has guided my work for many years: leadership starts with leading yourself.

There are countless books, theories, and frameworks about how to lead others. I wanted to step back and start somewhere more fundamental:

Who is the leader, and the person, you want to be?

There isn’t one right answer to that question. CORE Leadership helps people create their own vision of what better leadership and a better life look like for them, and gives them practical tools to put that vision into action. That is where self-leadership begins: taking ownership of how we show up, recognizing the choices available to us, and acting with greater intention, agency, and accountability.

Since CORE Leadership was published, one of the most rewarding parts has been hearing from readers about how they are putting these ideas into practice. People have shared how the book has helped them clarify their values and purpose, become more aware of their behavior and its impact on others, see choices they didn’t see before, and make changes in how they show up, both at work and in their personal lives.

That is what I hoped CORE Leadership would do: help people lead themselves with greater awareness, intention, and agency so they can become better leaders and have a more positive impact on the people around them.

Receiving the NYC Big Book Award for Leadership celebrates the book, but for me, it also celebrates the idea at the heart of it:

becoming a better leader starts with how we lead ourselves.

I’m deeply grateful to Marshall Goldsmith for writing the foreword and to the many leaders and thinkers who generously shared their insights, including Dorie Clark, Chester Elton, Carol Kauffman, Garry Ridge, Rhett Power and Ayse Birsel.

And thank you to everyone who has read CORE Leadership, recommended it, reviewed it, shared it, or reached out to tell me about the difference it has made. Ultimately, that impact is the recognition that matters most to me.