“Who You Are Is How You Lead” by Rachel L. Rider

Who You Are Is How You Lead

Rachel L. Rider
Muse Literary (2023)
ISBN 978-1958714713
Reviewed by Jill Rey for Reader Views (3/2023)

Author Rachel L. Rider owns MettaWorks LLC, specializing in executive coaching for some of the uppermost leaders in the technology industry. Her book, “Who You Are Is How You Lead,” combines her industry experience, credentials, and insights to share with readers her proven MettaWorks Method.

The MettaWorks Method simply believes that relationships are the key to influence and leadership. This approach is crucial at the top leadership level as the technical and individual contributor skills that allowed leaders to achieve top positions are no longer the primary skills needed to be successful in C-suite roles. Beginning with oneself, Rider takes readers through the steps to becoming an instrumental sensation in these upper echelon positions.

Chapter-by-chapter Rider guides readers through her steps. Including identifying your drivers, cultivating self-awareness, reading the room, identifying the patterns, disrupting the patterns, embracing survival mechanisms, understanding and making room for resistance, harnessing the survival mechanisms as your superpower, and then allowing these to cultivate compassionate accountability, challenge your assumptions, nurture new habits, and ultimately envisioning your ideal state. She even does a great job concluding with a chapter on incorporating anti-racism, in light of recent events in the United States, as she grapples with ways to do more than the bare minimum in her work and company.

Unlike many books of this nature, each chapter, each step in the method, is driven by real stories, from real clients, as they worked to accomplish their own personal understanding, data collection, and awareness in their path to improving relationships and their own leadership potential. By using these real-life examples from her own clientele, Rider provides engaging and relatable content surrounding her MettaWorks Method. Some of the individuals from the examples even make appearances in later chapters as they themselves work through the steps as new challenges arise. 

Rider did not hesitate to portray her own vulnerabilities as well. Using her own survival mechanisms, patterns, and Buddhist teachings to connect with her readers and embrace the progress. Specifically, I connected with her as she spoke of her own relationships and the give/take she expects when someone does something for her, like her husband cooking dinner. Her vulnerabilities in her patterns really jumped off the page into my own life as I looked inward at myself, showing that these concepts go far beyond the boardroom and the C-suite.