Are you Happy, Successful, and Understood…
- In your work?
- In the most important relationships in your life?
- In the communities where you live and volunteer (your church, synagogue, or a non profit organization you care about)?
- As you go about the day-to-day tasks in your life, like managing your health and finances?
If so, congratulations! That is what we want for everyone. But, if there is some dimension of your life where you answer NO to these questions, then we are here to help.
Our mission with the Book of You® and Know Thyself Guides® is to equip you with personalized, easy-to-understand knowledge about yourself and others that you can immediately put it into action toward becoming happy, successful, and understood in your chosen pursuit.
With this information about YOU, you can jumpstart finding the career that is right for YOU, improving a relationship that is important to YOU, and working happily and successfully in a volunteer service role. To achieve this goal, every book has to be unique and all about YOU. We do not know of any product on the market that can provide this kind of customized, personalized self-help.
Many people keep asking us why we started doing this. Here are the answers:
Sarah E. Brown, Ph. D
I have over 30 years in corporate America, having worked for the Bell System, DuPont, and Accenture. In the last 17 years of my career, I worked for Accenture managing large outsourcing engagements—many of them focused on Talent Management. I kept seeing clients landing in the wrong jobs—ones that did not interest them or for which they were not naturally inclined. As Einstein said, they were like “fish trying to climb trees.” But I also saw something else. I saw some of them getting out or radically redesigning their jobs. And what was different about those that escaped workday depression versus their unhappy peers was whether or not they had a coach or not. So I started looking carefully at what these coaches were doing. And it seemed to me that they were getting at the heart of what made each person unique and then helping them make the changes necessary to channel that uniqueness in ways that made them happy, successful, and understood. This kind of one-on-one coaching is great. The problem with it is that it takes a long time (coaching engagements are often 12 weeks or more) and it costs a lot of money. That puts it out of reach of most people.
I have a gift for scaling big ideas so I kept thinking about how we could scale this coaching concept, marry it up with specific knowledge about each person, and make this experience available to all for a fraction of the cost of a good coach. That’s how I came up with the idea of Know Thyself Guides®.
I believe everyone deserves to be happy, successful, and understood at work, in relationships–in fact in any thing (s)he is doing. I want my Know Thyself Guides® to jumpstart everyone on their journey to knowing themselves and achieving happiness. I also believe that happy, successful people are more likely to be helpful to others, so this is an all-around win.
I am thrilled that these books can have such an impact on individuals’ lives. Peter G. is an example of someone who used a Know Thyself Guide® to make a big change. He uncovered that his interests and strengths were pointing him away from his then-current sales roles and toward more technical roles. In addition, the knowledge reinforced something he already knew deep down—that he needed a role that enabled him to work collaboratively with a team, rather than solo; and that he worked better when the pace was steady rather than the roller coaster of activity that was often the case in sales. Peter took the risk of changing careers and is now very happy as a technical operations analyst for Nemours.
I had a really good corporate career, but now I am devoting full time to Know Thyself Guides®. My goal is to help 250,000 people achieve happiness, success, and understanding in their chosen pursuits.
I have some interests and strengths that I am bringing to this venture. I am passionate about research. I have a Ph. D. in PyschoEducational Processes, which is a combination field of adult learning and group psychology. (The practical application of this in business is Organization Development.) I have strengths in creative and conceptual thinking and dealing with really complex and ambiguous problems. This is what enables me to conceptualize how we can scale things like coaching to make it available to the world.
But it takes more than me to pull this off. And I need strengths that are not a part of my personal tool kit. So I have assembled a really great team. I am going to let them tell you a little about themselves and why they are excited to work on Know Thyself Guides®.
Kristofer Younger
Kris brings over 20 years of technical experience in the commercialization and application of networked computing technologies. He began his career as a Sun Microsystems engineer, moved into technical director roles at NeXT and vice presidential roles for Netscape and AOL. Prior to joining Know Thyself Guidesr, he was chief technical officer at Epok and Breakthrough Commerce where he directed all technical developments. He is fond of saying that someday, “This Internet thing is gonna be big!” He is responsible for building the technology that manages the dynamic me-book content.