Fierce Optimism

Seven Secrets for Playing Nice and Winning Big

By: Leeza Gibbons

Narrated by: Leeza Gibbons

Length: 8 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

Attitude can be sexy....

A practical and inspirational guide for using kindness and positivity as a winning strategy from Celebrity Apprentice champion, Hollywood veteran, and New York Times best-selling author Leeza Gibbons.

We live in a winner-take-all world, in which only the toughest thrive. On the surface, from the living room to the boardroom, it's certainly no place for nice. Civility and kindness are often the price of admission, and empowering communication is checked at the door.

Leeza Gibbons is a culture changer who doesn't "mess with mean". She has fiercely redefined optimism and used positive communication as an empowerment strategy to win with class. She refuses to sacrifice kindness as she has succeeded in getting ahead. Working for decades in an intense, often merciless industry that rewards novelty, ruthlessness, and the next big thing, she has applied smart principles and excelled through savviness - without having to sell her soul or fake it.

But redefining nice does not mean being a pushover. As the winning contestant on the hit show Celebrity Apprentice, the former host of Entertainment Tonight relied on her fresh and authentic "no drama" mentality and smart strategies to outmaneuver the other contestants without disempowering them. Throughout the competition, Leeza kept her cool and, most importantly, remained true to herself and her values. In this book, she reveals the secrets of her years of success and bares the stories and vulnerable moments that led to where she is today. Her success is proof that optimism works. You can play it your way and still win.

In Fierce Optimism, Leeza combines stories from her own life and tales of other pioneering business leaders with core principles that others can apply to take them to the next level of success:

• Engage optimism and kindness as your competitive edge
• See success unshared as failure
• Empower the team, and you win
• Pay it forward by mentoring others
• Be transparently you

Filled with down-to-earth advice and empowering stories, Fierce Optimism makes clear that with kindness, authenticity, and smart teamwork, you can be nice - and win.

©2016 Leeza Gibbons (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers

Like listening to a friend

It was great to hear Leeza share her experiences of the journey she is on, and it was easy to relax as I listened and learned. Internally, we have much in common, and it felt like we connected on so many levels.

More like fierce egotism

In the spirit of this book, I made it to the end, but it never got better. It's just basically a super biased autobiography of Leeza Gibbons

The "secrets" in the book are pretty shallow and not covered in any sort of academic sense, with the author choosing instead to rely solely on her own experiences, many of which only remotely tie to the topic.

The book rambles and doesn't really go anywhere, spending a lot of time jumping across her life to random events.

But all of this could be forgiven and the book considered okay if it wasn't for the blatant egotism. Every story is about how she overcame some terrible person and was better than them or how she was so righteous to grace a poor soul down on their luck. The story about how she saved a girl from suicide by talking to her is just maddening. Everyone and everything in the book is used and abused to make her seem like this omniscient angel.

For a lady with some train wreck marriages and more than a few stumbles in life, she sure presents herself as knowing everything. Save yourself some time and read something more useful instead.