When you first meet Allison, you get the sense that she has done impossible things. This feeling is not easily articulated. It is an unspoken energy that surrounds her. It is an invisible, powerful force that comes through in such a gentle way that you want to take on the hardship of scaling. She has a way with it, and she teaches you not only how to scale, but also how to scale over and over again.

You see, she takes that invisible force and gives it to you. At first she makes you feel that it is easy to do – that it is possible for you to overcome all the pain, all the fear, all the uncertainty. You even forget that scaling is daunting. This is how it felt when I first met her in 2011. I was just starting out with my Life Reentry work and she grabbed my hand and said, “Christina, this will be hard, but you can do this.” I remember thinking: I know what hard is, this can’t be harder than loss. After all, I had lost my husband and had gone through some impossible things. But she was right, it was close.

Scaling is brutal. It is not for the faint of heart. It is as painful and as impossible as the hardest things in life. It requires something, a very important something: resilience to pain. You have an opponent every day when you wake up. Your opponent is called struggle. You have to fight with struggle every day and, in the end, you must win.

Somehow, Allison has won tens of thousands of these battles with her gentle fierceness. She built 10 businesses and has held the hand of so many like myself who were starting out and showed them what is possible. I know you want to change the world. I know you have a dream – a mission, a fire inside of you that wants to create, grow, and scale it to reach millions of people.

Well, you have the right book in your hands to help make this a reality.

It doesn’t matter what business you are in. You may have created a hair salon because of the way you believe women should feel about themselves. Or, you have a grocery store that influences the gut health of your customers and you want one in every corner. Maybe you own an engineering company that is ready to innovate your industry or a construction company with a big vision to transform the way we live. This book is made for you.

I have to be honest with you. Scaling your dream is almost impossible. Most of the time the safety net is nonexistent. Nothing is underneath you to catch you, and this is why Allison wrote this book. She built you a net to catch you when you fall. She is here to ensure that you scale and not fail.

I will never forget the day I spent with Allison at her office many years ago. She stood in front of me with a big black marker and a whiteboard and showed me what my work could do for the world. She found the proof I was missing when my struggles and fears would wake me up in the morning waiting for the battle. I saw the vision of what was possible for the first time. In Allison’s fashion, she made it seem simple, easy, doable, and you know what else? Fun.

I realized then that the invisible force that surrounded Allison was her ability to have fun even while scaling and doing impossible things. Her vibe, her spirit, and her essence came from her flying in her trapeze every week, no matter how hard her days had been. She has taught herself to fly even on the days that she was falling – maybe even especially on those days.

As I read this book I realized that she took all of her flying experience and made it into words so that you too could tap into this invisible force as you find your way to scaling your big dream. As for me, the vision Allison wrote on that whiteboard has come true 10-fold. When you read the book and you apply her formula, your vision will become a bigger and brighter reality than you ever thought possible. Enjoy the flying, the scaling, and changing the world.

I am.

—Christina Rasmussen, founder of Life Reentry Institute, and bestselling author of Second Firsts: Live, Laugh, and Love Again