As the world has become more globally connected, our personal interconnections have grown exponentially. The speed and pace of our days has greatly increased. In this busier, more connected world, it can be difficult to take the time needed to reflect on our careers and our lives. While our opportunities and challenges seem to be growing, the time available to reflect on these opportunities and challenges seems to be shrinking.

My professional mission is to help successful leaders achieve positive, lasting change in behavior. Over the years I have seen how the leadership behaviors that have led to one level of success might not be the same behaviors needed to achieve a higher level of success. In my coaching, all my clients receive confidential 360-degree feedback. This feedback comes from managers, peers, colleagues, and direct reports. In many cases my clients also receive feedback from family members and friends. This type of comprehensive feedback may enable us to see the blind spots that inhibit our growth. When leaders have a complete perspective, they can move forward with clarity. Buddha noted that right understanding leads to right action. One word for such a comprehensive view of life is holistic.

In problem analysis, the holistic approach takes into account the whole system of causes and effects that have an impact on the problem. If the problem were a knot, the holistic problem solver would review each thread’s direction and how they all fit together—how the many parts created the puzzling whole. After seeing how the tangling happened, it can be easy to untie the knot; the solution practically suggests itself.

Holistic problem solving helps us systematically review the messy knots in our lives and then create clear, ready-to-implement solutions.

This book helps us find holistic solutions to problems in our organizations and in our lives. To do this it combines different disciplines.

While there are many books about understanding business and many books about understanding ourselves, there are few books that address both issues at once. In addressing both of these issues, Faisal Hoque and Drake Baer have drawn upon knowledge from many sources, including organizational theory, neuroscience, and management theory, as well as psychology, spirituality, and self-improvement. Their holistic approach illustrates how these different views of the world can be connected.

The holistic approach described in the book was shaped by the backgrounds of the authors. Faisal, the entrepreneur, innovator, and elder of the duo, was born in Bangladesh (near the birthplace of Buddha) and found himself in the boardrooms of Fortune 100 companies by the time he was 27. Drake, the journalist, traveler, and younger of the two, was born in Illinois and found himself in Himalayan meditation retreats by the time he was 24. There’s something disparate, united, and exciting about that combo, and their creative tension is found throughout the argument and adventure of the text. Together, they’ve created a book that’s as much about business as it is about life or as much about life as it is about business.

In today’s rapidly changing world, leaders are constantly challenged with questions such as these: How can we keep improving? What can we do that is new and better? How can we innovate?

Innovation does not happen on a spreadsheet, slide show, or product line. Innovation occurs in the interaction between people. Innovation is a human process. Faisal and Drake believe that the more we can humanize the way we work, the more innovative we become. I agree with their view that the more we understand the mental and emotional causes of innovation and creativity, the more we can untie the knots that stop our progress.

The human process of innovation is not just something that happens between people; it also happens inside people. Part of innovation is self-discovery. Over my years of coaching I have learned that we cannot have an effective conversation with others if we do not have an effective conversation inside ourselves. By learning how we can better frame conversations within ourselves, we can have more grounded conversations with our teams and our world.

To me the discussion of work-life balance often misses the point. The very phrasing implies that work and life are somehow disconnected. I don’t feel this way about my work and my life, and neither do most of the mega-successful people I coach. Faisal and Drake have done a wonderful job of showing that the change we want to see in the world needs to be consistent with the change we see in ourselves.

Progress is something we are all trying to achieve. As we learn in the following pages, progress feeds our engagement, which leads to our best work. What’s exciting is that progress isn’t something that only exists out there as some feathery ideal but is something we can arrange in our days, starting today. If we understand all the threads that are knotted together in this thing called a job, this thing called a company, this thing called a nonprofit, then with a little luck, a little reorientation, we can make that progress an integrated part of this thing called life.

Maybe that’s why there’s a bicycle chain on the cover: if you love cycling, you know that it’s challenging, it’s self-powered, and it’s sustainable—in the sense that it’s good for the environment and in the sense that you can do it every day, joyfully. Through that sustained, sustainable effort, you get better at the cycling itself. It can get you here and it can get you there, literally. That’s the same kind of journey that readers of this book are going to go on: a journey in learning how to move our work in a self-powered, sustainable, and maybe even joyful direction. And by cycling around the whole big, beautiful mess of this unpredictable, innovation-hungry world of ours, we can start to untie the knots both inside and outside ourselves.

Marshall Goldsmith is a New York Times bestselling author and the Number One Leadership Thinker in the World (according to the Thinker’s 50 Conference sponsored by Harvard Business Review).