Asya Raines

ASYA RAINES was born in Riga, the capital of Latvia, in 1952. Asya graduated from Latvian Technical University in 1975 with a degree in economics. She is descended from a long line of Latvian Jewish families, and her parents were both professors at Latvian Technical University. Asya emigrated from Latvia to the United States in 1997, and currently lives in the Detroit, Michigan area.

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• Asya's Laws, Lessons in Love Lost and Found

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Charlie Fleetham

You can stop reading now if you want a fairy tale about a struggling writer who heroically pursued his dream in the face of unrelenting rejection only to be discovered by a wise and clever agent who recognized the man's creative potential and lifted him out of swamps of failure and set him on the secret path to the riches and literary fame.

I started writing The Search for Unrational Leadership™ in 1992, but I didn't know it. I had just founded Project Innovations, and I wanted to write a book to establish myself as an expert. Most of my consulting practice focused on helping project managers. As I helped them deliver projects large and small, I began to see each project as a heroic adventure and the project manager as a knight in shining armor. I got halfway through writing a book about the trials and tribulations of Carl, a young project manager who discovered the secrets for delivering that holy trinity of project time: On time, under budget, and within specifications. But, the more I wrote, the more I disliked my writing. It seemed pedantic, but worse than that, I didn't feel like I had anything new to say. So I stopped writing and threw myself into building my business.

By 1996, I had transformed myself from a sole proprietor to the president of Project Innovations, a million dollar consulting and training firm. The core of our work had shifted from project management to meeting facilitation. To capitalize on our success, we created a marketing slogan: We are in the facilitation business. We spent a hundred thousand dollars on a training video, and I started writing a book with a working title of Masterful Facilitation. I spent a year outlining the book, collecting data, and writing chapters. By the time I had finished the first draft I decided that I was tired of facilitating meetings. How could I write a book about facilitation when the process didn't energize me? So, I stopped writing and threw myself into learning about what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life and my business.

In 2000, some of the fog had cleared. Inspired by the works of Carl Jung and the advice of a wise elder, I started creating and implementing a series of techniques for tapping the unconscious in the workplace. My goal was to help people become more conscious at work! Carl Jung and his followers shied away from applying his theories in the workplace, but I saw a lot of practical applications in his ideas: Dream circles, mandalas, and the stages of life.

In 2002, divorced and starting a new life, I began The Search for Unrational Leadership™, in which I introduced a methodology to integrate rational and irrational decision-making processes in the workplace. As I wrote about and developed the process of Unrational Leadership™, the story of a knight emerged within me. Whether the story came from my unfinished book about a heroic project manager or from my own life, I am not certain, but as soon as I drew his character, I knew I had found a source of creative energy. I named him TrueHeart, inspired by the title of the movie BraveHeart. Then, I developed a series of heroic adventures based on TrueHeart's quest for Unrational Leadership™. The book turned into a blend of rational explanations of Unrational Leadership™ and irrational fairy tales about TrueHeart.

In the spring of 2003, I finished this book and named it Unrational Leadership™, A Modern Toolkit for Solving Life's Most Difficult Problems. I hired an editor from New York City to help me polish a final version. Then, I wrote a book proposal, shopped for an agent, and in October 2003, I found one on my first round of queries. He was located in Manhattan, in the heart of the publishing world, and I sat back and waited for the offers to come from publishers hungry for the next big thing. On my birthday in March 2004, my agent called me and told me that he didn't want to represent me anymore because nobody wanted to publish my book.

I went through a few months of depression and stabbed around at rewriting some of the book's chapters, when I had a dream that forever changed my approach to the book. I dreamt I was walking over a large bridge. In the middle of the bridge there was a river, big enough for ocean going freighters and battleships. I managed to get to the other side and saw two men diving into the river. I decided not to try to save them. I was too tired. But, help arrived and the men were rescued. There was a press conference, and it turned out that one of the men was a woman who looked like a man. To complicate the weirdness, they had faces on the front and back of their heads. When I awoke, I asked myself what the dream meant, and an answer shot back to me: "write the book for the executives."

"Of course," I thought. "I have been working with executives for twenty years. I know them and I know what they want."

On June 26, I started a furious campaign to rewrite the book. I wrote at home, at work, in airports, on airplanes, and on vacations. The book poured out of me and for the first time, I didn't have to discipline myself to write. I had to discipline my self to stop! Within three months, I had finished The Search for Unrational Leadership™.