Emilia Lahti is the first academic researcher to examine the relationship between embodied fortitude, business and leadership. Her research begins with an inquiry into the Finnish concept of sisu—an untranslatable term that refers to a particular kind of deep primordial strength that individuals tap into when they have reached the limit of their assumed capacities—and expands to create what she has termed as “gentle power.” Lahti is an awarded educator, international keynote speaker and social entrepreneur. Over the past decade, Lahti’s research has immersed her deeply through ultrarunning, martial arts, and a series of extraordinary transformations through entrepreneurship, athletics and personal growth to understand what unlocks inner power. She is a rare combination of an academic researcher and fierce adventurer, whose talent for storytelling easily translates her discoveries into tools for everyday life.
GENTLE POWER is a universal strategy showing how integrity-fueled fortitude is in fact the master key to restoring balance to a globalized capitalist world where the value of true human connection is in danger of becoming of lesser priority and results are created through force. It starts with one’s commitment personal transformation at the service of greater good, builds on a series of micro-habits of gentle power, and leads to tangible results, success and even profit through better business practices, better parenting, better thinking and leadership in the everyday. The book is a call to recognize leadership not only as a title or position, but as a mindset and role of every individual that is not only good for us—but is a necessity and a super-tool in the era that we are currently living.
Based on her pioneering research at the University of Pennsylvania and Aalto University in Helsinki, where she is completing a doctoral thesis on sisu—which in its native Finland is an entire way of being aimed at excellence through inner power—Lahti’s work posits that having the courage to both truly own our inner “power” root it in the bravery of “gentleness” find balance in both polarities, is the ultimate path to harmony, success, and is the next evolution of leadership available to everyone who chooses to embrace it.
Through wielding together hard facts of science and inspiring stories of real-life stories, Lahti makes an irresistible proposition: When we shift from force to gentle power we will inevitably move our own lives and humanity at large toward goodness we know we are capable of.
You are the leader now.
