Align Your Business with the Real You
Connect With Yourself, Create What Matters Most, and Define Your Success
Suggesting a mindful approach to entrepreneurship, Align Your Business with the Real You is an engaging leadership guide.
Drawing from her background in corporate consulting, Jennifer Musser’s leadership guide Align Your Business with the Real You merges business strategy with self-reflection, prioritizing authenticity and personal alignment as key drivers of success.
Arguing that business owners too often build their companies based on external expectations about success rather than their personal values, strengths, and desired lifestyles, this book asserts that success should not come at the expense of mental well-being, individual autonomy, or the ability to enjoy one’s work and life outside of financial metrics. Indeed, revenue growth and industry recognition are not treated as the ultimate goals. Instead, the book suggests a mindful approach to entrepreneurship, redefining success by emphasizing intentional decision-making, sustainable business practices, and long-term fulfillment over short-term gains. By questioning the methods of conventional entrepreneurship, it encourages a shift toward building companies that support both personal and professional victories.
The 5C Framework structures the book’s foundation, breaking alignment into distinct phases that build on one another. Each phase—Connect, Clarify, Control, Co–create, and Change—is introduced in terms of its guiding principles. However, the boundaries between the Cs are not always well-defined. Clarify and Control both emphasize decision-making and setting priorities, but they also revisit similar discussions about personal values without introducing distinct action steps. Co-create presents collaboration as essential to alignment, but without sharing concrete examples about how partnerships and external systems influence long-term business sustainability.
The prose is clear, presenting complex ideas in a straightforward manner. Short, structured sentences make the content approachable. Journal-style reflection prompts are used to help people define success for themselves beyond financial benchmarks and to identify misaligned aspects of a business. Throughout the text, graphs, formulas, quote boxes, and bullet points help to break up dense sections and make the book’s ideas more digestible.
Case scenarios from Musser’s consulting work spotlight common pitfalls, including entrepreneurs who expand too fast without considering whether their business model supports their long-term vision. Musser’s own struggles with misalignment are also covered, as when she navigated external pressures while advising companies on strategic growth. Takeaway points are shared at the end of each chapter for easy recall.
Emphasizing self-reflection and intentional decision-making, the clever leadership guide Align Your Business with the Real You introduces strategies for blending one’s personal values into entrepreneurial efforts.
Reviewed by
Kiana Curtis
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
