A refreshingly honest guide to embracing your imperfect, nonlinear journey and turning your flaws, failures, and diverse experiences into your greatest professional assets.

What if the messy, winding path you’ve taken is exactly what qualifies you for success? Leadership coach Elizabeth McCourt spent decades feeling like she was doing it wrong, bouncing from finance to law to waitressing to recruiting before finally discovering her calling.

In Refreshingly Flawed, she makes the case that the nonlinear life isn’t a detour; it’s the destination. Drawing on her work at INSEAD, her experience coaching leaders at top global organizations, and her own spectacularly imperfect journey—from rock climbing in New Mexico to trekking the Annapurna Circuit—McCourt offers a polymathic, creatively driven approach to finding purpose. She weaves together insights from clowning philosophy and the Meisner Technique, neuroscience and Zen Buddhism, experiential learning and street art, to show you how to stop chasing someone else’s definition of success and start building your own.

Practical yet deeply personal, Refreshingly Flawed is for anyone who has ever felt overqualified, underqualified, and undecided all at once—and is ready to turn that into a superpower.