Audacity: Go From Wannabe Leader to the Leader Others Wannabe

by Katie Goar

Leadership Starts Before the Title.

Audacity is a bold leadership guide for women ready to stop waiting for permission and start leading with confidence. Katie Goar reveals how real leadership is built—not through pedigree or position, but through resilience, vulnerability, and decisive action.

Drawing from her journey from housing instability to executive leadership, Katie shows readers how to reframe self-doubt, build credibility, and lead authentically in high-pressure environments.

Readers will learn how
Stop letting circumstances define identity Build resilience that outperforms credentials Embrace uniqueness and pressure test for curve ballsUse humor and self-trust to navigate pressure Turn everyday choices into leadership momentum
Audacity is for women who want more impact, more influence, and more ownership of their leadership path—starting now.

Genres: Nonfiction

166 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication October 20, 2026

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

Some Families Inherit a Rolex. Katie Goar Inherited a Rolodex.
“Audacity” Is at Its Sharpest When the Objects of Survival – Tents, Storage Bins, Missing Shoes, Lists, and Names – Say More Than the Leadership Slogans
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 14th, 2026

Driving harder is not the lesson Katie Goar finally trusts. For much of “Audacity: Go From Wannabe Leader to the Leader Others Wannabe,” she teaches the habits that carried her from childhood homelessness to the presidency of Quadel: say yes before you feel ready, prove doubters wrong, record your wins, build resilience, solve the problem in front of you. Near the end, she writes, “Hustle will get you ahead today, but only because it siphons energy from your future self.” Notice the accounting. “Today” gets the advancement; the “future self” inherits the withdrawal. Hustle works, which is why it can be so difficult to recognize as a bad bargain. The bill arrives later, often at the address of the person you have become.

Early in the book, Goar defines audacity less as swagger than as the willingness “to know yourself and be known,” then immediately names the part of herself she spent years keeping quiet: her family once lived in a tent in the woods. She was the oldest of four children; after her parents’ divorce and her father’s departure, her mother worked multiple jobs while the children learned to hide how unstable life had become. Goar’s younger brother Ben once drew the family tent when a teacher asked him to draw his house. The teacher thought he had misunderstood the assignment and drawn a camping trip. He had answered correctly. The adult simply did not recognize his answer as a possible life.

Most executive memoirs know what to do next. Adversity becomes origin myth; deprivation becomes evidence of grit; the child, viewed from the summit, turns out to have been secretly training for success all along. “Audacity” sometimes reaches for that arithmetic, but its own stories will not stay inside it. Goar’s family did not leave the tent because eleven-year-old Katie became sufficiently resourceful. They left because another single mother saw the problem and offered them a converted garage apartment before winter. Goar states the causality plainly: their homelessness was temporary “not because of what our family could do on our own, but because someone saw a problem and offered a solution.” The syntax matters. The first clause removes the self-made explanation before the second places another person inside the story of survival.

Even the book’s distinction between a “handout” and a “hand up” will not stay tidy. “Up” preserves motion: the recipient remains someone going somewhere rather than a vessel into which aid is poured. But the apartment precedes the metaphor. Whatever word is chosen, another person possessed a material resource Goar’s family did not have and chose to share it. That fact keeps tugging against the book’s fierce insistence that circumstance need not dictate identity. Both things can be true. A person is more than her condition, and conditions still exert power. Agency may require housing, time, sponsorship, treatment, accommodation, money, or somebody with enough room in her own life to make room for yours.

The ten chapters keep worrying that tension even when their titles sound like merchandise from a leadership gift shop. There is a necklace of shame, a Yes Plan, a Hype Squad, a Win Journal, resilience protein powder, “hold on,” a backpack, a mindset with teeth, Jedi ninja skills, Pink Elephants, checklists, scripts, BLUF, friction, 80 percent, rodeos. One occasionally longs to confiscate the branding marker. Yet the sequence is not arbitrary. Goar starts with identity and permission, proceeds through resilience and judgment, then moves toward systems, limits, delegation, and finally generosity. The vocabulary proliferates; the governing question narrows: once experience has made you capable, what are you supposed to do with that capability?

Restraint arrives in Chapter 4 by way of a chair, a dumpster, a basketball, and a bad Mother’s Day. Goar’s son Asher, determined to prove that his height will not prevent him from dunking, stacks a chair on a dumpster, falls, and breaks his arm. Her first instinct is sarcasm. Instead she forces herself to think, “Hold on.” Care first, lesson later. Up to this point, audacity has largely moved forward: apply, insist, persist, reframe. Now Goar introduces a pause between feeling and action. She calls “hold on” her “tool to save me from myself.” It is an admirably unheroic phrase. The leader is no longer simply the person brave enough to act. She may be the person disciplined enough not to make everyone else live inside her first reaction.

In Brooke’s case, that pause stops being cute. Brooke, a relatively new employee, tells Goar that she has stage 3 breast cancer and immediately promises that the diagnosis will not affect her work. A certain corporate mythology would reward that sentence. Goar refuses it. The cancer should affect the work; surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation are not tests of professional devotion. They identify projects that can move, work that can be redistributed, help that can be added. “Hold on” has traveled from Goar restraining herself with an injured child to a leader giving somebody else permission to stop performing invulnerability. That is a much more interesting evolution than a slogan merely recurring.

Professional experience gives “Audacity” some of its least glamorous and best pages. Goar has spent decades in affordable housing, and she becomes more distinctive when she talks about backlogs, staffing, portals, compliance, telephone queues, onboarding, and the dreary machinery through which good intentions either reach people or expire. When a housing authority asks Quadel to clear a backlog, Goar wants to know what keeps producing it. Obsolete technology? Turnover? Slow training? Too little surge capacity? The leader’s job is not to mop up the same leak with greater enthusiasm. It is to find the pipe.

Administrative “friction” sounds like the sort of phrase one could lose in a PowerPoint deck until Goar asks what it means for a person seeking housing. Can someone living in a car complete the process on a phone? Can someone working nights reach assistance while awake and off the clock? Were the forms designed around the agency or around the person desperate enough to need it? The United States Government Accountability Office reported in 2025 that an estimate cited by the Office of Management and Budget puts unclaimed federal benefits above $140 billion a year, in part because people encounter administrative burdens while trying to obtain them. Goar does not need that figure to validate her argument, but it exposes the stakes of her least glamorous insight: bad process can turn an entitlement on paper into help a person cannot actually reach.

People are also badly served by systems that decide in advance what competence is supposed to resemble. Jenifer has spent eighteen years outside the traditional workforce, raising and homeschooling nine children, including three with special needs. On a résumé, that can look like blank space. Goar sees scheduling, negotiation, crisis response, adaptation, budgeting, and the ability to continue while a dozen things demand attention at once. Jenifer enters Quadel through data entry, loses an early opportunity to lead when a project changes, then works her way into running a project and a fifteen-person team. Goar does not prove that motherhood makes someone a manager. She demonstrates something more credible: institutions often recognize skill most easily when it arrives in the format they already know how to read.

Against that example sits one of the book’s recurrent temptations. “Giving myself the yes was the promotion,” Goar writes after interviewing for an executive role she had been warned would probably go elsewhere. The line is clean because it separates self-conception from title. Taken literally, it also gives the self too much jurisdiction. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.Org’s “Women in the Workplace 2025” found that women receive less sponsorship and manager advocacy than men, and that the observed gap in desire for promotion disappears when career support is comparable. Employees with sponsors were promoted at much higher rates than those without. Goar is right that a person can internalize someone else’s no. Her own narrative is equally full of people whose yes has material force: a husband, a sponsor, a colleague, an employer, a woman with an apartment.

Defining a condition without letting it consume the person living inside it is one of Goar’s better ethical instincts. She calls shame a necklace, something worn so continuously that eventually its weight can feel like part of the body. Homelessness, poverty, rejection, diagnosis, professional failure: all may be true without becoming the total truth of the person. Goar hid her homelessness from colleagues for years. Preparing a TEDx talk finally made her write down sensory details she had kept packed away and compare memories with her siblings, who had survived the same period differently. That scene does more work than the maxim. Reinterpretation does not make the past false. It makes the past speakable without granting it sole authorship.

It is easy, though, for reclamation to become another demand. Goar repeatedly asks difficult experience to yield something usable: a mess becomes a message; trauma becomes a resiliency résumé; motherhood becomes professional skill; hardship fills the backpack; homelessness becomes expertise in housing. Sometimes this is exactly what reclaiming experience looks like. Sometimes it comes perilously close to requiring suffering to justify itself by becoming productive. A child should not need to turn poverty into executive differentiation. Grief should not have to improve anybody’s leadership. “Audacity” is most trustworthy when it permits some pain to remain stubbornly unprofitable.

More than any of the named systems, a pair of socks explains what that permission can look like. Goar’s adopted daughter arrives after severe neglect and initially hoards food, bites, throws things, and panics around institutional settings. The family gives her ice-cream socks for school and promises that afterward they will return and take her for ice cream. Day after day, they come back. The socks do not persuade through rhetoric. They accumulate evidence. Eventually, repeated return begins to make safety believable. The scene quietly corrects the book’s confidence vocabulary: trust is not always an attitude one chooses. Sometimes another person has to become predictable long enough for the nervous system to stop expecting disappearance.

In another scene, the same daughter secretly removes Goar’s dress shoes from a suitcase because she wants her mother to stay home. Goar has created a packing ritual in which the child helps prepare for a trip and then helps unpack after the return, making departure comprehensible through repetition. The ritual is thoughtful. The child edits it anyway. That missing pair of shoes says something the book’s formal language occasionally forgets: a system can be considerate without being sovereign. People keep having wishes that refuse the process designed for them. Goar laughs, pivots, and goes to work in casual shoes. Her best systems leave room for such disobedience.

The prose has the same virtues and liabilities as its frameworks. Goar writes in short-to-medium bursts, fragments, questions, exclamations, and direct address. “BS,” “AF,” Darth Maul, protein powder, and poopy diapers are allowed into the same room as compliance systems and executive management. This loosens the collar of business prose, and that looseness belongs to the argument. A book insisting that leadership does not belong exclusively to titles and credentials would sound peculiar if it spoke only in laminated management language. Goar is easy to hear on the page. But the same punch can give experiences of very different gravity an overly similar rhythm. A broken process and a death in the family cannot always bear the same motivational percussion.

Rather than functioning as decoration, the book’s images are meant to be retrieved later, almost like handles. They work best when Goar finds them in experience before converting them into advice: the tent, the backpack she carried on Mount Rainier, the missing shoes, her grandfather’s Rolodex, the rodeo tickets on her office wall. Those objects retain residue that an invented mnemonic does not. Protein powder and Pink Elephants come already packaged. The extended “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” analogy begins with an amusingly apt image of Qui-Gon Jinn pausing while Darth Maul paces, then grows into a whole Jedi leadership system and, somehow, acquires ninjas. More telling is the book’s movement between “I” and “you.” “I” offers testimony: this happened; this is what I made of it. “You” can turn testimony into doctrine. The grammar marks the boundary between witness and prescription.

Overreach tends to happen on the far side of that boundary. Goar can convincingly say that homelessness did not constitute her entire identity; no amount of reframing, however, would have supplied the apartment her family needed. The book itself keeps correcting its more absolute impulses. Bootstrapping cannot get everyone out of the mud. A checklist without feedback can become a “bureaucratic weapon.” After Goar’s brother-in-law dies unexpectedly, her family uses a simple phrase to get through logistics and shock, while she explicitly refuses to pretend that a script solves grief. Even one of the book’s research flourishes illustrates the danger of easy universals. It repeats the claim that 92 percent of people never achieve their goals, but J. C. Norcross and D. J. Vangarelli’s 1988 study in the “Journal of Substance Abuse” followed 200 New Year’s resolvers; 19 percent were still maintaining their pledges after two years. Goar’s evidence is most trustworthy when she has actually lived or operated inside it.

Precisely what makes Chapter 10 effective is that Goar does not discover hustle was useless. She discovers that it worked. For years she performs at what she calls 110 percent and then 1,000 percent, adding responsibility, outworking doubt, using velocity as insurance against ever returning to scarcity. Eventually the body submits its own audit: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, sleepless nights, twelve-hour days, children growing older while she keeps sprinting. Then comes the line about hustle “siphoning” energy from the future self. “Siphons” is harsher than “uses.” It suggests quiet extraction from someone not present to object. The sentence does not moralize effort. It puts a price beside it. Success remains success; it can still be too expensive.

Once that price becomes visible, several earlier virtues acquire shadows. “Prove them wrong” can become permanent overperformance. Resilience can become endurance past usefulness. Organization can become control. Goar’s proposal to lead at 80 percent is not especially persuasive as mathematics, but it works as an act of separation: “You’re always 100 percent of a person, even when you’re leading at 80 percent.” The person and the output are no longer identical. Even her love of order acquires a backstory. Rubbermaid tubs once held the family’s few possessions inside the tent; her grandfather’s Rolodex becomes another beloved instrument of arrangement. Goar jokes that some families inherit a Rolex; hers inherits a Rolodex. The near-rhyme contains a small class history: visible wealth on one side, names, systems, work, and order on the other.

Underneath all the named methods is the afterlife of emergency. Hypervigilance helps Goar anticipate danger until anticipation itself becomes exhausting. Self-sufficiency helps a child in an unstable household until the adult has trouble asking for help. Work ethic creates a career until work begins borrowing against health and family. Organization produces islands of safety until control starts masquerading as security. This is why the late turn toward delegation does not read like imported work-life-balance advice. Goar is not discarding grit. She is sorting inherited tools. Some still fit the hand. Some have become too heavy. Maturity sometimes means refusing to keep paying tribute to an emergency that is no longer happening.

Leadership accordingly gets less glamorous as “Audacity” proceeds. A Hype Squad talks someone through doubt. A colleague absorbs work. An employee is allowed to be sick without performing devotion. A housing process is redesigned. A mother provides an apartment. The roles of giver and receiver do not remain fixed, which is more interesting than generosity imagined as virtue flowing downward from the strong. Goar’s final phrase, “strategic generosity,” works because her own history keeps contaminating any fantasy of the self-sufficient benefactor. The person offering the hand today may be the person who needed one yesterday. For a book committed to self-authorship, “Audacity” becomes moving when it admits how many other hands end up on the manuscript.

On those terms, I land at 84/100, or 4.25/5 on my Goodreads scale. Goar’s lived and operational intelligence is more convincing than her empirical apparatus; the chapter sequence is more carefully shaped than the abundance of branding initially suggests; the scenes often preserve complications that the slogans would prefer to settle. There is repetition, and several metaphors keep talking after they have made their point. More seriously, the book sometimes asks suffering to prove its usefulness. Bode’s diagnosis did not become good because it enlarged Goar’s advocacy. Her daughter’s neglect did not become meaningful because it taught the family how trust works. Bereavement is not redeemed by a script. Goar often knows this. The friction comes from how much more fully her scenes know it than some of her instructions do.

Still, she closes neither in the executive office nor on a stage. The book returns to the tent and to winter coming, then to the single mother who recognized a family facing its first “rodeo” and did the ordinary, enormous thing available to her: she offered them somewhere to live. “True leadership is strategic generosity,” Goar writes, and then tells the reader to be generous. After so much terminology, the language suddenly sheds equipment. No acronym. No checklist. No Jedi. “Audacity” begins by arguing that other people do not get to author your identity. It finishes in a place less self-sufficient and more persuasive: nobody authors a life alone. The child in the tent grows into the adult able to extend a hand, without ever escaping the fact that somebody once had to extend one first.

[Richard Propes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it when I learn from a book on leadership. I love it when I have some handy dandy takeaways. I love it when a book on leadership inspires me.

But you want to know what my real test for a book on leadership is? It's when I decide for myself "Would I work with or for this leader?"

Katie Goar? Yep, I'd work with or for her in a heartbeat.

"Audacity: Go From Wannabe Leader to the Leader Others Wannabe" is a book that gave me good info, good stories, good tips, good ideas, and a surprising amount of heart-tugging storytelling that Goar assures us is leadership in action.

Goar takes us from her childhood homelessness to her rise as presidency of Quadel, a national leader in providing training solutions to the affordable housing community.

We start off with simple lessons, really.

Goar defines audacity early on, and it's a bit different than we're used to. It's less about bold swagger and more about knowing oneself and being willing to become known. For Goar, this meant leaning into her childhood homelessness and traumas. She also refreshingly leans into the reality that it was another single mother's awareness of her family's situation that changed its course.

This matters.

Time and again, Goar writes back against the cliches of leadership to create both practical truths and human truths. Yes, there are skills that can be acquired to lead and succeed, but our circumstances are part of what we come to the table with. "Audacity" is a relatively short book at less than 200 pages, yet it's possessing of expertise, spirit, compassion, and even a little humor. It would be easy to say that "Audacity" leans too much into casual prose, however, for me that's the strength of Goar's writing. She adapts to the lesson, the person, the situation, and the need. I take to my office valuable lessons here from such simple tools as Yes Plan, Hype Squad, 80 percent (which I really loved), and others. Over and over again, Goar serves up leadership from home and between those office walls. Audacity isn't simply this bullet point - it's a living personal and professional reality that Goar utilizes in a myriad of impactful ways. The stories here are effective, powerful, and touching.

"Audacity" isn't like a good majority of leadership books out there, yet I resonated with it deeply. Goar weaves a tapestry of storytelling, powerful life lessons, and the world in which we live to create a path toward a more honest leadership that stresses resilience as much as credentials. In Goar's world saying "yes" means giving yourself permission to lead, stepping forward to lead, and knowing who you are as a leader. As a leader with a disability, there's so much here that clicks with who I am, who I want to be, and how I lead plus how I can be a more effective leader.

Far too often, leadership becomes defined as "I'm a leader" or "I have this title." "Audacity" inspires one to become a proactive leader worthy of having those who follow. It's about building the culture and encouraging and equipping people to do the same.

At a time in my life when I'm working on improving my leadership and discovering who I want to be as a leader, "Audacity" is a powerful tool and an abundance of encouragement to ensure my leadership style stays rooted in who I am, how I live, my life challenges, and how I experience this world.

So much to love here. Absolutely a winner.

[Olga Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had a lot of good points on leadership. The author shared her own traumas and hurdles she has overcome and how it helped her become a strong leader. Inspirational.