Leadership coach and International Coaching Federation Professional Certified Coach Francesca Oduoza has released a new book that positions emotional leadership as a strategic capability rather than a soft skill. Titled The ARC of Progress: A Coaching Handbook for Emotional Leadership — Transforming Difficult Emotions into Purposeful Action, the handbook was published on September 15, 2026, and introduces the ARC™ Framework—Acknowledge, Reflect, Convert—a repeatable pathway for leveraging emotions to strengthen leadership effectiveness and support personal growth.
The release arrives as leaders face growing complexity, uncertainty, and workplace challenges, and as AI and digital transformation reshape how organizations operate. According to the source material, many people are taught to manage emotions without learning to harness them for strategic leadership advantage. Oduoza argues that emotional leadership remains essential for navigating relationships, managing conflict and change, and making inclusive decisions, even as technology takes on more analytical work.
"Emotions are not simply barriers or distractions; they are signals," Oduoza said. "Much like a warning light on a car's dashboard, an emotion can alert us that something beneath the surface deserves our attention. The choice isn't whether to feel. It's what you do with what you feel." The framework is designed to help coaches, leaders, and professionals name their emotions, understand what those emotions reveal, and turn that insight into intentional decisions and meaningful action.
The handbook guides readers through three interconnected stages. Acknowledge & Accept helps readers recognize and make space for their emotional reality with honesty and compassion. Reflect & Reframe explores the beliefs, interpretations, and stories shaping the emotional experience, opening the door to new understanding. Convert & Commit turns emerging insight into intentional action that lays the foundation for sustainable behaviour change. Coaches and leaders can apply these concepts through thematic coaching domains, guided visualizations, practical prompts, and reflection exercises.
The book includes foundational concepts of emotional regulation, real-life stories and metaphors showing how emotions shape leadership behaviours and relationships, action-oriented prompts for navigating emotional contagion, structured coaching domains and emotionally focused demonstrations, hundreds of prompts and reflective questions, and practical exercises for individuals, teams, and groups. The ARC™ approach aligns with most of the International Coaching Federation's core coaching competencies and ethical principles, and can be used in individual coaching, team coaching, leadership development programs, emotional intelligence coaching, workshops, and team development initiatives.
Written for leadership, life, and executive coaches, people leaders, HR professionals, educators, mentors, and anyone committed to developing others, the handbook supports both professional practice and personal growth. Early praise came from Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, MCC, author of Coach the Person, Not the Problem and Breakthrough Coaching, who described it as a practical tool readers may invite others to use to transform emotions that feel like blocks into insights and confident action. Emmanuel Michael, SPHRi, a leadership and career coach recognized among the Top 100 Global HR Leaders, called it a transformational tool for anyone committed to elevating human performance, emotional intelligence, and personal mastery.
Oduoza holds an MBA and is a Certified Organizational Coach with more than 20 years of leadership experience, including senior leadership roles in banking, and a certificate in mediation and conflict resolution from Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. The book is available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, Rakuten Kobo, and Smashwords, with formats varying by retailer. More information is available at francescaoduoza.com.
