Game Face Down: What happens when you stop performing

Everyone at work learns to say they're fine. This is the book where they stop.In high-pressure careers, everyone learns the same move: suck it in, keep the camera on, say you're fine, and assume you're the only one who isn't.For two years, Jolie Shapiro sat down with thirty-three people in tech, sales, and marketing and opened every conversation with a version of the same question: what makes you, you, if we subtract your title, your biggest win, and your biggest scar?What came out was burnout, depression, addiction and sobriety, grief, layoffs, and the private cost of carrying a number. None of it is on LinkedIn.The people who said it out loud: Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia, on the years she hid who she loved at work. Rob LoCascio, who built LivePerson over twenty-eight years and still keeps the Ikea couch he slept on. Anthony Kennada, former CMO at Gainsight, who lost a daughter, nearly lost his wife, and opened Zoom on Monday morning anyway. Leslie Venetz, who had her bathroom breaks counted and spent fifteen years believing a word about herself that was never true. Brandon Fluharty, who earned $1.5 million in a year, had a mini-stroke, and walked away from the number. And nine more.Then the author's own: bipolar I, a psychiatric hospital at twenty, fifteen years of adjusting her medication in secret, three layoffs in three years, sobriety, and eight months of treatment.Read this if you have ever: - Turned the camera off between meetings to fix your face- Gone back to work early because work was somewhere to put your hands- Watched a number decide how you felt about yourself that week- Carried something at home that nobody at work knew about- Wondered whether everyone else is actually fine, or just better at the faceGame Face Down is the record of those conversations, and of her own. Not a self-help book. Not a framework. Just fourteen leaders, and the author herself, telling the truth out loud and landing on the same thing: you were never the only one in the room.Includes a discussion guide for teams, book clubs, and leadership offsites. Contains frank discussion of mental illness, addiction, grief, and pregnancy loss.