Leadership coach and International Coaching Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC) Francesca Oduoza has released a new book, The ARC of Progress: A Coaching Handbook for Emotional Leadership — Transforming Difficult Emotions into Purposeful Action. Published on September 15, 2026, the handbook introduces the ARC™ Framework—Acknowledge, Reflect, Convert—a repeatable process designed to help coaches, leaders, and professionals name their emotions, understand what those emotions reveal, and convert that insight into intentional decisions and meaningful action.
The book arrives as leaders face growing complexity, uncertainty, and workplace challenges, and as AI and digital transformation reshape workplaces. Oduoza emphasizes that emotional leadership remains essential for navigating relationships, managing conflict and change, and making inclusive decisions. "Emotions are not simply barriers or distractions; they are signals," said Oduoza. "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 ARC™ Framework 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 handbook is written for leadership, life, and executive coaches; people leaders; HR professionals; educators; mentors; and anyone committed to developing others. It includes foundational concepts of emotional regulation, real-life stories and relatable metaphors, action-oriented prompts for navigating emotional contagion, structured coaching domains and emotionally focused demonstrations, hundreds of prompts and reflective questions, practical exercises and facilitation tools, and a repeatable coaching method for use with clients and for self-coaching reflections. 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.
The framework has versatile applications, including addressing leadership challenges, navigating difficult relationships, overcoming limiting beliefs, coaching through conflict, strengthening team dynamics, managing stress, developing emotional intelligence, and understanding emotional contagion. Early praise for the book comes from Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, MCC, author of Coach the Person, Not the Problem and Breakthrough Coaching, who described it as "a practical tool they may invite others to use to transform emotions that feel like blocks into insights and confident action," and from Emmanuel Michael, SPHRi, a leadership and career coach recognized among the Top 100 Global HR Leaders, who called it "a transformational tool for anyone committed to elevating human performance, emotional intelligence, and personal mastery."
The book is available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book through Amazon (including Kindle), Barnes & Noble, Indigo, Rakuten Kobo, and Smashwords, with formats varying by retailer. For more information, visit https://francescaoduoza.com. Oduoza is a Certified Organizational Coach with more than 20 years of leadership experience, including senior leadership roles in banking, and holds a certificate in mediation and conflict resolution from Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation. She is also the author of Breaking Free from the Paralysis of Inaction: The Path from Hesitation to Bold Decisive Leadership.
