Todd Schaefer’s Books
Welcome to my bookshelf.
Each book was shaped by something real—drawn from years of inner work, business clarity, and the deeper process of learning what actually transforms. Take your time here. Explore what speaks to you. And thank you for being part of this circle.
Needing vs. Leading: How to Eliminate Approval-Seeking with Clients and Tribes: A Guide for Holistic Coaches and Business Owners
This book reveals how unconscious neediness—approval-seeking, overgiving, or identity tied to impact—can quietly distort your leadership. If you're a coach, healer, or guide, it offers a clear path to reclaiming your clarity, authority, and boundaries without abandoning empathy or connection.
Butts In Seats 2: Turn Your Holistic Side Hustle into a Successful Local Business
This follow-up to Butts In Seats dives deeper into turning your side hustle into a sustainable business. Co-authored with Kyra Schaefer, it reflects the strategies and mindset shifts we used to grow our own practice—and helps holistic practitioners build lasting momentum with clarity and confidence.
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Selling Emotionally Transformative Services Companion Notebook: Thought-Provoking Questions to Integrate and Apply to Your Business
This notebook is the companion to Selling Emotionally Transformative Services, featuring 52 thought-provoking prompts and ample space for reflection. Designed as a daily practice, it helps holistic practitioners integrate key insights, plan next steps, and stay aligned as they build a business with clarity and confidence.
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The Acceptance Guidebook: Spiritual Solutions for Active Minds – Reflections on A Course in Miracles (10th Anniversary Edition)
Written between 2005 and 2011, this early collection captures the raw, honest beginnings of my inner work. These reflections track the growing pains of clarity, trust, and self-acceptance—and offer insight for anyone navigating their own path back to themselves.
(This 10th anniversary edition is a cleaned-up 2021 republish of the original, which was published under a different company and is no longer in print.)
Butts In Seats: How to Get Clients and Launch Successfully as a New Local Business
This is a practical guide for heart-led service providers—especially holistic practitioners—who are great at what they do but struggle to get clients. Co-authored with Kyra Schaefer, it draws from our real-world experience building a successful holistic business from scratch.
Selling Emotionally Transformative Services: Business and Self-Worth Advice Holistic Practitioners Need To Know (Second Edition)
This updated edition expands on the original with clearer guidance, new insights, and dozens of reflection prompts to help you apply the work in real time. It’s designed for heart-led practitioners who want to sell with integrity—without overgiving, undercharging, or collapsing their clarity. More than a revision, it’s a complete upgrade.
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Selling Emotionally Transformative Services: Business and Self-Worth Advice Holistic Practitioners Need to Know (First Edition)
This is the original edition of Selling Emotionally Transformative Services—a book shaped by hard-earned insights and the intensity of working with thousands of clients. It carries some edge and repetition, reflecting the emotional charge and learning curve of that time. The second edition is clearer, more grounded, and more aligned with the work I do now.
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Why I Wrote These Books
I started writing because I saw patterns that needed naming. Especially in the holistic world—where talented, heart-led people with real gifts were often left without a clear roadmap, meaningful support, or the kind of clarity that helps things truly take root.
Early on, my work focused on the structure behind service—how to build businesses that work without selling out. But over time, a deeper thread became impossible to ignore: even when people had the tools, many still struggled. Not because they weren’t capable, but because they were entangled in stories—about themselves, their worth, their role, their healing.
So now I write about what sits beneath all that: the emotional architecture of growth, the difference between relief and real transformation, and what it means to stop performing your life and actually inhabit it. Some of these books are practical. Others are piercing. But all of them point to the same thing: the possibility of living and leading from clarity instead of compensation.
If that’s the path you’re on—or the one you’re finding your way back to—these books are here for you.
What’s Coming Next
The next wave of books will stretch beyond business into new territory—exploring emotional integration, identity, boundaries, trust, masculine psychology, relational healing, and even a few unexpected directions. Some of these works are already well underway. Others are early sparks or evolving blueprints. But they’re all rooted in the same intent: to name what’s hard to name, and offer grounded clarity to those ready to live, relate, and lead from presence—not performance.
Meet Todd
Todd Schaefer
Todd Schaefer writes with one aim: clarity that transforms. His books explore the intersection of self-awareness, leadership, emotional truth, and real-world change—offering grounded insight for those navigating personal growth, service, and the subtle work of becoming more fully themselves.
His work is shaped by years of lived experience in healing, business, and the quiet process of integrating it all. Rather than offering quick fixes, he writes for those who sense there's more beneath the surface—people drawn to truth, transformation, and the kind of clarity that doesn’t shout.