Forgotten Leaders: Leadership Stories

What if the people we admire most are the ones silently breaking?

In Forgotten Leaders, Stéphane Trottier challenges everything we think we know about leadership, success, and strength.

Behind boardroom confidence, entrepreneurial drive, and public achievement often lies anxiety, burnout, trauma, and silent suffering. Through powerful personal reflections and real-life stories of executives, entrepreneurs, survivors of abuse, individuals experiencing homelessness, and people battling depression, this book reveals a hidden crisis affecting both high-achieving professionals and everyday heroes.

These are the forgotten leaders: the executive who loses everything to untreated stress, the entrepreneur crushed by personal collapse, the parent silently fighting depression, the trauma survivor rebuilding from nothing, and the once-successful professional now struggling to survive on the streets.

Blending psychology, neuroscience, social commentary, and lived experience, Trottier redefines leadership not as power or status, but as empathy, resilience, service, and courage.

In Forgotten Leaders, readers will discover the hidden psychological cost of high performance, how burnout and anxiety can dismantle even the strongest leaders, the deep connection between trauma and homelessness, and why vulnerability can become a powerful source of strength. The book also offers practical insights for emotional recovery, resilience, and redefining success in a demanding world.

More than a book about mental health or social hardship, Forgotten Leaders is a call to rethink leadership itself. It invites readers to confront difficult conversations about burnout, trauma, and systemic challenges while imagining a more compassionate future.

Because true leadership is not about standing above others.

It is about lifting them.