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For Rayona Sharpnack, sports was always a second language that her body spoke fluently. She grew up pitching and batting against three older brothers in rural Susanville, California. "There weren't many other kids around, and there were hardly any girls," she explains. "So if I wanted to play with the guys, I had to be good." And she was incredibly good. As a sinewy 11-year-old with stubbornly curly hair, she set a Junior Olympic record by throwing a softball 189 feet. Five years later, the driven teenager won her state's tennis championship in both doubles and singles. In college, she earned a physical-education degree at a time when few women entered the field, and in the early 1980s, she became the first player-manager of the most profitable franchise of the International Women's Professional Softball League. Today, still a muscular and graceful athlete at age 49, she is a shortstop for the California Express, a women's professional softball team that took second place in the league's 1999 world championships.

Sharpnack describes her athletic talent as a meld of instinct and preparedness -- both mental and physical. "When people watch me play, they might think, 'How did she know to go there?' " she says. "It's almost as if I'm moving to the ball before I see where it's headed. Some of that is the dance of the body coupled with experience and working on instinct. But more than that, it is a state of being -- a complete focus and presence of attention that I have to maintain every moment that I'm out on the field."

That insight is precisely what Sharpnack applies to her other career -- teaching leadership to businesspeople (mainly women) inside some of the most powerful companies in the world. Leadership isn't about doing, Sharpnack insists. It's about being. You are more likely to succeed if you concentrate on transforming your mental framework, rather than on memorizing mechanics. Her approach revolves around self-discovery, and her personal history in sports is merely a reference point. For the real lessons, she sends participants into their own psyches to explore their views of the world, their companies, and themselves -- and how those perceptions shape their behaviors and opinions.

That philosophy has become the core curriculum behind the Institute for Women's Leadership, which Sharpnack founded in 1991. Most of each three-day seminar on "breakthrough change" involves conversation. Drawing on her academic background in linguistics, business, and psychology, Sharpnack guides participants through a process of unlearning what they assume to be true about what they can (and can't) accomplish. All of this talk, participants agree, changes how they walk the walk of leadership.

"Quite simply, it was a life-changing experience," says Vivian Groman, 43, a senior VP of finance and corporate administrative technology at Charles Schwab Corp., who took Sharpnack's course in 1997. "You walk in with a challenge, some mountain that you don't think you can climb. When you walk out, you've built a higher mountain that you know you can climb."

Sharpnack primarily targets women simply because she thinks that they have a natural affinity for her leadership methods. And she has a big-picture theory as well: The more women that she trains to lead critical, business-changing projects, the more women will get promoted, and the more the balance of power inside companies will shift. So far, her model has produced compelling business results. Women at Schwab felt that the training was making such a difference in the company's competitiveness that they asked Sharpnack to share the class with male colleagues too. The feedback from the coed course was so positive that Schwab added the class to its regular HR-training offerings.