Book picks similar to
Marriage Meetings for Lasting Love: 30 Minutes a Week to the Relationship You've Always Wanted by Marcia Naomi Berger
marriage
relationships
self-help
non-fiction
What Every Body is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People
Joe Navarro - 2008
Is it?She says she agrees. Does she?The interview went great - or did it?He said he'd never do it again. But he did.Read this book and send your nonverbal intelligence soaring. Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer and a recognized expert on nonverbal behavior, explains how to "speed-read" people: decode sentiments and behaviors, avoid hidden pitfalls, and look for deceptive behaviors. You'll also learn how your body language can influence what your boss, family, friends, and strangers think of you. You will discover:The ancient survival instincts that drive body languageWhy the face is the least likely place to gauge a person's true feelingsWhat thumbs, feet, and eyelids reveal about moods and motivesThe most powerful behaviors that reveal our confidence and true sentimentsSimple nonverbals that instantly establish trustSimple nonverbals that instantly communicate authorityFilled with examples from Navarro's professional experience, this definitive book offers a powerful new way to navigate your world.
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
Daniel H. Pink - 2018
But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork.Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science.Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married?
How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly
David Richo - 2013
Loving ourselves and others is in our genetic code. It’s nothing other than the purpose of our lives—but knowing that doesn’t make it easy to do. We may find it a challenge to love ourselves. We may have a hard time letting love in from others. We’re often afraid of getting hurt. It is also sometimes scary for us to share love with those around us—and love that isn't shared leaves us feeling flat and unfulfilled. David Richo provides the tools here for learning how to love in evolved adult ways—beginning with getting past the barriers that keep us from loving ourselves, then showing how we can learn to open to love others. The first challenge is that we have a hard time letting love in: recognizing it, accepting it from others. We're afraid of it, of getting hurt. The second, related problem is that we're unable to share love with those around us--and love that isn't shared isn't truly love. The first step to learning to love and be loved, according to Richo's model, is to identify the different levels of love so that you can hit each one separately. He breaks it down to three: • Level One: Positive Connection. As simple as being courteous, respectful, helpful, and honest, and decent in all our dealings. Pretty basic, but it makes the world a better place, and it's the essential foundation for growing in love. • Level Two: Caring and Personal Connection. Intimacy and commitment to friends, family, partners, lovers. Commitment to others. • Level Three: Unconditional and Universal. Transcending the love of individuals to the love of all beings; self-sacrificing. The love expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and the Bodhicharyavatara. This level of love isn't for a heroic few, it's everyone's calling. He then shows us how to incorporate these varieties of love into our lives. It's a relief to know that even just aspiring to incorporate them really changes things. He also provides exercises and guided meditations for identifying and getting through the things that keep you from getting and giving love at each of these three levels.Through the lens of these types of love, Richo covers topics such as: how to still be yourself while loving another; how to embrace your dark side; what to do when the one who loves you dies; need versus fear; clinging; healthy sexuality, including fantasies and how to experience pleasure without guilt; how to break distructive patterns in your relationships; and how to have safe conversations with your loved one.Richo provides wisdom from Buddhism, psychology, and a range of spiritual traditions, along with a wealth of practices both for avoiding the pitfalls that can occur in love relationships and for enhancing the way love shows up in our lives. He then leads us on to love’s inevitable outcome: developing a heart that loves universally and indiscriminately. This transcendent and unconditional love isn’t just for a heroic few, Richo shows, it’s everyone’s magnificent calling.
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
David McRaney - 2011
Whether you’re deciding which smart phone to purchase or which politician to believe, you think you are a rational being whose every decision is based on cool, detached logic, but here’s the truth: You are not so smart. You’re just as deluded as the rest of us--but that’s okay, because being deluded is part of being human. Growing out of David McRaney’s popular blog, You Are Not So Smart reveals that every decision we make, every thought we contemplate, and every emotion we feel comes with a story we tell ourselves to explain them, but often these stories aren’t true. Each short chapter--covering topics such as Learned Helplessness, Selling Out, and the Illusion of Transparency--is like a psychology course with all the boring parts taken out.Bringing together popular science and psychology with humor and wit, You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of our irrational, thoroughly human behavior.
Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis
Ada Calhoun - 2020
She was married with children and a good career. So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too?Calhoun decided to find some answers. She looked into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age, problems that were being largely overlooked.Speaking with women across America about their experiences as the generation raised to “have it all,” Calhoun found that most were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. Instead of being heard, they were told instead to lean in, take “me-time,” or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order.In Why We Can’t Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X’s predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss—and keep the next generation of women from falling in. The result is reassuring, empowering, and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman - 2021
Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.
Rewire Your Brain for Love: Creating Vibrant Relationships Using the Science of Mindfulness
Marsha Lucas - 2012
Lucas’s clear, unintimidating, often laugh-out-loud style invites you to explore how the brain functions in relationships, helping you understand how your current relationship wiring developed and showing you how you can rewire your relationship brain through mindfulness meditation. A down-to-earth therapist and self-described neuroscience geek, Dr. Lucas has written a chapter-by-chapter guide with compassion, wisdom, and humor. In Rewire Your Brain for Love, she takes you on a journey through seven high-voltage relationship benefits—everything from keeping your fear from running the show to cultivating healthy, balanced empathy—and offers specific mindfulness practices to help bring those benefits into your life. With a few minutes of practice a day, you can change the way you interact with everyone around you . . . especially those closest to you. You can transform your brain from an enemy to an ally in all matters of the heart, creating more loving communication, building emotional resilience, and reducing overreactivity—not to mention enjoying better sex. You don’t have to become a monk, or a vegetarian, or spend hours contemplating your navel—you just need to update the relationship wiring of your brain. The simple practice of mindfulness can help get you there, with Dr. Lucas showing you how.
Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication
Oren Jay Sofer - 2018
Here's a proven method that makes it not only considerably easier, but also much more effective for people on both sides of the conversation. Oren Sofer's method for effective communication is a unique combination of mindfulness with the modality called nonviolent communication (NVC), a method popular since the 1960s that is based on the belief that all human beings have the capacity for compassion and resort to violence or behavior that harms others only when they don't recognize more effective strategies for meeting needs. NVC provides those peaceful strategies. Oren's unique method for fostering peaceful--and effective--communication has three "steps" or components: (1) presence: bringing mindful awareness to the interaction, (2) intention: clarifying and setting a goal for the interaction, and (3) attention: learning to really hear and understand in a way that enables you to navigate the difficulties, express yourself clearly, and listen like it really matters--which it most certainly does. The steps are accompanied by many practical exercises, and in the course of this three-part training, readers will learn how to apply these skills to personal and social relationships with romantic partners, friends, colleagues, and family.
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
Adam Alter - 2017
We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans. In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist. By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.
Real Love
Greg Baer - 2003
Greg Baer found the answers to these questions while working with hundreds of individuals and couples. In Real Love, he shares his enlightening and practical blueprint for creating successful relationships and reveals the secret to finding and keeping what he calls “Real Love.”
When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us: Letting Go of Their Problems, Loving Them Anyway, and Getting on with Our Lives
Jane Adams - 2003
She listens to a generation that “did everything right” and expected its children to grow into happy, healthy, successful adults. But they haven’t, at least, not yet—and meanwhile, we’re letting their problems threaten our health, marriages, security, freedom, careers or retirement, and other family relationships. With warmth, empathy, and perspective, Dr. Adams offers a positive, life-affirming message to parents who are still trying to “fix” their adult children—Stop! She shows us how to separate from their problems without separating from them, and how to be a positive force in their lives while getting on with our own. As we navigate this critical passage in our second adulthood and their first, the bestselling author of I’m Still Your Mother reminds us that the pleasures and possibilities of postparenthood should not depend on how our kids turn out, but on how we do!
Will I Ever Be Free of You?: How to Navigate a High-Conflict Divorce from a Narcissist and Heal Your Family
Karyl McBride - 2015
Narcissists do not have the capacity to love, understand other people’s emotions, or feel empathy. They are grandiose in their need for praise and attention, they overestimate their abilities, and they diminish people around them with emotional abuse. Being in an intimate relationship with a narcissist destroys your hopes, dreams, and peace of mind and erodes your children’s emotional health and your finances.Does this sound like what you have to deal with? If you ever look at your partner and wonder in despair if you will ever be free, the answer is yes, you can be.A leading authority on narcissism, Dr. Karyl McBride offers proven therapeutic advice that will help you protect and nurture yourself and your children through your difficult divorce, from separating from your narcissistic partner and navigating the court system, where a narcissist can be especially destructive, to a restorative healing program of trauma recovery.
The Sweet Spot
Christine Carter - 2015
Not long ago, Christine Carter, a happiness expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and a speaker, writer, and mother, found herself exasperated by the busyness of modern life: too many conflicting obligations and not enough time, energy, or patience to get everything done. She tried all the standard techniques—prioritizing, multitasking, delegating, even napping—but none really worked. Determined to create a less stressful life for herself—without giving up her hard-won career success or happiness at home—she road-tested every research-based tactic that promised to bring more ease into her life. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the latest research related to happiness, productivity, and elite performance, she followed every strategy that promised to give her more energy—or that could make her more efficient, creative, or intelligent. Her trials and errors are our reward. In The Sweet Spot, Carter shares the combination of practices that transformed her life from overwhelmed and exhausting to joyful, relaxed, and productive. From instituting daily micro-habits that save time to bigger picture shifts that convert stress into productive and creative energy, The Sweet Spot shows us how to • say “no” strategically and when to say “yes” with abandon • make decisions about routine things once to free our minds to focus on higher priorities • stop multitasking and gain efficiency • “take recess” in sync with the brain’s need for rest • use technology in ways that bolster, instead of sap, energy • increase your ratio of positive to negative emotions Complete with practical “easiest thing” tips for instant relief as well as stories from Carter’s own experience of putting The Sweet Spot into action, this timely and inspiring book will inoculate you against “The Overwhelm,” letting you in on the possibilities for joy and freedom that come when you stop trying to do everything right—and start doing the right things. Advance praise for The Sweet Spot “Illuminates the simple and sustainable path toward a precious and happy balance.”—Deepak Chopra “A gift, like a good friend drawing a personal road map out of the crazy busy swirl of our overloaded lives.”—Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed “This book did something I thought was impossible: It seemed to give me more time.”—Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Way in a Wild New World “A page-turning thriller full of proven ways to have the life you want.”—Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Hardwiring Happiness “Timely, lively, and vital, The Sweet Spot is an immediately useful must-read.”—Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage“The Sweet Spot inspired me to make immediate changes that have increased my productivity and lowered my stress.
How to Think More About Sex
Alain de Botton - 2012
By examining sex from a subjective perspective, he uncovers new ideas on how we can achieve that balance.
Happiness for Two: 75 Secrets for Finding More Joy Together
Alexandra Stoddard - 2007
So, how do we find happiness in a relationship—when there are two people who want and deserve to be happy?Help is here, from a beloved (and blissfully married) lifestyle philosopher whose books and lectures on personal contentment have helped millions and whose popular Happiness Weekends are filled with dating singles, newlyweds, and long-married couples. In brief, readable essays rich in wisdom, practical strategies, and humor, Alexandra Stoddard shows how two people can be happy together, not at each other's expense.Alexandra's essays help couples make personal happiness a priority ("Encourage each other to do something every day that will boost happiness"), connect in simple, powerful ways ("Give the gift of eye contact"), share decisions ("A home has no boss"), set family priorities ("Don't let children control you"), expand your horizons ("Encourage adventure"), be grateful for each other ("Treat each encounter as though it could be your last"), and have fun ("Live a little!").Perfect for couples to read alone or together, Happiness for Two brims with useful ideas to help us "love and live happy."