The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness


Todd Rose - 2016
    We’re a little taller or shorter than the average, our salary is a bit higher or lower than the average, and we wonder about who it is that is buying the average-priced home. All around us, we think, are the average people—with the average height, the average salary and the average house.But the average doesn’t just influence how we see ourselves—our entire social system has been built around this average-size-fits-all model. Schools are designed for the average student. Healthcare is designed for the average patient. Employers try to fill average job descriptions with employees on an average career trajectory. Our government implements programs and initiatives to serve the average person. For more than a century, we’ve believed that the best way to run our institutions is by focusing on the average person. But when you actually drill down into the numbers, you find an amazing fact: no one is average—which means that our society built for everyone is actually serving no one.In the 1950s, the American Air Force found itself with a massive problem—performance in expensive, custom-made planes was suffering terribly, with crashes peaking at seventeen in a single day. Since the state-of-the-art planes they were flying had been meticulously crafted to fit the average pilot, pilot error was assumed to be at fault. Until, that is, the Air Force investigated just how many of their pilots were actually average. The shocking answer: out of thousands of active-duty pilots, exactly zero were average. Not one. This discovery led to simple solutions (like adjustable seats) that dramatically reduced accidents, improved performance, and expanded the pool of potential pilots. It also led to a huge change in thinking: planes didn’t need to be designed for everyone—they needed to be designed so they could adapt to suit the individual flying them.The End of Average shows how success lies in customizing to our individual needs in all aspects of our lives, from the way we mark tests to the medical treatment we receive. Using principles from The Science of the Individual, it shows how we can break down the average to create individualized success that benefits everyone in the long run. It's time we stopped settling for average, and in The End of Average, Todd Rose will show you how.

Care Package: A Path To Deep Healing


Sylvester McNutt III - 2018
    In Care Package, Sylvester digs deep to uncover pain, moments of fear and relates to the reader's struggles through powerful stories. In Care Package, Sylvester has tackled life's biggest hurdles: shame, guilt, letting go, codependency, lack or purpose, people pleasing, setting boundaries, and negative self-talk. Sylvester guides the reader down the path of healing, the scary journey that is tough to do alone, but with Care Package, the reader is never alone. Sylvester's mission with Care Package is to inspire the reader to heal, to release, to vibrate higher, and to practice self-care every single day.Chapters:One: AlignmentTwo: Walking Away from PainThree: Letting GoFour: People Pleasing and Setting BoundariesFive: GuiltSix: CodependencySeven: Self-Care and Putting Yourself FirstEight: Overcoming AnxietyNine: Living In The MomentsTen: Keep LovingEleven: Healing

The Courage to Create


Rollo May - 1975
    May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.

The Magic of Believing


Claude M. Bristol - 1948
    Now it's your turn to put Claude M. Bristol's special "magic" into your life and into action!His tough-minded, hard-hitting message speaks directly to You. It has yielded proven results for forty years and remains as fresh and focused as ever. Learn how to:* Harness the unlimited power of the subconscious mind and make your dreams come true* Protect your thoughts and turn them into achievements* Use "the law of suggestion" to step up your effectiveness in everything you do* Apply the power of your imagination to overcome obstacles* And much more!If you seek to become more assertive in business, more fulfilled at home, more influential in your dealings with others -- you can believe in MAGIC!

The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling


Stephen Cope - 2012
      In this fast-paced age, the often overwhelming realities of daily life may leave you feeling uncertain about how to realize your life’s true purpose—what spiritual teachers call dharma. But yoga master Stephen Cope says that in order to have a fulfilling life you must, in fact, discover the deep purpose hidden at the very core of your self. In The Great Work of Your Life, Cope describes the process of unlocking the unique possibility harbored within every human soul. The secret, he asserts, can be found in the pages of a two-thousand-year-old spiritual classic called the Bhagavad Gita—an ancient allegory about the path to dharma, told through a timeless dialogue between the fabled archer, Arjuna, and his divine mentor, Krishna.   Cope takes readers on a step-by-step tour of this revered tale, and in order to make it relevant to contemporary readers, he highlights well-known Western lives that embody its central principles—including such luminaries as Jane Goodall, whose life trajectory shows us the power of honoring The Gift; Walt Whitman, who listened for the call of the times; Susan B. Anthony, whose example demonstrates the power of focused energy; John Keats, who was able to let his desire give birth to aspiration; and Harriet Tubman, whose life was nothing if not a lesson in learning to walk by faith. This essential guide also includes everyday stories about following the path to dharma, which illustrate the astonishingly contemporary relevance and practicality of this classic yogic story.   If you’re feeling lost in your own life’s journey, The Great Work of Your Life may provide you with answers to the questions you most urgently need addressed—and may help you to find and to embrace your true calling.Praise for The Great Work of Your Life   “Keep a pen and paper handy as you read this remarkable book: It’s like an owner’s manual for the soul.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion  “A masterwork . . . You’ll find inspiration in these pages. You’ll gain a better appreciation of divine guidance and perhaps even understand how you might better hear it in your own life.”—Yoga Journal  “I am moved and inspired by this book, the clarity and beauty of the lives lived in it, and the timeless dharma it teaches.”—Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart  “A rich source of contemplation and inspiration [that] encourages readers . . . to discover and fully pursue their inner self’s calling.”—Publishers Weekly   “Fabulous . . . If you have ever wondered what your purpose is, this book is a great guide to help you on your path.”—YogaHaraFrom the Hardcover edition.

Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow


Elizabeth Lesser - 2004
    In a beautifully crafted blend of moving stories, humorous insights, practical guidance, and personal memoir, she offers tools to help us make the choice we all face in times of challenge: Will we be broken down and defeated, or broken open and transformed? Lesser shares tales of ordinary people who have risen from the ashes of illness, divorce, loss of a job or a loved one - stronger, wiser, and more in touch with their purpose and passion. And she draws on the world's great spiritual and psychological traditions to support us as we too learn to break open and blossom into who we were meant to be.

Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict


Tsultrim Allione - 2008
    If we want to liberate ourselves from the fight once and for all, we must reverse our approach and nurture our demons.In Feeding Your Demons, Allione adapts the revolutionary wisdom of Tibet’s greatest female spiritual master for the first time, providing a powerful method for coping with the inner enemies that undermine your best intentions. Based on an extraordinarily simple yet effective five-step practice, Feeding Your Demons outlines a strategy for transforming negative emotions, relationships, fears, illness, and self-defeating patterns. By recognizing your demons, giving them form, and then feeding them, you can free yourself from the battle. And the paradigm shift from fighting to feeding demons can apply not only to your personal challenges but also to the challenges of the world at large. Enriched with detailed examples to show how others have transformed their demons, Feeding Your Demons will give you remarkable new insight into the forces that threaten to defeat you, along with the tools to achieve inner peace.

Loving My Actual Life: An Experiment in Relishing What's Right in Front of Me


Alexandra Kuykendall - 2016
    Other people seem to have it all together, to be finding success, to be having more fun. But we weren't meant for a life characterized by dissatisfaction. In this entertaining and relatable book, Alexandra Kuykendall chronicles her nine-month experiment to rekindle her love of her ordinary "actual" life. After wiping her calendar as clean as a mother of four can, Kuykendall focuses on one aspect of her life each month, searching for ways to more fully enjoy her current season. By intentionally adding one thing each month that will make her jump for joy, she provides a practical challenge women can easily replicate. With humor, poignancy, and plenty of personal stories, Kuykendall weaves together spiritual themes and practical application into a holy self-awareness, showing women how a few small changes in their routines can improve their enjoyment of this crazy-busy life.

Chicken Soup for the Soul


Jack Canfield - 1993
    Canfield and Hansen bring you wit and wisdom, hope and empowerment to buoy you through life's dark moments.

How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration


David Richo - 1991
    In this best-selling work, David Richo conveys to his readers just how to do this, based on his many years' experience as a psychotherapist and workshop leader. The author uses as a model the heroic journey whose three phases--departure, struggle, and return--explain what happens in us as we evolve from neurotic ego through healthy ego to the spiritual Self. Departure is explored by helping the reader deal with fear, anger, and guilt, and building self-esteem. Through struggle one learns to maintain boundaries and build intimacy in relationships. And the result is a return to wholeness and love through integration. This thoughtful, approachable work is filled with checklists, diagrams, and literary quotations for meditation, making this a book to read and digest a little at a time for best results. How to Be an Adult will guide readers on their positive journey from fear, through power, to love.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction


Matthew B. Crawford - 2015
    Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters


Phillip C. McGraw - 1999
    McGraw's 10 Life Laws will empower you to take responsibility for your own actions and break free from self-destructive patterns. Drawing upon more than fifteen years of experience, Dr. McGraw explores each of the 10 Life Laws necessary to succeed:Life Law #1: You either get it, or you don't.Strategy: Become one of those who gets it.Life Law #2: You create your own experience.Strategy: Acknowledge and accept accountability for your life.Life Law #3: People do what works.Strategy: Identify the payoffs that drive your behavior and that of others.Life Law #4: You cannot change what you do not acknowledge.Strategy: Get real with yourself about your life and everybody in it.Life Law #5: Life rewards action.Strategy: Make careful decisions and then pull the trigger.Life Law #6: There is no reality; only perception.Strategy: Identify the filters through which you view the world.Life Law #7: Life is managed; it is not cured.Strategy: Learn to take charge of your life.Life Law #8: We teach people how to treat us.Strategy: Own, rather than complain about, how people treat you.Life Law #9: There is power in forgiveness.Strategy: Open your eyes to what anger and resentment are doing to you.Life Law #10: You have to name it before you can claim it.Strategy: Get clear about what you want and take your turn.

How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life


Massimo Pigliucci - 2017
    No goal is more elusive. In How to Be a Stoic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers Stoicism, the ancient philosophy that inspired the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, as the best way to attain it. Stoicism is a pragmatic philosophy that focuses our attention on what is possible and gives us perspective on what is unimportant. By understanding Stoicism, we can learn to answer crucial questions: Should we get married or divorced? How should we handle our money in a world nearly destroyed by a financial crisis? How can we survive great personal tragedy? Whoever we are, Stoicism has something for us–and How to Be a Stoic is the essential guide.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work


Vishen Lakhiani - 2020
    This book will disrupt your deeply held beliefs about work, success, and, indeed, life.If you’re the average person in the developed world, you spend 70 percent of your waking hours at work. And if you’re the average person, you’re miserable for most of those hours. This is simply not an acceptable state of affairs for your one shot at life. No matter your station, you possess incredible unique powers. It’s a modern myth that hard work and hustle are the paths to success. Inside you is a soul. And once you unleash it fully into the domain of work, magic happens. Awakening the Buddha and the Badass inside you is a process that will disrupt the way you work altogether. You’ll gain access to tools that bend the very rules of reality.• The Buddha is the archetype of the spiritual master. The person who can live in this world but also move with an ease, grace, and flow that comes from inner awareness and alignment.• The Badass is the archetype of the changemaker. This is the person who is out there creating change, building, coding, writing, inventing, leading. The badass represents the benevolent disruptor—the person challenging the norms so we can be better as a species.Once you integrate the skill sets of both archetypes, you will experience life at a different level from most people. You will operate from a space of bliss, ease, inspiration, and abundance. The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work will show you how. Author of the New York Times bestseller The Code of the Extraordinary Mind and founder of Mindvalley, Vishen Lakhiani has turned his own life and company into his research lab. He’s codified everything he’s learned into the how-to steps in this book. The Buddha and the Badass teaches you how to master your work and your life.

Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationship with Food Through Myths, Metaphors, and Storytelling


Anita Johnston - 1999
    By weaving practical insights and exercises through a rich tapestry of multicultural myths, ancient legends, and folktales, Anita Johnston helps the millions of women preoccupied with their weight discover and address the issues behind their negative attitudes toward food.