Couple Skills: Making Your Relationship Work


Matthew McKay - 1994
    Couple Skills, Second Edition, revised and updated from the therapist-recommended classic, will show you how to work smarter in your relationship. You'll learn to improve communication, cope better with problems, and resolve conflicts with the one you love in healthy and creative ways. Each chapter teaches you an essential skill that supports greater relationship satisfaction and deeper intimacy.New to this edition is a chapter on using acceptance skills, developed from the revolutionary new acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). These new approaches will help you to accept your partner's feelings (and your own emotions) without judgment. Using these techniques will help you decide what you really value in your relationship and then commit to acting in ways that further those values every day.

Six Pillars of Self-Esteem


Nathaniel Branden - 1994
    The book demonstrates compellingly why self-esteem is basic to psychological health, achievement, personal happiness, and positive relationships.  Branden introduces the six pillars—six action-based practices for daily living that provide the foundation for self-esteem—and explores the central importance of self-esteem in five areas: the workplace, parenting, education, psychotherapy, and the culture at large.  The work provides concrete guidelines for teachers, parents, managers, and therapists who are responsible for developing the self-esteem of others.  And it shows why-in today's chaotic and competitive world-self-esteem is fundamental to our personal and professional power.

On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss


Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - 2005
    Includes a new introduction and resources section.Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying changed the way we talk about the end of life. Before her own death in 2004, she and David Kessler completed On Grief and Grieving, which looks at the way we experience the process of grief. Just as On Death and Dying taught us the five stages of death -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- On Grief and Grieving applies these stages to the grieving process and weaves together theory, inspiration, and practical advice, including sections on sadness, hauntings, dreams, isolation, and healing.

Your User's Manual: A Guide for Purpose and an Anxiety Free Life in the 21st Century


Anderson Silver - 2018
    There are answers to all of these questions and Anderson Silver has compiled teachings from Stoicism and other schools of thought in Your User’s Manual. This refreshing collection not only gives the reader much sought after answers, but also provides the tools for finding purpose, and living an anxiety-free life in the modern world. Meant as a light read that the reader can come back to and meditate on periodically, Anderson has done a wonderful job of condensing fundamental teachings, making Your User’s Manual a straightforward read in answering life’s most pressing questions and recognizing what is truly important.

Becoming Better Grownups: Rediscovering What Matters and Remembering How to Fly


Brad Montague - 2020
    First visiting elementary schools and later also nursing homes and retirement communities, he hoped to glean new wisdom as to how he might become a better grownup. Now, in this playful and buoyant book, he shares those insights with rest of us --timeless, often surprising lessons that bypass the head we're always stuck in, and go straight to the heart we sometimes forget.Each of the book's three sections begins with the illustrated story of "The Incredible Floating Girl." Brad weaves this story together with lessons of success, fear, regret, gratitude, love, happiness, and dreams to reveal the true reason we are here: to fly, and to help others fly.Beautifully designed and featuring Montague's own whimsical 4-color illustrations that appeal to the kid in all of us, Becoming Better Grownups shares the purpose and meaning we can all discover merely by listening, and reveals that--in a world that seems increasingly childish--the secret to joy is in fact to become more childlike.

I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt to Embrace the Hidden Value in Daily Life


Madeleine Dore - 2022
    Madeleine Dore has long felt a pressure to be productive. In the pursuit of getting things done, she tried every way to optimize her day, only to keep falling short and feeling behind. She turned to interviewing hundreds of creative thinkers and experts to find the secret to productivity. What she discovered instead was far more enriching: There is more to value in each day than what we did or didn't do. I Didn't Do the Thing Today is a reprieve from our doing obsession. Designed as a companion for the days that go off track, the book's chapters explore the various ways we encounter productivity guilt--including comparison to others, striving for perfection, and our great expectations--to point to how a day doesn't have to be optimized, but simply occupied. When we take away judgment from how moments unfold, we can find our way out of the productivity spiral and step fully into our lives. For anyone who has struggled with worrying about wasted time or felt caught in the busyness trap or stifled by indecision, I Didn't Do the Thing Today shares how to take productivity off its pedestal and find more connection, creativity, and curiosity in its place.

Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study


George E. Vaillant - 2012
    The now-classic "Adaptation to Life" reported on the men's lives up to age 55 and helped us understand adult maturation. Now George Vaillant follows the men into their nineties, documenting for the first time what it is like to flourish far beyond conventional retirement.Reporting on all aspects of male life, including relationships, politics and religion, coping strategies, and alcohol use (its abuse being by far the greatest disruptor of health and happiness for the study's subjects), "Triumphs of Experience" shares a number of surprising findings. For example, the people who do well in old age did not necessarily do so well in midlife, and vice versa. While the study confirms that recovery from a lousy childhood is possible, memories of a happy childhood are a lifelong source of strength. Marriages bring much more contentment after age 70, and physical aging after 80 is determined less by heredity than by habits formed prior to age 50. The credit for growing old with grace and vitality, it seems, goes more to ourselves than to our stellar genetic makeup.

Write Your Own Fairy Tale: The New Rules for Dating, Relationships, and Finding Love on Your Terms


Siggy Flicker - 2015
    You have to work for it. Readers will get a tried-and-true comprehensive guide to the first six months of dating and Siggy's exclusive plan to get over heartbreak ensuring you'll get from agony to over it in just six simple steps. Smart and sassy relationship expert Siggy Flicker is your new fairy godmother. Having matched more than a thousand couples and embraced her own second chance at love, she knows finding a prince is no picnic. Now she's sharing the keys to building a fairy-tale romance, beginning with an honest assessment of what you really want to be happy.To help readers create the healthy, lasting relationships they deserve, Siggy is sharing her honest, empowering advice, including:- Define the relationship you want. - Forget what looks good "on paper." - Take a break from your dating rut with a Dating Detox. - Learn how to make the most of the first five minutes. - Happily ever after means forever.Featuring practical exercises, real-life success stories, and lessons Siggy learned the hard way, Write Your Own Fairy Tale is a wake-up call for everyone looking for love--and a guide for making sure you get the happiness you truly deserve.

Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age


Bruce Feiler - 2020
      Bruce Feiler has long been writing about the stories that give our lives meaning. Recently he began to notice a new pattern: our old stories, with their predictable plot points along linear paths, no longer hold true. The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. Yet many people feel overwhelmed by this change. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected; that we’re living life out of order.   Galvanized by a personal crisis and family emergency, Feiler set out on what became an epic journey to harvest American stories and see what he could learn from them. He crisscrossed the country, collecting hundreds of life stories from a breathtaking range of Americans in all 50 states. He then sifted through and coded these stories, building a massive database of patterns and takeaways that can help all of us live better.   LIFE IS IN THE TRANSITIONS introduces the fresh, pressing vision of the nonlinear life, in which personal disruptions and lifequakes are becoming more plentiful, nontraditional life shapes are becoming the norm, and each of us has the opportunity to write our own story. Drawing on an extraordinary trove of insights, Feiler offers a powerful, new transition toolkit with original strategies for coping with the difficult, painful, or unsettling times of life.   From a master storyteller with a timely message, LIFE IS IN THE TRANSITIONS can move readers of any age to think deeply about times of change in their lives and how to transform them into periods of creativity and growth.

Less is More: 101 Ways to Simplify Your Life


Domonique Bertolucci - 2014
    Less is More shows the reader how to find more time and energy to enjoy the things that really do matter. It invites the reader to make small, simple changes in the way they live, like learning to say no and embracing silence: changes that will simplify their life and leave them feeling relaxed and happy, instead of stressed and overwhelmed.

Breakup Bootcamp: The Science of Rewiring Your Heart


Amy Chan - 2020
    Although she was angry and broken-hearted, Chan soon came to realize that the breakup was the shakeup she needed to redirect her life. Instead of descending into darkness, she used the pain of the breakup as a bridge to self-actualization. She devoted herself to learning various healing modalities from the ancient to the scientific, and dived into the psychology of love. It worked. Fast forward years later, Amy completely transformed her life, her relationships and founded a breakup bootcamp helping countless women heal their hearts.In Breakup Bootcamp, Amy Chan directs her experience as a relationship columnist and as the creator of Renew Breakup Bootcamp into a practical, thoughtful guide to turning broken hearts into an opportunity to break out of complacency and destructive habits. Dubbed "the Chief Heart Hacker," Amy Chan grounds her practical advice and tried and tested methods rooted in cutting-edge psychology and research, helping first her bootcamp attendees and now her readers most effectively heal and reclaim their self-love.Breakup Bootcamp comes at the perfect time, when many are feeling the intensity of being in or out of a relationship, lonely or suffocated, and flirting with old toxic relationships they’ve outgrown. Relatable, life-changing, and backed by sound scientific research, Breakup Bootcamp can help anyone turn their greatest heartbreak into a powerful tool for growth.

A General Theory of Love


Thomas Lewis - 2000
    Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.A General Theory of Love demonstrates that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.

The Storms Can't Hurt the Sky: The Buddhist Path through Divorce


Gabriel Cohen - 2008
    In Storms Can't Hurt the Sky, Gabriel Cohen bravely delves into his personal experience-along with insights from Buddhist masters, parables, humor, social science studies, and interviews with other divorces-to provide a practical and very helpful guide to surviving the pain of any break-up. Focusing on the emotions most common in the dissolution of a relationship-anger, resentment, loss, and grief -- Storms Can't Hurt the Sky shows how thinking about these feelings in surprisingly different ways can lead to a radically better experience. This compulsively readable book offers sound advice and much-needed empathy for anyone dealing with a break-up.

Sociology: A Practical Understanding of Why We Do What We Do: Social Psychology (Applied Psychology, Positive Psychology)


Jonny Bell - 2014
    What exactly makes us tick? For many people, the question may have only popped up in their heads from time to time, though it’s not hard to imagine such a question has also led to many a sleepless night as some naturally curious people are very often compelled to wonder.Whether you belong to the first or the second group of people, wonder no more as this book will provide you the answer to the question “Why do we do what we do?” Through extensive, detailed, and well-researched facts and other information, Sociology: A Practical Understanding of Why We Do What We Do aims to explain the uniqueness of human behavior as well as the tendency of people to act the way they act under different circumstances—either driven by instinct or after much thought—despite the notion of free will which is perhaps the one thing that separates us from all other living creatures.Yes, we human beings are still free to act as we please, but considering the growing influence of our surroundings, it may be surprising to know just how much freedom we get to exercise in any given situation (though that’s not necessarily a bad thing as this book will also explain).

Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying


Sallie Tisdale - 2018
    Informed by her many years working as a nurse, with more than a decade in palliative care, Tisdale provides a frank and compassionate meditation on the inevitable.From the sublime (the faint sound of Mozart as you take your last breath) to the ridiculous (lessons on how to close the sagging jaw of a corpse), Tisdale leads readers through the peaks and troughs of death with a wise and humorous hand. This is more than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible: it is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions, and literature around the world.