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 The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated.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.

Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You


Bill Burnett - 2016
    Now in book form for the first time, their simple method will teach you how to use basic design tools to create a life that will work for you.Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping, you will learn how to build your way forwards, step-by-positive-step, to a life that’s better by a design of your own making.Because a well-designed life means a life well-lived.

You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment


Thich Nhat Hanh - 2004
    “Mindfulness is not an evasion or an escape,” he explains. “It means being here, present, and totally alive. It is true freedom—and without this freedom, there is no happiness.”Based on a retreat that Thich Nhat Hanh led for Westerners, this book offers a range of simple, effective practices for cultivating mindfulness, including awareness of  breathing and walking, deep listening, and skillful speech. You Are Here also offers guidance on healing emotional pain and manifesting real love and compassion in our relationships with others. Simple, warm, direct, and startlingly potent, this book reveals the heart of the Buddhist path and helps us to reconnect with the joy and wonder of being alive, regardless of life’s changing circumstances. Praise for Thich Nhat Hanh “Among Buddhist leaders influential in the West, Thich Nhat Hanh ranks second only to the Dalai Lama.”—New York Times “Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.”—Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level


Gay Hendricks - 2009
    Fans of Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, and The Secret will find useful, effective tips for breaking down the walls to a better life in The Big Leap.

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.

Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals


Michael Hyatt - 2018
    We all want to reach our full potential. But too often we find ourselves overwhelmed by the day-to-day. Our big goals get pushed to the back burner--and then, more often than not, they get forgotten. New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt wants readers to know that it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, he thinks that this is the year readers can finally close the gap between reality and their dreams.In Your Best Year Ever, Hyatt shares a powerful, proven, research-driven system for setting and achieving goals. Readers learn how to design their best year ever in just five hours- three simple ways to triple the likelihood of achieving their goals- how to quit-proof their goals- what to do when they feel stuck- and much moreAnyone who is tired of not seeing progress in their personal, intellectual, business, relationship, or financial goals will treasure the field-tested wisdom found in these pages.

The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed On Your Own Terms


Vishen Lakhiani - 2016
    Learn to think like the greatest creative minds of our era—to question, challenge, and create new rules for your ideas of love, education, spirituality, work, happiness, and meaning. The Code of the Extraordinary Mind is a blueprint for retraining our minds to hack everything—how we work, love, parent, and heal—and learn to succeed on our own terms. No matter where you’re starting from, you can build a life that’s truly extraordinary and make a dent in the universe. In this book, you will learn to bend reality, question the brules, transcend the culturescape, embrace your quest, practice consciousness engineering, live in blissipline, and push humanity forward. You will question your limits and realize that there are none. Your understanding of the world around you and your place in it will change, and you will find yourself operating at a new, extraordinary level in every way—with happiness, purpose, fulfillment, and love.

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha


Tara Brach - 2000
    It doesn’t take much--just hearing of someone else’s accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work--to make us feel that we are not okay. Beginning to understand how our lives have become ensnared in this trance of unworthiness is our first step toward reconnecting with who we really are and what it means to live fully. --from Radical AcceptanceRadical Acceptance“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork--all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s twenty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations. Step by step, she leads us to trust our innate goodness, showing how we can develop the balance of clear-sightedness and compassion that is the essence of Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance does not mean self-indulgence or passivity. Instead it empowers genuine change: healing fear and shame and helping to build loving, authentic relationships. When we stop being at war with ourselves, we are free to live fully every precious moment of our lives.From the Hardcover edition.

Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom


Rick Hanson - 2009
    Then they used their minds to change their brains in ways that changed history.With the new breakthroughs in neuroscience, combined with the insights from thousands of years of contemplative practice, you, too, can shape your own brain for greater happiness, love, and wisdom.Buddha's Brain joins the forces of modern science with ancient teachings to show readers how to have greater emotional balance in turbulent times, as well as healthier relationships, more effective actions, and a deeper religious or spiritual practice.Well-referenced and grounded in science, the book is full of practical tools and skills readers can use in daily life to tap the unused potential of the brain-and rewire it over time for greater peace and well-being.If you can change your brain, you can change your life.

How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life


Caroline Webb - 2016
      Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best. But it has not always been easy to see how to apply these insights in the real world – until now.  In How to Have a Good Day, Webb explains exactly how to apply this science to our daily tasks and routines. She translates three big scientific ideas into step-by-step guidance that shows us how to set better priorities, make our time go further, ace every interaction, be our smartest selves, strengthen our personal impact, be resilient to setbacks, and boost our energy and enjoyment. Through it all, Webb teaches us how to navigate the typical challenges of modern workplaces—from conflict with colleagues to dull meetings and overflowing inboxes—with skill and ease.  Filled with stories of people who have used Webb’s insights to boost their job satisfaction and performance at work, How to Have a Good Day is the book so many people wanted when they finished Nudge, Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow and were looking for practical ways to apply this fascinating science to their own lives and careers.   A remarkable and much-needed book, How to Have a Good Day gives us the tools we need to have a lifetime of good days.From the Hardcover edition.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol


Holly Whitaker - 2019
    Either way, it will save your life.”—Melissa Hartwig Urban, Whole30 co-founder and CEOWe live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but.When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular. What’s more, she could not ignore the ways that alcohol companies were targeting women, just as the tobacco industry had successfully done generations before. Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people—who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives. When Holly found an alternate way out of her own addiction, she felt a calling to create a sober community with resources for anyone questioning their relationship with drinking, so that they might find their way as well. Her resultant feminine-centric recovery program focuses on getting at the root causes that lead people to overindulge and provides the tools necessary to break the cycle of addiction, showing us what is possible when we remove alcohol and destroy our belief system around it.Written in a relatable voice that is honest and witty, Quit Like a Woman is at once a groundbreaking look at drinking culture and a road map to cutting out alcohol in order to live our best lives without the crutch of intoxication. You will never look at drinking the same way again.

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It


Barbara Sher - 1994
    If you suspect there could be more to life than what you're getting...if you always knew you could do anything if you only knew what it was, this extraordinary book is about to prove you right!A life without direction is a life without passion.  The dynamic follow-up to the phenomenal best-seller Wishcraft, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (the New York Times Bestseller) guides you, not to another unsatisfying job, but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart's desire.  And in a work of true emancipation, this life-changing sourcebook reveals how you can recapture "long lost" goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever!You will learn:*       What to do if you never chose to be what you are.*       How to get off the fast track--and on to the right track.*       First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity.*       How to regroup when you've lost your big dream.*       To stop waiting for luck--and start creating it.

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life


Martin E.P. Seligman - 1990
    Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enchances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an “I—give-up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier.. With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound and practical–and valuable for every phase of life.

The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play


Neil A. Fiore - 1988
    Dr. Fiore’s techniques will help any busy person start tasks sooner and accomplish them more quickly, without the anxiety brought on by the negative habits of procrastination and perfectionism.

Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy


Sarah Ban Breathnach - 1995
    Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, Simple Abundance is a book of 366 evocative essays - one for every day of your year - written for women who wish to live by their own lights.In the past a woman's spirituality has been seperated from her lifestyle. Simple Abundance shows you how your daily life can be an expression of your authentic self . . . as you choose the tastiest vegetables from your garden, search for treasures at flea markets, establish a sacred space in your home for meditation, and follow the rhythm of the seasons and the year. Here, for the first time, the mystical alchemy of style and Spirit is celebrated. Every day, your own true path leads you to a happier, more fulfilling and contented way of life - the state of grace known as . . . Simple Abundance