Faced with a relentless flood of information and distractions, our brains try to process everything at once increasing our stress, decreasing our effectiveness and negatively impacting our performance. Ironically, we have become too overworked, unfocused, and busy to stop and ask ourselves the most important question: What can we do to break the cycle of being constantly under pressure, always-on, overloaded with information and in environments filled with distractions? Do we need to accept this as the new workplace reality and continue to survive rather than thrive in modern day work environments? Thankfully, the answer is no. In their new book, ONE SECOND AHEAD: Enhance Your Performance at Work with Mindfulness (Palgrave Macmillan; November 2015), Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, and Gillian Coutts demonstrate that it is possible to train the brain to respond differently to today's constant pressures and distraction. All it takes is one second.They propose that we need to learn to work differently so we are more focused, calm and have less clutter in our mind so we can better manage our time and attention. What if we could hit the 'pause' button on our day, step back, and meet challenges with a sense of clarity and purpose? And what if there was a way not just of 'getting things done,' but ensuring that what does get done are the right things to do? Based on a program in corporate mindfulness designed by Hougaard and the partners of The Potential Project, One Second Ahead provides practical tools and techniques as well as real-world examples and lessons from organizations that have implemented mindfulness on a large scale. Thoroughly tested in a diverse range of industries, this program has resulted in measurable increases in productivity, effectiveness, and job satisfaction. With the new mindset proposed in One Second Ahead, readers will be able to put an end to ineffective multitasking, unproductive meetings, poor communication, and other unhealthy workplace behaviors by applying mindfulness to every day work life.All too often, we think that being mindful requires engaging in a special activity like meditation or yoga. Sure, these activities are beneficial and important to train the mind, but there are many simple things we can do to be mindful all day long. One Second Ahead is a handbook for more mindful work that offers: • Practical, easy to apply, tools and techniques to enhance performance and effectiveness in day to day work activities such as meetings, emails, communication, planning, creativity and more • Real-world stories of how mindfulness changed the workdays of leaders and front line employees• Tips for cultivating mental strategies and routines that can reduce clutter, increase focus, and rewire your brain to enhance presence, patience, kindness and other valuable mind states• Simple yet detailed step-by-step instructions for a more systematic approach to mindfulness training to enhance focus and awareness• Guidelines for a 10-minute-per-day mindfulness program that can reshape your life both at work and at home; • A reproducible planning worksheet and further resources in the Appendix.One Second Ahead can transform daily work life by helping individuals and teams realize more of their potential through greater focus and awareness. The tools and techniques in this book can transform individual and organizational performance one mind at a time.

    This updated assessment includes reports and resources that go far beyond the standardized reports of the older assessment by providing you with personalized insight statements unique to your specific combination of strengths.Many people have little sense of their talents and strengths, much less the ability to build their lives around them. Instead, they are raised and taught to become experts in their weaknesses — and spend their lives trying to fix them — while their strengths lie dormant. Led by Don Clifton, the Father of Strengths-Based Psychology, Gallup created a revolutionary program to help people identify their talents; develop them into strengths; and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. Twenty years ago, Gallup released Now, Discover Your Strengths to bring this program to the world. At the heart of this book is CliftonStrengths, the assessment that is the product of decades of research and hundreds of thousands of interviews to identify the most prevalent human strengths. CliftonStrengths reveals 34 dominant talent themes that you can translate into personal and career success. To develop this assessment, Gallup conducted psychological profiles with more than 2 million individuals to help people around the world focus and perfect these themes. Since Now, Discover Your Strengths was first released two decades ago, more than 20 million people worldwide have taken the CliftonStrengths assessment. The 20th anniversary edition includes a unique access code to take CliftonStrengths — previously known as StrengthsFinder 2.0 — which is a significantly more robust program than the assessment that appeared in the original edition of the book. This web-based assessment analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your top five themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes you lead with — such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic and Strategic — the book will show you how to use your top themes for your own development, for your success as a manager and for the success of your organization. With accessible and profound insights into how to turn talents into strengths, and with immediate online feedback from the CliftonStrengths assessment at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and powerful business books ever written.

    From seemingly insignificant daily decisions to major life choices, you negotiate every time you aim to persuade, argue over a decision, or resolve a conflict. But as negotiations and leadership expert Erica Ariel Fox reveals, the most important negotiations-the ones that determine the impact of our actions and the quality of our lives-are those we have with ourselves.Most of us recognize the difference between our knowledge-what we know we should do and say-and our know-how-what we actually do and say in real life when it counts. Fox calls this the "Performance Gap," and she shows you how to close it, turning breakdowns into breakthroughs, whether struggling with a difficult client, arguing with a combative teenager, or organizing for community action.Winning from Within combines insights from Western psychology and Eastern philosophy with practical applications from real business situations and everyday life. Fox shows that the ability to achieve mastery over how we interact with each other comes from within, from the "center" where desires, thoughts, feelings, and impulses to take action live side-by-side. Winning from Within offers a profound and highly practical seven-step method for making changes that last-at work and at home. As Erica Ariel Fox demonstrates, we can actually get what we want-and feel good about the result.

    Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about high performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising short cut. They're harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition.New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler and high performance expert Jamie Wheal spent four years investigating the leading edges of this revolution—from the home of SEAL Team Six to the Googleplex, the Burning Man festival, Richard Branson’s Necker Island, Red Bull’s training center, Nike’s innovation team, and the United Nations’ Headquarters. And what they learned was stunning: In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide.Today, this revolution is spreading to the mainstream, fueling a trillion dollar underground economy and forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives. Driven by four accelerating forces—psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology—we are gaining access to and insights about some of the most contested and misunderstood terrain in history. Stealing Fire is a provocative examination of what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.

    But with opportunity comes responsibility. Companies today aren't managing their knowledge workers careers. Instead, you must be your own chief executive officer. That means it's up to you to carve out your place in the world and know when to change course. And it's up to you to keep yourself engaged and productive during a career that may span some 50 years. In Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker explains how to do it. The keys: Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself by identifying your most valuable strengths and most dangerous weaknesses; Articulate how you learn and work with others and what your most deeply held values are; and Describe the type of work environment where you can make the greatest contribution. Only when you operate with a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true and lasting excellence. Managing Oneself identifies the probing questions you need to ask to gain the insights essential for taking charge of your career. Peter Drucker was a writer, teacher, and consultant. His 34 books have been published in more than 70 languages. He founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and counseled 13 governments, public services institutions, and major corporations.

    And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs.Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

    This book brings them all together for the first time. It systematically presents what the various Stoic philosophers said on every important topic, accompanied by an eloquent commentary that is clear and concise. The result is a set of philosophy lessons for everyone - the most valuable wisdom of ages past made available for our times, and for all time.

    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.

    About three quarters of the jobs created in the United States since the great recession pay only a bit more than minimum wage. Still, the United States has more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever, and we continue to mint them.In this eye-opening book, renowned economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen explains that phenomenon: High earners are taking ever more advantage of machine intelligence in data analysis and achieving ever-better results. Meanwhile, low earners who haven’t committed to learning, to making the most of new technologies, have poor prospects. Nearly every business sector relies less and less on manual labor, and this fact is forever changing the world of work and wages. A steady, secure life somewhere in the middle—average—is over.With The Great Stagnation, Cowen explained why median wages stagnated over the last four decades; in Average Is Over he reveals the essential nature of the new economy, identifies the best path forward for workers and entrepreneurs, and provides readers with actionable advice to make the most of the new economic landscape. It is a challenging and sober must-read but ultimately exciting, good news. In debates about our nation’s economic future, it will be impossible to ignore.

     From the author:   “For the last two years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview. This unusual depth has helped make The Tim Ferriss Show the first business/interview podcast to pass 100 million downloads.   “This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met.   “What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. This is reflected in the questions. For example: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?   “I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something and replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested.   “Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.   “I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”

    If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.             In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.             Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:      • The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.    • The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.    • Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network  A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.From the Hardcover edition.

    But how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? The Person You Mean to Be is the smart, "semi-bold" person’s guide to fighting for what you believe in.Dolly reveals the surprising causes of inequality, grounded in the "psychology of good people". Using her research findings in unconscious bias as well as work across psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and other disciplines, she offers practical tools to respectfully and effectively talk politics with family, to be a better colleague to people who don’t look like you, and to avoid being a well-intentioned barrier to equality. Being the person we mean to be starts with a look at ourselves.She argues that the only way to be on the right side of history is to be a good-ish— rather than good—person. Good-ish people are always growing. Second, she helps you find your "ordinary privilege"—the part of your everyday identity you take for granted, such as race for a white person, sexual orientation for a straight person, gender for a man, or education for a college graduate. This part of your identity may bring blind spots, but it is your best tool for influencing change. Third, Dolly introduces the psychological reasons that make it hard for us to see the bias in and around us. She leads you from willful ignorance to willful awareness. Finally, she guides you on how, when, and whom, to engage (and not engage) in your workplaces, homes, and communities. Her science-based approach is a method any of us can put to use in all parts of our life.Whether you are a long-time activist or new to the fight, you can start from where you are. Through the compelling stories Dolly shares and the surprising science she reports, Dolly guides each of us closer to being the person we mean to be.

    Given the new normal, how do you plan for a future filled with prosperity, health, and happiness? As a companion to What Color Is Your Parachute?, the world’s best-selling career book, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement offers both a holistic, big-picture look at these years as well as practical tools and exercises to help you build a life full of security, vitality, and community.This second edition contains updates throughout, including a section on Social Security, an in-depth exercise on values and how they inform your retirement map, and the one-of-a-kind resource for organizing the sea of information on finances and mental and physical health: the Retirement Well-Being Profile. More than a guide on where to live, how to stay active, or which investments to choose, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement helps you develop a detailed picture of your ideal retirement, so that—whether you’re planning retirement or are there already—you can take a comprehensive approach to make the most of these vital years.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    It's a way of life for many who live in a culture that expects them to be the ones who "keep everyone happy." But what happens when keeping everyone else happy drains your own happiness?This book by bestselling author Dr. Kevin Leman shows how women who find themselves manipulated by impassivity, guilt, or abusive behavior can learn to assert themselves while maintaining their "pleasing" personalities.

    The 77 tips contained in this book will help you bust through your motivational slump, and get to action! Imagine being constantly fuelled, and wanting to do all the things you know you “should”. Procrastination is a thing of the past, and anxiety issues no longer bother you! Short, Concisely-Explain Tips This book consists of the 77 tips that are most useful for getting motivated. The book is fluff-free: you won’t have to wade through pages of psychological jargon and case studies to get to the “good bits.”