Books & More

These are books and resources that I find extremely valuable and encourage you to utilize. If you choose, you can purchase the books from Amazon.com by clicking their titles or covers.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler

Mainly about resolving conflicts and influencing people, this useful guide covers every conceivable aspect of talking with others. People hear facts and stories and turn them into shared knowledge when they’re not attacked or overpowered–in other words, when they feel safe. No mushy mental health lesson, the program does a stellar job of explaining many types of communication errors and describing the best ways to achieve mutual purpose. The authors have exceptional ideas about moving toward healthy solutions in a variety of business and personal realms. Anna Fields gives a perfect reading–emotionally bright but still allowing the lesson to retain its practical, straight-talking nature.

Delivered from Distraction
Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey

Medication? Maybe. Marry the right person and find the right job? A must if you are an adult suffering from ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). So say psychiatrists Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey, authors of the influential Driven to Distraction, published in 1994. In their new book, Delivered from Distraction, Hallowell and Ratey survey the current medical landscape concerning ADD, combining their own clinical observations with the latest research to paint a much more complex and, in many ways, positive picture of the condition than has generally been presented.

Hallowell and Ratey embrace the idea that success in life comes more from playing to your strengths than overcoming your weaknesses. In the case of a person with ADD (child or adult), these strengths often include unusually high levels of creativity, charisma, intelligence, and energy. The authors insist that, while medication and other treatments can sometimes work wonders in reducing limitations, surrounding yourself with people who promote these positive traits, be they in your personal or professional life, is the single most important element to living well with ADD. As both Hallowell and Ratey are not only experts in the field, but “ADDers” themselves, the tips and stories they share for how to do so are fresh, funny, and far more helpful than tired arguments over drugs verse no drugs or whether there’s even such a thing as ADD at all.–Patrick Jennings (Amazon.com Review)

Breaking Free from the Victim Trap: Reclaiming Your Personal Power
Diane Zimberoff

This new millennium has ushered in the Age of Freedom. A time to break out of old, self-defeating patterns and claim our personal power. A time to face the past, heal the wounds, and move into our full potential. We’ve all known what it’s like to be a victim. Now it is time to break free and thrive. This book is for anyone who has experienced the Victim Trap: (1) people trapped by guilt in compulsive use of alcohol, food, drugs, tobacco, gambling, spending, sex, or codependent relationships. (2) people burdened by stress-related illness, who have “taken on” the problems of those they are trying to help. (3) psychologists, doctors, therapists, nurses, those in the helping professions who may be feeding the Victim Trap by “rescuing” those seeking their services. This book chronicles the rage, the frustration, and most of all the guilt that keeps people in impossible “no win” situations. And it offers a clear, step-by-step approach to leading people out of their self-defeating patterns into new liberating freedom. Diane Zimberoff’s Breaking Free from the Victim Trap guides victims attempting to communicate their despair to their therapists, and guides professionals in treating the victim client.

Awakening the Entrepreneur Within
Michael E. Gerber

“A business without a dream is like a life without a purpose.”
—Michael Gerber

These words have been defining the life of Michael Gerber, bestselling author and international small business guru. He created E-Myth Worldwide in 1977 to transform the way that small business owners grow their companies. Now he’s created In The Dreaming Room as a place where entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs come to discover how to make their dreams a reality.

In Awakening the Entrepreneur Within you are invited into the Dreaming Room, where your own entrepreneurial dreams will come alive and become reality. Michael will help you shape your dream into a viable, economically successful company! As he writes: “It is time to dream. It is time to care about something bigger than you. It is time to imagine something sorely needed in the world—the world you live in—that somebody would pay to have. It is time to look around you and ask yourself, ‘What’s missing in this picture?’”

If you see something missing in your world, it’s time to start dreaming. Let Michael Gerber welcome you to the Dreaming Room.

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Eckhart Tolle

According to Tolle, who assumes the role of narrator as well, humans are on the verge of creating a new world by a personal transformation that shifts our attention away from our ever-expanding egos. This idea is well realized through Tolle’s remarkably well-paced narration. Naturally, the author understands his material so thoroughly that he is able to convey it in an enjoyable manner, but Tolle’s gentle tone and dialect begs his audience’s attention simply through its straightforward approach. Something about this reading just seems profoundly important, whether one agrees with the material or not, and listeners’ attention is sure to be captured within seconds of listening to Tolle’s take on the universe in which we live.

The Seat of the Soul
Gary Zukav

Gary Zukav’s American Book Award-winning The Dancing Wu Li Masters masterfully introduces the layman to quantum and particle physics, as well as Einstein’s relativity theories. With a similar dose of amiable, easy-to-understand prose, Zukav guides readers into the spiritual realm in his bestselling The Seat of the Soul.

Zukav questions the Western model of the soul, alleging that the human species is in the midst of a great transformation, evolving from a species that pursues power based upon the perceptions of the five senses–”external power”–to one that pursues power based upon perceptions of the soul–”authentic power.” He believes that humans are immortal souls first, physical beings second, and that once we become conscious of this transformation–once we align our personalities with our soul–we will stimulate our spiritual growth and become better people in the process. This insightful, lucid synthesis of modern psychology and new-age principles has been described as the “physics of the soul.” Who better to explain such heady concepts than Gary Zukav.