Suggested Reading

Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Author(s): Malcolm Gladwell
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. The author encourages readers to focus on the meaning of “thin slices” of behavior. The key is to rely on our “adaptive unconscious” which provides instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

Learned Optimism
Author(s): Martin E.P. Seligman
Martin Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enhances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, this book 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 self-talk.

Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
Author(s): Wayne W. Dyer
In this book, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer has reviewed hundreds of translations of the Tao Te Ching and has written 81 distinct essays on how to apply the ancient wisdom of Lao-tzu to today’s modern world. Each chapter is designed for actually living the Tao or the Great Way today. Some of the chapter titles are Living with Flexibility, Living Without Enemies, and Living by Letting Go. Each of the 81 brief chapters focuses on living the Tao and concludes with a section called Doing the Tao Now.

Quantum Success: The Astounding Science of Wealth and Happiness
Author(s): Sandra Anne Taylor
Sandra Taylor helps the reader understand the science of attraction and manifestation. The formula in this book is based on the principles of quantum physics, and the author suggests that you can use these powerful forces and dynamic strategies to put the keys to wealth and abundance at your fingertips.

The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook
Author(s): Martha Davis, Matthew McKay, and Elizabeth Robbins Eshelman
Since its first publication in 1980, this book has gained acclaim as a resource for effective and up-to-date techniques for reducing stress and anxiety, relaxing the body, and calming the mind. Chapters include topics such as breathing, relaxation, meditation, thought stopping, body awareness, job stress management, goal setting, time management, and assertiveness training.

How to Help Children With Common Problems
Author(s): Charles Schaefer
This is a very practical manual that provides down-to-earth advice for effectively handling the everyday problems of children from early childhood through adolescence.

Raising a Thinking Child: Help Your Young Child to Resolve Everyday Conflicts and Get Along With Others
Author(s): Myrna Schur and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo
This book provides a step-by-step format parents can follow in teaching young children to solve problems and resolve daily conflicts. The lessons are uniquely taught by way of imaginative dialogues between Theresa Foy DiGeronimo and various children. Solutions are reinforced through game-playing activities and communication techniques.

The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
Author(s): Madeline Levine
The author proposes that one by-product of material wealth is depressed, anxious, angry and bored teenagers. If objects satisfy people, then they never get around to working on deeper issues. According to Levine, the teen years are supposed to be a time for character building and avoiding this hard work with the distraction of consumer toys can produce “vacant,” “evacuated,” or “disconnected” teens.

Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships
Author(s): David Schnarch
The author proposes that marriage is not the end of a couple’s sex life. Schnarch says that a man is more likely to let a relationship suffer in order to hold on to his sense of self, while a woman is more apt to let her identity suffer to help strengthen it. The author provides tips on how to alter this pattern, an essential step he calls “differentiation.” He also explains why compromise isn’t always the best route to take when conflicts arise. The couples profiled here deal with some common problems including: uneven sexual desire and initiation, concerns about oral sex, self-image problems, and trust.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Author(s): John M. Gottman and Nan Silver
This book teaches partners new and startling strategies for making their marriage work. Gottman has analyzed the habits of married couples and established a method of correcting the behavior that puts thousands of marriages on the rocks. He helps couples focus on each other, on paying attention to the small day-to-day moments that, strung together, make up the heart and soul of any relationship.

Getting the Love You Want.
Author(s): Harville Hendrix
The author writes about how couples can express frustrated childhood needs constructively, instead of acting them out and damaging their relationship. Providing exercises that get everyone’s cards on the table, his approach to marital communication is widely used across the country. Hendrix covers many of the essentials of long-term relationships and what it takes to get past the most common forms of relationship dysfunction.

The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying
Author(s) Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Kübler-Ross has brought comfort and understanding to millions coping with their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. Now, at age seventy-one facing her own death, Kubler-Ross tells the story of own life. Having taught the world how to die well, she now offers a lesson on how to live well.

Talking about Death: A Dialogue Between Parent and Child
Author(s) Earl A. Grollman
This book helps explain the loss of a loved one to a child. It is a compassionate guide for adults and children to read together, featuring a read-along story, answers to questions children ask about death, and a comprehensive list of resources and organizations that can help.

Family Rules: Raising Responsible Children
Author(s): Kenneth Kaye
This guide to parenting explains how you can custom design, for your own family, a set of straightforward rules that make discipline easy—principles which can be easily modified as family life improves. The author believes that in order to grow into happy, self-respecting adults, children need the security of clear, consistently enforced rules.

The Family Crucible
Author(s): Augustus Y. Napier and Carl Whitaker
This book presents scenarios of one family’s therapy experience and explains what underlies each encounter. You will discover the general patterns that are common to all families stress, polarization and escalation, scapegoating, triangulation, blaming, and the diffusion of identity.

The E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Business Don’t Work and What to Do About It
Author(s): Michael E. Gerber
The author dispels myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks the reader through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. Gerber also draws the distinction between working on your business and working in your business.

First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
Author(s): Marcus Coffman and Curt Buckingham
This book is the culmination of over 80,000 interviews conducted by The Gallup Organization. The authors stress that good managers spend more time with their best performers rather than with their less productive counterparts, that they fit people into the right roles and hire for talent rather than experience, that they focus on strength rather than weakness, and that they clearly define the right results as opposed to the right steps.

On Becoming a Leader
Author(s): Warren Bennis
Bennis is a business professor at the University of Southern California. He provides solid, practical guidance in how to define leadership–which, in his view, requires self-knowledge and clear personal goals. Leaders in widely diverse areas share the ability to unite people in a common purpose. Among other qualities, leaders have faith in an “inner voice” and success in seizing control of their lives.

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Author(s): Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard
Depending on your perspective, change can be a blessing or a curse. The main point of this book is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of change and the role it plays in their lives. Change occurs whether a person is ready or not, but the author affirms that it can be positive. His principles are to anticipate change, let go of the old, and do what you would do if you were not afraid.