Personal growth

Find the time, clarity, and mental space to achieve your goals The Free-Time Formula helps you slow down time and get the important things done. We're all overworked, stressed, and always being asked to do more, and do it better; the days aren't getting any longer, so something has to give—don't let it be your sanity. This book provides a real-world framework for more effective time management that helps you prioritize, focus, clarify, and go. You'll begin with a time audit to assess your current stress, strategies, and output—and the results may shock you. From there, you'll work step-by-step toward a new daily routine that will help you become the focused, efficient achiever you've been trying to be for so long. It's not about cramming more into your precious 24 hours, it's about figuring out what really matters to you, and getting the most important things done first. Every day. Never miss another big deadline, never flake on an important meeting, never be late to an appointment again. It is possible with great planning, and this book is your personal guide. Focused on action, not filler, this book is an excellent resource for those who want to achieve more, but do less. With a few simple changes, you'll find the time you've been missing and put it to more productive use. Define and prioritize your personal and professional goals and responsibilities Cut the distractions and clarify your daily objectives Adapt your workplace tools and environment to facilitate actual work Periodically self-assess, course–correct when needed, and plan for the future Rather than rush through another day leaving things un-done and roses un-sniffed, take a beat and a breath, and take back your day with The Free-Time Formula.

Every person is an immortal spiritual being expressing their life through a material body, mind and senses. We are in this world to learn effectively and to eventually awaken to complete awareness and knowledge of our true spiritual nature and ultimate Reality. Spiritual life begins when you accept the necessity to aspire to know and realise directly the highest Truth. Your sincere and earnest desire to want to know Truth, will keep you open to the inflow of the nature of Truth in your own Self. On your spiritual path to inner freedom and Self- and God-realisation, this book will be a useful guide and source of inspiration towards understanding your mind and knowing your true Divine nature.

Jill Stark was living the dream. She had a coveted job as a senior journalist, she was dating a sports star, and her first book had just become a bestseller. After years of chasing the fairytale ending, she’d finally found it. And then it all fell apart. Getting her happy-ever-after plunged Jill into the darkest period of her life, forcing her to ask if she’d been sold a lie. What if all the things that she’d been told would make her happy were red herrings? Could it be that the relentless pursuit of happiness was making her miserable?

A sister is a friend for life, and a friend can be a sister. Sisterhood is one of the most liked topics for the 3.5 million Happiness Is . . . fans on social media and this cute-ascan- be book captures 200 beautiful moments of sisterhood among friends and friendship between sisters. From sharing clothes and hosting parties to making pinky promises and staying close when you're far apart, this book says "I love you" in 200 different ways. Featuring the iconic illustration and charming captions of the beloved Happiness Is . . . brand, it's the perfect way to honor sisters by birth and sisters of the heart.

Written by meditation expert, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher Stephan Bodian, this book takes you beyond familiar mindfulness practices by offering guided meditations and direct pointers that invite you to realize your natural state of inherent wakefulness and peace. No regular practice is required, just the willingness to open yourself to a transformative new way of experiencing life. Mindfulness has permeated our modern lives, and with good reason—it’s been proven to boost mood, reduce stress, improve health, and maximize performance. But in our achievement-oriented culture, the practice of mindfulness can feel laborious and mechanical, like one more task on your endless to-do list. What if you could let go of effort and struggle and relax back into the happiness and ease that is your birthright—and is always readily available to you? Beyond Mindfulness offers teachings and practices based on the direct approach to spiritual awakening that take you beyond the mechanics of being mindful and open you to the non-dual dimension of being, where the separation between self and other reveals itself to be a painful but seductive illusion. Once you realize this new way of seeing, you’ll learn how to move beyond mindfulness into awakened awareness and discover that the love, compassion, wholeness, health, and happiness you’ve been seeking were there all along.

Gives advice on how to set goals, control one's finances, change one's habits, find wisdom, and improve one's lifestyle.

When a person receives a diagnosis of diabetes, he or she starts a process of adjusting and making sense of the new normal living with a chronic disease. A large part of that adjustment is figuring out how to balance diabetes with all the intricacies of a life outside of diabetes care. In Balancing Diabetes, diabetes online community blogger Kerri Sparling compiles strategies used by people with diabetes and their caregivers to bring that elusive balance into their lives. Whether adult or child, type 1 or type 2, spouse or caregiver, male or female, people in the diabetes world will find themselves in this book and be inspired by the commonality of that continuing search for balance.

Korine reframes the question of succession in family and founder-lead businesses as an issue of entrepreneurial choice, concentrating on the challenge of succession for change as opposed to the traditional focus on succession for continuity. It is inevitable that when the leaders of family and founder-lead businesses look to pass on the mantle they naturally want to preserve and maintain the firm they have worked so hard for so long to build up. The shaping influence of family or founder, and the instinctive emotional desire for legacy easily sways succession towards continuity rather than the possibly radical development the business may need to meet new challenges.

An innovative, comprehensive guide—the first of its kind—to help parents understand and accept learning disabilities in their children, offering tips and strategies for successfully advocating on their behalf and helping them become their own best advocates. In Thinking Differently, David Flink, the leader of Eye to Eye—a national mentoring program for students with learning and attention issues—enlarges our understanding of the learning process and offers powerful, innovative strategies for parenting, teaching, and supporting the 20 percent of students with learning disabilities. An outstanding fighter who has helped thousands of children adapt to their specific learning issues, Flink understands the needs and experiences of these children first hand. He, too, has dyslexia and ADHD.

An ode to family life in all its glorious mess and chaos For the young James Jeffrey, the day his parents split was like the splitting of the atom. Life took on a seismic instability filled with madness and strain and vendetta and daftness and acts of love, both beautiful and misguided. Yet, what could have been a calamitous upbringing turned instead into an education. For better or worse, his family handed out lessons that would guide him through life, into marriage, and eventually parenthood. My Family and Other Animus is an ode to his family.

Investing your life in your family brings you joy, and doing it on a single income doesn't need to stress you out! In You Can Stay Home with Your Kids! Erin Odom of The Humbled Homemaker blog shares her best money-saving tips so you can live frugally and thrive as a stay-at-home or work-from-home mom. From the moment you discovered you were going to be a mom, you envisioned spending each day with your kids, guiding, teaching, and loving them. But diapers, wipes, shoes, and braces are expensive! Though it may feel impossible to manage on one income, Erin Odom is here to show you that, through God's grace, staying at home with your kids isn't just doable; it's doable while living the good life. Your kids are young only once—you don't have to miss out just because money is tight.

The Friendship Challenge can help you get the conversation started about bridging the racial divide in your community. The Friendship Challenge is a six-week guide, helping individuals and groups promote racial reconciliation in their communities―one person at a time, one friendship at a time. The first week prepares individuals and groups to reach out to a person on the other side of the racial divide, whether it is a person at work or in a nearby church. The next five weeks take that small group through a study that fosters true reconciliation―the kind of reconciliation Jesus showed in his own life and death. Take the Friendship Challenge and spend the next six weeks cultivating true reconciliation in your community.

In popular opinion, gratitude means saying 'thank you'. While politeness and appreciation are certainly important, gratitude is a larger issue. Appropriately defined, it encompasses the strengthening of human relationships and qualifies as a moral virtue. This important and timely volume provides the conceptual framework for studying the development of gratitude, with a comprehensive and international set of authors approaching the topic from philosophical, psychological, and educational perspectives. The first section provides the theoretical underpinnings for the study of gratitude as a virtue. In the next section, the authors examine the ways in which gratitude develops, including key cross-cultural variations and some possible effects of its development. The final section then considers the links between parent and child gratitude and the ways in which parents and teachers can help to encourage gratitude, both in their everyday practices and by using literary texts.

The perfect gift for dads and pun-lovers alike! "Dad, can you put my shoes on?" "No, I don't think they'll fit me." Ah, the dad joke―humor that reminds us of all the lovable, embarrassing dads out there. Be prepared for the obvious, silly, and awkward in this massive collection of the best groan-worthy dad jokes around, including clever quips, overly literal dialogue, and punny one-liners. 

In 1961, the U.S. government established the first formalized provisions for intercountry adoption just as it was expanding America's involvement with Vietnam. Adoption became an increasingly important portal of entry into American society for Vietnamese and Amerasian children, raising questions about the United States' obligations to refugees and the nature of the family during an era of heightened anxiety about U.S. global interventions. Whether adopting or favoring the migration of multiracial individuals, Americans believed their norms and material comforts would salve the wounds of a divisive war. However, Vietnamese migrants challenged these efforts of reconciliation. 

Parenting: The Long Journey stands out in its approach to parenting in that it reinforces the view that parenting is primarily a relationship requiring a particular attitude and a series of skills readily available to parents. In this way it is both instructive and encouraging for parents in their respective day-to-day of parenting their children in a variety of family constellations and real life circumstances. Although good advice for parents may be found in a variety of resources, Parenting: The Long Journey couples solid advice with encouraging words that can lead to an attitude and relationship approach that will last for the many years after the active parenting of children comes to a close and children enter into adulthood. This makes the material widely applicable to parents of every social class, family structure and education level. The book offers guidance on approach in general which applies to a wide variety of parenting issues. The book includes plenty of real life examples and stories. The advice is non-judgmental and its philosophical approaches like "parents are experts on themselves" and "aim for better not perfect" make the book very inviting to those faced with the challenges of parenting in today's world.

Parenting any preschooler can be challenging, but when hyperactivity and impulsivity are extreme, parenting requires extraordinary effort and skill. Parents need tools for helping their children behave in ways that are adaptive and socially appropriate and that will prevent their children from developing additional difficulties. Children who are hyperactive are at risk for developing emotional or behavioral disorders, and research suggests that helping parents to provide firm and consistent limits in a nurturing environment can significantly reduce hyperactivity and associated difficulties.

Parenting: An Ecological Perspective was originally created in 1993 to answer questions such as: Why do parents differ markedly in the ways in which they care for their children? What factors contribute to individual differences in parenting behavior? The framework used for addressing these questions is the ecological perspective developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner, who recognized that children's development is influenced by the interactions that they have over time with the people, objects, and symbols in their immediate environment.

A history of the shifting and conflicting ideas about when, where, and how we should touch our children Discussing issues of parent-child contact ranging from breastfeeding to sexual abuse, Jean O'Malley Halley traces the evolution of mainstream ideas about touching between adults and children over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. Debates over when a child should be weaned and whether to allow a child to sleep in the parent's bed reveal deep differences in conceptions of appropriate adult-child contact. Boundaries of Touch shows how arguments about adult-child touch have been politicized, simplified, and bifurcated into "naturalist" and "behaviorist" viewpoints, thereby sharpening certain binary constructions such as mind/body and male/female. Halley discusses the gendering of ideas about touch that were advanced by influential social scientists and parenting experts including Benjamin Spock, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Luther Emmett Holt. She also explores how touch ideology fared within and against the post-World War II feminist movements, especially with respect to issues of breastfeeding and sleeping with a child versus using a crib. In addition to contemporary periodicals and self-help books on child rearing, Halley uses information gathered from interviews she conducted with mothers ranging in age from twenty-eight to seventy-three. Throughout, she reveals how the parent-child relationship, far from being a private or benign subject, continues as a highly contested, politicized affair of keen public interest.

A primer on the world's best parenting strategies—with eye-opening research on the surprising disadvantages lurking in the typical American childhood.    Research reveals American kids today lag well behind the rest of the world in terms of academic achievement, happiness, and wellness. Meanwhile the battle over whether parents are to blame for fostering a generation of helpless kids rages on. Christine Gross-Loh (who raised her young children in Japan for five years) exposes the hidden, culturally-determined norms we have about “good parenting,” and asks, are there parenting strategies that other countries are getting right that we are not? This book takes us from Finland, and Sweden to Germany, France, Japan, China, Italy, and more, and examines how parents successfully foster resilience, creativity, independence and academic excellence in their children. Revealing the surprising ways in which culture shapes our parenting, Gross-Loh also offers objective, research-based insight into what strategies are best for children and why.A primer on the world's best parenting strategies—with eye-opening research on the surprising disadvantages lurking in the typical American childhood.    Research reveals American kids today lag well behind the rest of the world in terms of academic achievement, happiness, and wellness. Meanwhile the battle over whether parents are to blame for fostering a generation of helpless kids rages on. Christine Gross-Loh (who raised her young children in Japan for five years) exposes the hidden, culturally-determined norms we have about “good parenting,” and asks, are there parenting strategies that other countries are getting right that we are not? This book takes us from Finland, and Sweden to Germany, France, Japan, China, Italy, and more, and examines how parents successfully foster resilience, creativity, independence and academic excellence in their children. Revealing the surprising ways in which culture shapes our parenting, Gross-Loh also offers objective, research-based insight into what strategies are best for children and why.