Self-Development Audiobooks

Facing the loss of a loved one in a death-avoidant culture can be excruciating. Grievers may be expected to put on a brave face, to “move on” quickly, and to seek medication if they are still grief-stricken after an “acceptable” amount of time. Psycho­therapist Judy Heath draws on extensive experience as a grief specialist in private practice to help those struggling with the anguish of loss. Addressing the myths and misinformation about mourning that still abound today, Heath gently coaches readers to understand that coping with loss is a natural process that our society tends to avoid and hurry people through, often leading to unresolved, lasting grief. No Time for Tears offers practical advice for both short- and long-term recovery, including how to manage rarely discussed physical and emotional changes: feelings of “going crazy” and inability to focus; feeling out of sync with the world, exhausted and chilled, and crushingly lonely. This updated second edition includes new information about medication and discusses various types of loss including that of a parent, child, spouse, friend, or pet. Helpful not only to grievers but also to those who care about, counsel, or employ them, No Time for Tears is an essential resource for grief management and recovery.

First featured on a British poster produced during World War II, "Keep calm and carry on" has become the mantra of millions — but exactly how to keep calm remains a difficult question for most of us. The next time you are stressed by pressures of work, overwhelmed by life's challenges, or panicked by problems that seem unsolvable, reach for this book. In LITTLE WAYS TO KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON, you'll find twenty short yet powerful lessons and anxiety-reducing techniques that will help you move past stressful moments with grace. Each lesson is so simple to learn and practice, you'll find that this pocket guide is all you really need whenever you need a little help keeping calm.

Neuroscientists estimate that over 90 percent of our operating systems—beliefs, behaviors, patterns—are unconscious. Since the surface story determines less than 10 percent of our decisions, how can we illuminate the shadow story responsible for over 90 percent of what we do each day? Once we systematically understand our relationship with money, can we overcome the mind and brain’s resistance to change? Especially when so many of the current popular strategies for change are contrary to the way the mind and brain work? Each money story line contains unspoken assumptions, emotional agendas, and unconscious meanings. Money becomes a portal to the immaterial and the intangible, a Rorschach onto which we project our needs and hopes. Your New Money Story: The Beliefs, Behaviors, and Brain Science to Rewire for Wealth combines twenty-five years of psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice and over a dozen years of professional and executive mentor coaching with groundbreaking research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to show readers how to recognize money behaviors ghostwritten by hidden assumptions, overcome the brain’s patterned responses that lead to bad decisions, harness the power of regulating states of mind, develop the art and neuroscience of money strategies, and identify and remedy emotionally based money mistakes and financial fallacies. The ROADMAP System deconstructs the process of understanding a money story to systematically construct a new one to write new mind software and rewire the brain for wealth. YOUR NEW MONEY STORY The Beliefs, Behaviors, and Brain Science to Rewire for Wealth David Krueger, Read by Edward Bauer • Unabridged • AUGUST 2019 Vibrance Press • Digital Download Narrator Edward Bauer sounds like a friendly college instructor who wants to spare you the anguish you've had trying to get your financial life in order. He has a wonderful phrasing palette, smooth and natural sounding, and what stands out is how he finesses the author's desire to help: He's assertive enough with the direct advice and many lists offered by the psychiatrist/business-coach, but he keeps enough distance from his listeners to convey respect for their autonomy. They can take this advice or leave it. This vocal attitude is important with a lesson like this, which is psychologically invasive with its pointed assumption that all financial mismanagement begins with limiting psychological beliefs. This is effective audio advice on how to overcome those beliefs with brighter expectations, concrete strategies, and discipline. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Transform your habits and find balance for success Fans of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Better Than Before and The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin will love Habits for Success A practical and motivational book: Habits for Success – Inspired Ideas to Help You Soar is the perfect blueprint to help manifest a life of progress, purpose and fulfillment. Author G. Brian Benson offers an informative, inspiring and unique look at growth, self-awareness and success. A self-help book for an authentic life: Habits for Success was written creatively, consciously and with heart. Using his own growth process, triumphs and hero’s journey, the author weaves authenticity and vulnerability into his habits, ideas and stories to entertain and inspire the reader. They are beacons of light, hope and possibility, which guide the reader to their own personal version of success and happiness while helping give them permission to take their own journey and to build a foundation of strength for the long run. Increase your self-awareness, manifest your dreams: Habits for Success is written in laymen’s terms but with an incredible amount of depth, which allows the reader to reach new levels of understanding and growth. It is a wonderful mix of heart, informative ideas and entertaining journey. It is a self-help book that doesn’t feel like one. The insights shared and the tools provided are tailored for life-long success. Readers will learn 46 unique, informative and life changing habits to manifest successful change. And, how to: Have healthier and happier relationships with loved ones and friends Cultivate more self-awareness, which will guide the reader to live a more proactive rather than reactive life Find personal success in life and business Work through fear and step out of a comfort zone Cultivate, grow and own a genuine sense of self-worthiness and love for oneself Live a life of authenticity and true-fulfillment Build a foundation for life long success Strengthen intuitive skills Find and cultivate daily inspiration Maintain life balance for increased creativity and productivity Identify triggers and warning signals when you are out of balance and what to do to counter them A Book Excellence Award winner.

A clear and utterly practical ninety-day program for discovering a new direction for your life—now completely revised and updated by the author! In Now What? pioneering life coach Laura Berman Fortgang shares the process that she has used to help hundreds of clients make major changes in their lives. Whether it’s moving on from a dead-end job, discovering an entirely new creative outlet, or answering the age-old question “What am I meant to do with my life?” this book provides a clear and practical ninety-day program that can help you make major changes in your life. This revised edition valuable insights into how to stoke change, including: Ten years of additional client experience; Reports from 500 coaches worldwide who have trained to use this material with clients; New stories and modern-day dilemmas addressed; QR codes and additional interactive materials. For anyone who feels drawn toward a life-changing move but is not sure exactly what to do or how to move forward, Now What? presents a concrete process for finding and pursuing a new path in life.

Relieve anxiety, fear, and worry for good! Fully revised and based in the latest research, this second edition of Coping with Anxiety includes the latest DSM updates and provides immediate, user-friendly, and effective strategies to stop anxiety at its source. If you suffer from anxiety, you may try to avoid the situations that cause you to feel uneasy. But avoidance isn’t the answer—and letting your fears and worries constantly hold you back will keep you from living the life you truly want. So, how can you learn to cope with your anxiety while it’s happening? In Coping with Anxiety, Second Edition, renowned anxiety expert and author of The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, Edmund Bourne, offers a clinically proven, step-by-step program to help you overcome the physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of anxiety. The exercises in this book can be done in the moment, whenever you feel anxious, and will help you move past your fears and start living the life you were meant to live. Don’t let anxiety keep you one step behind. This book will show you how to face your fears, overcome panic when it happens, and take charge of your anxiety once and for all.

Staying happily married has become a difficult proposition in recent times. Although the institution is still firmly embedded in our culture, divorce rates have steadily climbed since the 1960s. While some marriages are truly divorce-worthy, many other broken marriages can be saved. Recent emphasis on personal needs and greater social acceptance of divorce and alternative lifestyles may have weakened the resolve of partners to work through their problems. Furthermore, many couples may not realize that problems in their current marriages are likely to surface in other relationships. Consequently, while they may consider divorce a solution, it may in fact only be a stepping stone to the next relationship where patterns may repeat. Solving marital differences can be difficult. They tend to be linked to or caused by other problems, and that can make it hard to identify the real reasons for conflicts. Without knowing the true nature of their problems, couples cannot arrive at solutions that actually work. To understand the underlying issues that plague many marriages, the authors look to the research conducted on the subject over the past fifty years and to real life stories of success and failure to outline the major issues that detract from marital stability. Drawing on Louis Primavera’s twenty-five years in private practice as a marriage counselor, each chapter is peppered with anecdotes that every married person can relate to, and that help bring issues to life. The authors also propose frank and honest solutions that can help couples have more satisfying relationships. Anyone looking to improve their marriage will find suggestions for sussing out the underlying problems they may be experiencing and guidance for addressing those problems.

“It’s like the meanest, wildest monkey running around my head, constantly looking for ways to bite me.” That was how Kirsten Pagacz described her OCD to her therapist on their first session when she was well into her 30s she’d been following orders from this mean taskmaster for 20 years, without understanding why. Initially the tapping and counting and cleaning and ordering brought her comfort and structure, two things lacking in her family life. But it never lasted; the loathsome self-talk only intensified, and the rituals she had to perform got more bizarre. By high school she was anorexic and a substance abuser, common "shadow syndromes" of OCD. By adulthood, she could barely hide her problems and held on to jobs and friends through sheer grit. Help finally came in the form of a miraculously well-timed public service announcement on NPR about OCD -- at last her illness had an identity. Leaving the OCD Circus reveals the story of Pagacz’s traumatic childhood and the escalation of her disorder demonstrating how OCD works to misshape a life from a very young age and explains the various tools she used for healing including meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, exposure therapy, and medication.

Prior to 1990, fewer than five percent of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, ninety percent or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering. There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how? Open adoption isn't just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It's a lifestyle that may feel intrusive at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of circumstances. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the child involved is paramount. This book offers readers the tools and the insight to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up. Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, Lori and Crystal review the secrets to success, the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. By putting the adopted child at the center, families can come to enjoy the benefits of open adoption and mitigate the challenges that may arise. More than a how-to, this book shares a mindset, a heartset, that can be learned and internalized, so parents can choose to act out of love and honesty throughout their child’s growing up years, helping that child to grow up whole.

Blending Families responds to the need for a book that explores step-parenting by starting with the marriage as the central relationship in a new blended family unit. Just as you are better able to help your child in an airplane emergency if you put your oxygen mask on first, you are better able to blend two families if you take care of the marriage first. Starting with a discussion of attachment styles, the authors explore how those styles translate into the new family unit when trying to forge a new marriage while parenting tween and teen children in a family unit that is new to them as well. They provide parenting guidance premised on the fact that parenting occurs within a context, and in this case, a context that is unfamiliar territory for everyone involved. Using true stories throughout, they explore the variety of challenges that may arise, such as sibling rivalry, puberty, dating, emotional and intellectual differences, and preferential treatment, and offer suggestions for overcoming obstacles to fully blending. By focusing the light on the marriage as the most important source of stability, the authors encourage readers to develop a style of parenting that works for everyone and brings a sense of unity and strength to the household.