Self-Development Audiobooks - page 2

Popular blogger Ilana Jacqueline offers smart and savvy advice, humor, and practical tips for living with an invisible chronic illness. Do you live with a chronic, debilitating, yet invisible condition? You may feel isolated, out of step, judged, lonely, or misunderstood—and that’s on top of dealing with the symptoms of your actual illness. Take heart. You are not alone, although sometimes it can feel that way. Written by a blogger who suffers from an invisible chronic illness, Surviving and Thriving with an Invisible Chronic Illness offers peer-to-peer support to help you stay sane, be your own advocate, and get back to living your life. This compelling guide is written for anyone suffering with an illness no one can see—such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), Lyme disease, lupus, dysautonomia, or even multiple sclerosis (MP). This book will tell you everything you need to know about living with a complicated, invisible condition—from how to balance sex, dating, and relationships to handling work and school with unavoidable absences. You’ll also learn to navigate judg-y or skeptical relatives and strangers and—most importantly—manage your medical care. Suffering from a chronic illness doesn’t mean you can’t live an active, engaged life. This book will show you how.

“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.

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.

The first authoritative and comprehensive guide to "aging in place"--a burgeoning movement for those who don't want to rely on assisted living or nursing home care--which allows seniors to spend their later years living comfortably, independently, and in their own home or community. For millions of Americans, living in a nursing home or assisted living facility is not how they’d prefer to spend their retirement years. This is why more and more people are choosing to “age in place.” In this empowering and indispensable book, clinical psychologists and aging specialists Mary Languirand and Robert Bornstein teach readers how, with planning and foresight, they can age with dignity and comfort in the place of their own choosing. How to Age in Place offers useful, actionable advice on financial planning; making your home physically safe; getting around; obtaining necessary services; keeping a healthy mind, body, and spirit; and post-retirement employment. A necessary resource for seniors, their adult children, and eldercare professionals, How to Age in Place is both a practical roadmap and inspirational guide for the millions of seniors who want to make their own decisions and age well.

A clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral medicine presents a dozen practical approaches to transforming loss, pain, and suffering into positive growth and hope. Just as some flowers only bloom in the dark, so too, some people only grow by experiencing tough times. Each chapter explains an empirically based principle for handling adversity, followed by writing prompts designed to help readers experience the axiom personally. Tools such as self-reflection, meaning-making, narrative creation, benefit-finding, and inspired value-based action help readers move through their trauma toward a new exuberance for life.

FACT: Your brain is being controlled-and you don't even know it. Because if you think the ads you're seeing today are just pretty pictures with nice, creative copy, you're mistaken. Truth is, you are being powerfully influenced by dozens of proven scientific principles of advertising psychology... little-known techniques of consumer persuasion that go completely unnoticed by the buying public. And they're causing you--and millions like you--to spend enormous amounts of money every day on countless products and services. But what are these principles? How do they work? And how can you use them in your own advertising? Prepare yourself for a unique learning experience as author Drew Eric Whitman takes you on a wild, roller-coaster ride through the streets of New York's famed Madison Avenue and teaches you the specific psychological techniques that today's top copywriters and designers use to influence the masses... and how you can use them to rapidly increase your sales, no matter what you sell. In 207 fast-moving pages, Whitman teaches you dozens of well-guarded secrets that he learned during his 30+ years in the ad business, including: * How to Push Your Prospects' Hot Buttons in Every Ad, Sales Letter, or Email--It's not hard to do once you know the secret. * Why Developing Your "USP" Can Leave Your Competition in the Dust--It's the quickest way to instantly begin out-marketing your competitors. (And they'll never know what hit them.) * Why You Don't Need a Degree in Business to Create Great Ads--But there is one thing you MUST know or your ads will likely fail miserably. * How to Develop a Powerful Ad-Agency Mindset--What the pros know about consumer buying behavior and how you can use it to your advantage. * How to Save $600 for Every $1,000 You Spend on Ads--This idea alone is worth infinitely more than the price of this book...and you can start using it immediately. * The Amazing 5-Second, No-Fail Headline Test--Chances are your ads, emails, websites and other promotional materials fail this test every time. One small change boosts your response. * What a Good Ad Should "Feel" Like--How to connect to readers on a deep, emotional level. * How to Install Persuasive Images in People's Brains--Learn how to direct how people think about your products and services. * Why People Really Buy Your Product or Service--Sorry, but it's not what you think. (But you better know the reason... or else.) * Where to Always Put Your Biggest Benefit--Miss this and you're flushing your ad dollars down the toilet. * How to Write "Dragon-Slayer" Headlines that Get Read and Get Response--Tons of examples you can "steal" for your own ads. * Long vs. Short Copy: Which Is Really Best for Response? Don't believe the lies! We'll set the record straight and you'll learn to cash-in. * How to Use the Devilishly Effective Pyramid Principal--Lure readers into your ads by understanding human eyeball behavior. * 22 Tested and Proven Headline Prescriptions you can start using RIGHT NOW. * How to Turn Ordinary Words in "Money-Magnet" Copy that motivates, influences, persuades. (Yes, you can really do it.) * Put Your Copy Here and Boost Readership by 10-200%--Why doesn't everyone do this? * 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Start Writing Your Ads--So easy, it's almost automatic. * How to Cause People to Mentally Demonstrate Your Products... Before They Buy. * How Emotional Words Melt Sales Resistance a Red-Hot Knife Through Butter. * "Sneaky" Ad-Design Psychology Tricks that Work Like Magic--Start using them tonight. * Typestyles that Actually REDUCE Readership--Are you using them? * This "Evil" Design Sin Depresses Your Readership Up to 50%--Do you do it? * Widely Used Typeface LOWERS Comprehension Up to 67%--Are you using it? * The Eye-Grabbing "Advertising Guillotine"--The one image humans can't resist. * And Much More

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “ City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” — Sigrid Nunez , author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away , and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions . A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

This novella is also published as part of the collection SWEET HOME COWBOY. The Hathaway sisters might have grown up apart, but when they agree to move to Jasper Creek, Oregon, to revitalize their grandfather’s farm, it seems a straightforward decision. Until they meet their neighborhood cowboys… Prickly baker Georgie can’t resist the temptation of the most forbidden cowboy of all. The sisters’ feelings are anything but simple, but with the love and support of each other, they discover that a cowboy might be the sweetest thing of all about coming home.

This novella is also published as part of the collection SWEET HOME COWBOY. The Hathaway sisters might have grown up apart, but when they agree to move to Jasper Creek, Oregon, to revitalize their grandfather’s farm, it seems a straightforward decision. Until they meet their neighborhood cowboys… Tomboy Joey has more affinity with farm equipment than men, until a brooding cowboy changes her mind. The sisters’ feelings are anything but simple, but with the love and support of each other, they discover that a cowboy might be the sweetest thing of all about coming home.