Be a Dog with a Bone: always go for your dreams by Peggy McColl, 2003.
For years we have celebrated man’s best friend and his zealous love for life. This business fable teaches us to take a second look at our pets and discover the lessons they can teach us. Do you have a “glass is half full” personality? If so, this book will take you farther, teach you to reach for more. If not, the anecdotes will encourage you to pick up that glass and look again. Your trustworthy pet can teach you to discover your dream, identify those actions that will move you toward your goals, and eliminate the thoughts and actions that will prevent you from reaching those goals.
by Scott Ventrella, Recorded Books, 2007. Book on CD
Motivational speaker Scott Ventrella uses the best business practices of the best companies, but he teaches you to use them on yourself to develop the life and career you really want. Each milestone addresses a different aspect of your life and includes activities to help you decide what is really important to you and how much of your time you want to devote to each aspect of your life. He helps you identify all of the customers or ”clients” in your life and helps you determine what kind on relationship you want to have with each. Me Inc. includes the ten time tested principles that define the most successful companies and shows you how to apply them to your life.
You will develop a plan that will help you achieve your goals by understanding the twelve milestones and applying them to your life through the defined activities. Many questions provided help you to drill down to what is most important to you and what plan or guideline you need to develop to achieve your exceptional life. Because the answers to the questions asked are quite unique your plan will not look like someone else’s. This will be something you want to develop and then revisit as circumstances change in your life. Becoming the person you want to be is easier when you have the motivation and experience shared by Scott Ventrella to guide you.
by Mike Robbins, Jossey-Bass/John Wiley and Sons, 2007.
Negativity is everywhere around us. We get it from the time we get up until the end of the day; it comes from the media, our jobs, our family and friends. Unfortunately we focus on the negative and communicate that way rather than focusing on the good stuff we encounter daily.
Mike Robbins shares ways we can learn to refocus on the good and learn to get around the negative influences. The five powerful principles of appreciation are:
1. Be grateful
2. Choose positive thoughts and feelings
3. Use positive words
4. Acknowledge others
5. Appreciate yourself
Mike Robbins uses questions and exercises to help us explore the positive influences and reduce the influence of negativity on our lives. We create our own reality and can choose whether we focus on the good around us or allow the negativity to control our outlook.
The five steps to transform your negativity are:
1. Acknowledge all of your negative thoughts and feelings
2. Create a clean slate
3. Change your physical or emotional state
4. Verbalize and visualize what you want
5. Let it all go
By focusing on the positive and constantly finding ways to show appreciation for ourselves and others we can improve our outlook and learn to view everything as an opportunity to grow and learn. Appreciation for ourselves is the first step to being a positive influence for others and helping others to learn to give and get appreciation and not negativity every day.
by Stephen Covey, Franklin Covey, 2007. (Media Player – Playaway)
According to Stephen Covey the phrase “Time Management” is an oxymoron. The phrase should be self management, not time management. Stephen Covey explores the fallacies of time management which are:
1. people who believe that they can find more time to get things accomplished
2. you can bank or save time to be used at a later date
3. people who believe that they can manage time.
You can’t manage time, it marches on when we’re not paying attention and is lost forever. There is always more to do than we have time to do.
So how do we conquer the time we have. Using the techniques taught in this book we can learn to become better self managers. There are four quadrants that make up the designations for every task we do.
This time matrix is
1. necessity quadrant
2. deception quadrant
3. productivity and balance quadrant
4. waste and excess quadrant.
These are defined as:
1. Urgent and important
2. Urgent, not important
3. important, not urgent
4. not urgent and not important.
We need to spend some time placing our tasks in these quadrants and then coming up with ways to drop them or do them more effectively. By doing this we will feel like we can manage time.
Stephen Covey teaches us to use the productivity pyramid to accomplish more of what we want to accomplish. This pyramid includes values, goal setting and daily and weekly planning. The “core four” of the daily and weekly planning includes tasks, notes, appointments and contacts. By learning to direct these four items we will be better able to see where we spend our time and figure out ways to get tasks accomplished without necessarily doing them ourselves. This will allow us more “time” to accomplish the tasks that are most important and valuable to us.
by Denise Lynch, Recorded Books, 2007. Book on CD
This audio is not one you can listen to in your car. Denise uses the first CD to explore the idea of the techniques she uses in later CDs to show you how to achieve meditation levels that will help your focus and address any issue you have decided you want to address during this session. The accompanying music and sounds helps to facilitate a feeling of well being and relaxation and gets you to a state where you can access parts of your sub-conscious that can help you to see issues from a new viewpoint.
Denise helps you to identify and release many negative aspects of things happening in your life and helps you to see ways to empower yourself and create the outcomes you are looking for. Many times we have negative associations with something we are trying to do that are so strong that we end up sabotaging ourselves in accomplishing the task. She teaches techniques to gain optimism and confidence in all aspects of your life. By allowing you new ways to consider all of your options you will learn how to embrace what you really want in life.
A quote from the book is “If your mind has been powerful enough to get you results that you don’t want, it is powerful enough to get you the results that you do want.” — Denise Lynch
