Personal Development Leadership

In this revised and expanded edition of his groundbreaking Thinkertoys, creativity expert Michael Michalko reveals life-changing tools that will help you think like a genius. From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you'll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life.

Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo!, puts forth a wildly original idea: It pays to be nice. Sanders shows how being a "lovecat" will help you accomplish your goals, both in and out of the office.

The Power of Consistency lays out the Personal Prosperity Plan, a simple process to create meaningful results by unleashing the power of focus and your subconscious mind. Taking you step by step through the FEAR process - focus, emotional connection, action, and responsibility - this audiobook will teach you: How to get focused on what you want; How to become deeply emotionally committed to achieving your goals.

The World Health Organization estimates that American businesses lose more than $300 billion a year due to stress experienced by employees, and recent research by Harvard Medical School found that more than 95 percent of leaders felt at least somewhat burnt-out. For individuals and organizations who want to thrive in today's high-pressure, 24-7 business environment, working even longer is not the solution. To maximize your performance and well-being over the long-term, you need to work stronger.

First Things First is a revolutionary guide to managing your time by learning how to balance your life. Traditional time management suggests that working harder, smarter, and faster will help you gain control over your life, and that increased control will bring peace and fulfillment. But the authors of First Things First apply the insights of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to our daily problems of struggling with the ever-increasing demands of work and home life.

There is an unofficial rule for success: You need to change who you are to achieve greatness. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if you could leverage your so-called vices and shortcomings and make them your super powers? Rare Breed is an unorthodox business book for the rebels, outsiders, and provocateurs - anyone with the ambition to lead, create, inspire and provoke change on your own terms by owning all of who you are, not just the pretty parts. But be careful, each virtue has a seductive and dualistic nature that can lead to success or sabotage.

Every day, you have an opportunity to use your voice to have a positive impact - at work or in your community. You can inspire and persuade your audience - or you can distract and put them to sleep. Nervous, rambling robotic - these presentation styles can ruin a talk on even the most critical topics. And with each weak performance, career prospects dim. To get ahead and make an impact, you need to deliver well-crafted messages with confidence and authenticity. You must sound as capable as you are.

Average schools don't inspire greatness - and greatness is what our world needs if we are going to produce world-changing learners. In Culturize, author and education leader Jimmy Casas shares insights into what it takes to cultivate a community of learners who embody the innately human traits our world desperately needs, such as kindness, honesty, and compassion. His stories reveal how these "soft skills" can be honed while meeting and exceeding academic standards of 21st-century learning.

In his trademark storybook style that has won tens of millions of fans, Dr. Spencer Johnson once again uses a simple tale to reveal profound truths that can allow you to have less stress and enjoy more success and fulfillment. In Who Moved My Cheese?, two mouse-sized characters named Hem and Haw were faced with unexpected change when the Cheese they loved suddenly disappeared. Haw learned how to deal with that change by setting off in search of New Cheese. But Hem remained stuck where he was.

There's an 80 percent chance you're poor. Time poor, that is. Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment. How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives?

Performing Under Pressure tackles the greatest obstacle to personal success, whether in a sales presentation, at home, on the golf course, interviewing for a job, or performing onstage at Carnegie Hall. Despite sports mythology, no one rises to the occasion under pressure and does better than they do in practice. The reality is pressure makes us do worse and sometimes leads us to fail utterly. But there are things we can do to diminish its effects on our performance.

Best-selling author Bill George ( True North) and longtime corporate executive Doug Baker have participated for decades in a unique small group of peers dedicated to personal growth and leadership development. In this book they provide the first practical guide - including detailed instructions, rules, and resources - for anyone to start and manage such a group on their own.

Whether you just started your first entry-level job, run the entire company, or just feel trapped by your condo association bylaws, it’s time to it’s time to learn how to get big things done and make a lasting impact. From local government to the White House, Harvard to the world of venture capital, Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai have taken on some of the world’s most challenging bureaucracies—and won. Now, they bring their years of experience to you, teaching you strategies anyone can use to improve your organization through their own stories and those of fellow bureaucracy hacker.

In an increasingly polarized world, our only chance for coming together and moving forward is to learn from those who have mastered the art and science of disagreement. In this much-needed book, Ian Leslie explores what happens to us when we argue, why disagreement makes us stressed, and why we get angry. By drawing together the lessons he learns from different experts, he proposes a series of clear principles that we can all use to make our most difficult dialogues more productive—and our increasingly acrimonious world a better place.

The business world today is changing at a rapid rate. Competition is tougher than ever before. And the state of the economy is never a sure thing. It all adds up to high pressure for high achievers who want to succeed in their work and their lives. With Power Under Pressure, you'll learn to perform at peak levels while reducing the stress that many people think goes hand in hand with top performance. You see, if we are to succeed, we need to learn to not only reduce stress but maximize performance.

Modern life demands a more complex way of thinking and being. Developmental Coaching is a transformative program designed to enable true shifts in consciousness in executives, professionals, and coaches. It has already been delivered to hundreds of people across the globe with stunning effects. It really works to meet the demands of modern life.

Keith Ferrazzi is a master networker who claims his secret is merely reaching out to other people. And what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships, so that everyone wins. In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi presents the specific steps and mindset he uses to connect with the thousands of individuals in his Rolodex.

Cara Alwill Leyba's riveting voice and kinship with her audience drove the self-published success of Girl Code, a book that encouraged women to support each other in the business community. Now her many fans are ready to take the next step: building sustainable confidence from the ground up. Most women who are insecure look for the equivalent of a sugar rush, such as telling themselves they're better than other people or changing the way they look. But those tricks won't protect them from losing confidence in the future.

Here's the hard truth about leadership: It either forces you to get stronger or it slowly destroys your life. There is no in-between. Kevin Lawrence has discovered 17 habits that allow any leader to transcend the perils of success and keep achieving - habits that have already helped hundreds of CEOs and executives become stronger and more resilient.

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it.