Personal Improvement Development

The human brain is incredible. We accomplish marvelous things such as building rockets that send us to the moon and back. Yet, we regularly fail to remember simple things such as where we placed our house keys last night, we fall short when attempting to recall the name of an important person we should really know. Sometimes, we remember the most insignificant things and forget things that actually matter. Why? How does the human brain decide which memories to store and which memories to demolish?

In our risk-avoidant culture, we place a high premium on safety. We insure our vacations. We check crash tests on cars. We extend the warranties on our appliances. But by insulating ourselves from the unknown--the natural risks of life--we miss the great adventure of living our lives to their fullest potential.

The family-owned business of Allen & Augustine has manufactured high-quality chairs for decades. Its people take pride in their work and feel loyal to their owners and management team. But this long-revered company is now at a crossroads, hurt by a tough economy, foreign competition, and a cash crunch. The air is filled with the scent of uncertainty, anxiety, perhaps even panic. Enter Ben, the ambitious young executive assigned by his firm to promote a merger that will rescue Allen & Augustine.

Every year, we are given a fixed number of days. Some days pass us by without leaving a trace and some days we remember forever. Do you remember your first kiss? Or how the first rays of the spring sun feel? Or how about the best meal you ever had? These memorable experiences are characterised by intensity of perception, depth of feeling or sense of profound significance causing them to stand out in our mind and involve a heightened sense of wonder and awe.

In her midforties, Gwendolyn Bounds attended a dinner party where someone asked a little girl: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It struck Bounds: In middle age, no one asks you that anymore. So she put the question to herself. The answer set her on an unexpected five-year path of transformation from an unathletic office executive glued to her screens to an age-group medalist and world championship competitor in obstacle course racing—a demanding military-style sport requiring speed, endurance, mobility, and strength.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in 'the void,'" she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe." Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

Robin Dreeke is a 28-year veteran of federal service, including the United States Naval Academy, United States Marine Corps. He served most recently as a senior agent in the FBI, with 20 years of experience. He was, until recently, the head of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, where his primary mission was to thwart the efforts of foreign spies, and to recruit American spies. His core approach in this mission was to inspire reasonable, well-founded trust among people who could provide valuable information.

Because we all have too much to do, it feels like our lives are out of balance. But Brian Tracy and Christina Stein argue that imbalance results not so much from doing too much but from doing too much of the wrong things. They provide a process that enables you to sort out what is most important to you from among the many activities you could focus on. When you can efficiently identify and accomplish what really matters to you, you've found your balance point.

By adhering to the "5 Second Rule," which is the secret, you have the ability to alter every aspect of your life. You can use the rule and its countdown technique to break any bad habit, interrupt self-doubt and negative self-talk, and motivate yourself to take the measures that will change your life. These are all goals that can be accomplished through the use of the rule.

Does it sneak up on you on holiday when your mind finally has time to wander? After a bad day in the office where your ideas have gone unnoticed? We all have days when we idly dream of a new life. But this is different. The Career Change Guide is designed to take you from the confusion and indecision that stops you doing anything, to a clearer picture of the kind of work and life you want, with concrete steps to make it a reality. Get your brain into gear and equip yourself with the tools to become a committed career redesigner.

A guide to creating miracles in your own life through the power of thought.

We've all experienced brain fog - misplaced keys, forgotten facts, a general feeling that you're just feeling off today. And many of us will experience that "fog" manifesting as something more permanent - either in ourselves or our loved ones. No matter what your current brain health state may be, You Can Fix Your Brain will enable and empower you to take concrete steps that will make an immediate difference in your brain’s vitality, clarity, and energy. Your memory will improve, fogginess will disappear, you’ll be less tired all the time, and much more.

Based on the finest tools, techniques, principles, and strategies offered in Awaken the Giant Within, best-selling author and peak-performance consultant Anthony Robins offers daily inspiration and small actions (exercises) that will compel you to take giant steps forward in the quality of your life.

After eight books, many of them best sellers, A Game Plan for Life is the one closest to John Woodens heart: a moving and inspirational guide to the power of mentorship. The first half focuses on the people who helped foster the values that carried Wooden through an incredibly successful and famously principled career, including his college coach, his wife, Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Teresa.

When boy genius Garrett Gee started working for the federal government at age 15, he figured fame and fortune were only a stone's throw away. Despite impressive credentials and enormous potential in the world of computer hacking, Gee found himself years later as just another salaried employee. He soon realized that though he was a hacker at work, he was a slacker when it came to leading his own life. But as soon as he applied his meticulous hacker mindset to his personal life, everything changed—and success rolled in quickly.

Celebrated neurologist David Perlmutter reveals how everyday memory-loss - misplacing car keys, forgetting a name, losing concentration in meetings - is actually a warning sign of a distressed brain. Here he and Carol Colman offer a simple plan for repairing those problems, clarifying misconstrued connections between memory loss and aging, and regaining and maintaining mental clarity.

An instant best seller that is poised to become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes". He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author's own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.

As a top-level sport psychologist and performance consultant, Dr. Stan Beeham knows what it takes to succeed - on the playing field, in the board room, and in all aspects of life. This award-winning book takes you inside the minds of major-league athletes, Olympic medal winners, and world-class business leaders to reveal the key motivators and mental processes that drive people to victory.

A complete memory training program, this book is a step-by-step guide to improve your memory and harness the hidden potential of your brain. This book, written by the Guinness World Record holder Neerja Roy Chowdhury, comes with certified memory techniques and a Secret Memory Formula that will help listeners discover the simplicity of the otherwise vastly complex human memory system.

A lack of self-confidence is one of the greatest maladies of today’s world, one that is responsible for the rampant helplessness, lack of self-control, aimlessness, procrastination, and despair that characterize modern society. But as the venerable steel magnate Andrew Carnegie emphasized to Hill, “Confidence is a state of mind, necessary to succeed, and the starting point of developing self-confidence is definiteness of purpose.”