Go into any bookstore (if you can still find one in your town 
) and you’ll see rows and rows of personal growth, self help, and self improvement books. I haven’t read everything available, but have read my fair share and then some. These books are my recommendations for the person serious about personal growth.
The first table contains my own, which I—of course—feel fill a need the others don’t. The second table contains books I’ve read, re-read, and written about. I recommend them all.
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Sample Personal Development Plan and Workbook
Find your life purpose, discover your unique personal strengths, learn to overcome fears limiting your success, improve your relationships, reap the benefits of optimism and positive approaches to life, and much, much more. View the following video and receive a 20% discount when you purchase the eBook. |
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The Happiness Workbook: Take Control of Your Happiness
Are you as happy as you’d like to be with your body, self-esteem, friendships, and relationships? Is your life meaningful and fulfilling? Do you have purpose? The proven happiness-increasing interventions, tips, and exercises will help you become a happier person. |
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Jump for Joy: Clearing the hurdles to an easy life
Learn the ten common hurdles in your path to an easier life and the ways you can clear these hurdles like an Olympic hurdler at a high school track meet! Discover the joy of looking at life differently, and finding that it isn’t such a struggle after all. |
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Personal Development: 40 Best Articles on Cheering Up, Positive Attitude, Goal Setting, and much, much more
Included are forty of my most popular articles on intentional change: Learn the best goal setting practices; Tips for cheering up when you’re blue; How to reap the benefits of a positive attitude; Keeping your mind strong as you age, and much, much more. |
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5 Keys to Balancing Work and Life: Get Back to Basics and Balance Your Life
Follow this structured personal development plan and improve yourself in 16 ways with dozens of personal growth suggestions, exercises, and aids for personal improvement.
A three part book, including a Questionnaire to identify areas of your life preventing you from being as happy as you want to be, a Workbook to help you apply scientifically proven interventions for becoming happier, and a Resources section identifying books, articles, and web sites providing more information on being happy.
For many of us, life seems a constant struggle: overwhelming demands leaving us with too little time, money, love, fun, and fulfillment. Jump for Joy is your personal guide to an easier life, with helpful examples and exercises helping you apply each idea to your own unique life situation.
This book is about conscious change. Change is a given, we’re changing all the time even when we resist mightily. If we’re going to change anyway, why not approach change consciously and use the process to become the best we can be.
Life Purpose |
Life on Purpose, Six Passages to an Inspired LifeAuthor Brad Swift breaks the process of finding life purpose into six steps that he calls passages, with a chapter devoted to each. Each chapter includes personal examples as well as exercises to help the reader assimilate Swift’s concepts. Swift does a good job of tackling the difference between a life based on doing and a life based on being. Life purpose is fulfilled by who we are being and it is experienced by what we are doing at the time. This can be difficult to grasp since people are naturally inclined to do things. Life purpose is more about being than about doing. |
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My Life A WorkbookAn interesting and very different self-help book. My Life is primarily a book of questions with a few pages of text supporting and encouraging the reader’s reflective journey through My Life as a self-discovery workbook rather than a how-to advice book. Filling out My Life A Workbook with honesty and open self-reflection will bring you clarity on your life purpose and the things that bring meaning to life. But don’t buy My Life A Workbook unless you’re really serious about reflecting on who you are. If you’re seriously committed to self understanding, this book provides a great approach. |
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Self Knowledge |
Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform your LifeIf you’re awash in a sea of negativity, this book may be the life raft you need to lift yourself out of negativity and into the more healthful life of positive emotions. Emotional Freedom describes the processes Dr. Judith Orloff uses to help her clients free themselves from the harmful and debilitating effects of negative emotions, such as fear, jealousy, anxiety, and depression. A non-traditional psychologist, Orloff combines the sciences of biology and psychology with spirituality and intuitive energy to help people rid themselves of the unhealthy burdens of being buried in negative emotion. |
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The Strengths Book: Be Confident, Be Successful, and Enjoy Better Relationships by Realizing the Best of YouThe Strengths Book describes a four-quadrant model of strengths and introduces an online self-assessment questionnaire, Realise2, which assesses your strengths from among 60 character traits. Linley’s four strengths quadrants, Realized Strengths, Unrealized Strengths, Learned Behaviors, and Weaknesses, provides a model for your personal growth by continuing to focus on your realized and unrealized strengths, avoiding use of your weaknesses, and being cautious about over-using your learned behaviors. |
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Happiness |
The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You WantThe gold standard for happiness, what it is, how to change, and why. Based on the latest positive psychology research studies, this book is a comprehensive guide to happiness and provides dozens of strategies, tips, exercises, and interventions to help you easily become a happier person. |
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Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting FulfillmentAuthentic Happiness combines sound research results with tips and hints to help individuals attain greater happiness. Author Dr. Seligman is a leader in the positive psychology movement. In Authentic Happiness, Seligman shows how to increase happiness by simple daily practices. In addition to his insights on happiness, he introduces Signature Strengths. Read Authentic Happiness and The Strengths Book for a broad understanding of your unique personal abilities. |
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Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier ParentsA parenting book that takes the latest findings of positive psychology and applies the concepts to raising children. While most parenting books are based on personal experience alone, this one describes the personal experience of the author with utilizing positive psychology’s happiness findings. |
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The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life.Though referring to a person as a perfectionist rings of a compliment, in reality perfectionism is a significant cause of unhappiness. For those unhappily chasing perfection in their own lives and the lives of others, this book is an eye-opener. Written by a psychologist-perfectionist. |
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Mindfulness |
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual EnlightenmentIf you only buy one book to aid your Personal Growth, make it The Power of Now. This is one of my favorite books, focused on one concept—that life is now. Focusing on now allows you to avoid the complication and difficulty brought on by worry for the future or guilt about the past. Author Tolle makes the point–a powerful one–that focusing your energy and attention on now will remove fear from your life. So much of our lives are fear-driven that this one concept alone is worth the cost of this book. |
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Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday LifeWherever You Go There You Are is probably the most widely recognized book on mindfulness. It takes the Buddhist practice of mindfulness into the 21st century Western culture, helping you live more fully in the current moment by practicing strong self-awareness of feelings, emotions, and environment. |
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Law of Attraction |
Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your DesiresJerry and Esther Hicks do a masterful job of describing how to practically utilize the Law of Attraction. This is but one of their books devoted to teaching you how to get what you really want out of life—a great place to start your mastery of your environment. |
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Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of FeelingsAnother great, practical book about one person’s struggles and enlightenment with utilizing the Law of Attraction. Very practical, very readable how-to for applying the Law of Attraction to everyday problems of living. |
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Lifestyle Change |
Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Life Positively ForwardPsychologist James Prochaska’s Changing for Good is a great book that sets the standard for making significant lifestyle changes successfully. Many commercial and government sponsored change programs follow Prochaska’s model for successful lifestyle change. If you’ve been battling self-defeating bad habits for years, pick up this lifestyle change classic. |
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