Three of the Best Books for Professional and Personal Growth

Sometimes finding your next great read will have a lot to do with how much you desire to grow both personally and professionally. The three books noted below provides a great start to how you can begin to transform your life.

Enjoy,

Dr. Cris

The Purpose Driven Life

This book was not what I expected but I was pleased with the results. Author Rick Warren explains that when we decide to connect with God, then we begin to connect to our purpose and our passions. For our purpose is centered on His will for our lives, but we must first let go and learn to appreciate that God does haves a special plan for each of us and we can receive the best possible life based on His intention. It is then that we will blossom into the person that we are destined to be. 

Our purpose driven life is our awakening to surrendering. Our acknowledgment that our best life is a reflection of not only Gods’ will but also our passion. So if we allow ourselves to trust Him and serve Him then we also place ourselves in a position to serve others which is one of the five principles that Warren focuses on in this book. 

If you think that something is missing from your life, and perhaps a change is in order, I would strongly suggest this read. The Purpose Driven Life will make you reevaluate your life, what you value and your motives. Hopefully it will transform you. 

The 4-Hour Work week

“Can a person really work less than 50 or 60 hours a week?” was my first question when I picked up this book. So the possibility of working less than five made me immediately desire to learn more. What Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, is celebrating and trying to get across to all of us, is that life is worth living, not working away. And there are easy-to-learn strategies to get you to the comfortable life that you desire. Some of the main points that Ferriss suggests are…

• Creating a mobile lifestyle so that you can enjoy your life while facilitating your workload
• Outsourcing your workload through a virtual assistant – one of my personal favorites
• Creating automatic cash flow opportunities so that you are getting paid without punching a time-clock
• Eliminating 50% of your work in 48 hours

I’ll admit that initially the concept sounds too good to be true; however, once you decide that you are fed up with the rat race and desire more from your life then you may consider doing something about it, and this book is a great place to start.  

The Vision Board

It may be difficult to accomplish your dreams if you can’t see them. Once they are in front of you constantly, your dreams can begin to take shape and unfold from the visions, pictorial images, and text that represent your mantra into a creative representation of the life that you desire to live.  

Author Joyce Schwarz shares a detailed step-by-step process to capture your dreams and turn them into reality. The Vision Board: The Secret to an Extraordinary Life provides a how-to guide to understanding the power, the creativity, and the genius associated with creating a tangible representation of what you truly desire out of life. 

After Schwarz describes the basic process of creating your vision board, she then focuses on the importance of activating it, through the use of affirmations, visualization, and Feng Shui. Without connecting these three important components to your vision board, you have basically created an art project that lacks active energy and the power to take you to the next level.