Self-Development Audiobooks

An entertaining and insightful pageturner about modern marriage and a tight-knit group of friends navigating their 30s and beyond. It's tradition that on everyone's birthday, the three couples gather to celebrate. They've toasted each other's big life milestones, and been there for each other through loss and disappointment, too. Nathan is the first to turn 40, and when the cake arrives, he makes a shocking announcement. The birthday ritual, and the group of friends, will never be the same again. Confessions follow, and secrets get revealed. One couple's crumbling marriage forces the other two couples to reexamine their own marriages, and the fault lines that lurk beneath. Will their bonds be strong enough to survive issues like infidelity, infertility, and waning passion, plus a series of crises that push each relationship to the brink? The answers may prove surprising. A year after Nathan's big declaration, as the group gathers for the year's final birthday celebration, every person and every relationship will be fundamentally changed. Perfect for fans of Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Rebecca Serle, Reservations for Six is a deeply satisfying novel full of wisdom, humor, and heart. It shines a spotlight on the phase of marriage when the fabric has started to fray, and deftly observes how couples cope, grow, and eventually thrive-together or apart.

Staying happily married has become a difficult proposition in recent times. Although the institution is still firmly embedded in our culture, divorce rates have steadily climbed since the 1960s. While some marriages are truly divorce-worthy, many other broken marriages can be saved. Recent emphasis on personal needs and greater social acceptance of divorce and alternative lifestyles may have weakened the resolve of partners to work through their problems. Furthermore, many couples may not realize that problems in their current marriages are likely to surface in other relationships. Consequently, while they may consider divorce a solution, it may in fact only be a stepping stone to the next relationship where patterns may repeat. Solving marital differences can be difficult. They tend to be linked to or caused by other problems, and that can make it hard to identify the real reasons for conflicts. Without knowing the true nature of their problems, couples cannot arrive at solutions that actually work. To understand the underlying issues that plague many marriages, the authors look to the research conducted on the subject over the past fifty years and to real life stories of success and failure to outline the major issues that detract from marital stability. Drawing on Louis Primavera’s twenty-five years in private practice as a marriage counselor, each chapter is peppered with anecdotes that every married person can relate to, and that help bring issues to life. The authors also propose frank and honest solutions that can help couples have more satisfying relationships. Anyone looking to improve their marriage will find suggestions for sussing out the underlying problems they may be experiencing and guidance for addressing those problems.

“When you FIND and LIVE your purpose, you discover the essence of your existence and why you are here. This will transform your life forever.”—Karen Hoyos PURPOSE: The Ultimate Quest , is designed to uncover the answers to life’s most important questions: Who am I, and why am I here? Once you know who you really are, and what your purpose is, you can travel beyond the labels in your mind and surrender to fulfill your destiny. PURPOSE features stories of Karen Hoyos’ personal challenges and victories, as well as those of her coaching clients and seminar participants. It also includes “ do now ” exercises that will transform your life immediately. Be ready to delve into your essence as you laugh, cry, become inspired, and have fun with Karen’s refreshing wit and profound wisdom. Above all, this is a book of transformation. Within these pages, you will uncover access to a new life of happiness, health, and abundance. “Karen Hoyos is a true example of success: From coming to the US with nothing, to building a multimillion dollar company, all through helping people to fulfill their purpose! The best part is that this book will show you HOW!” — Bill Walsh, America’s Business Expert “Karen’s transformational book will empower you to live your legacy and make powerful contributions to the world!” — Liz Stern, Legacy Expert, Globetrotter of 95 Countries “PURPOSE will elevate your consciousness and transform your personal and financial life forever.” — Rocio and Alfonso Martinez, Real Estate Investors

A clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral medicine presents a dozen practical approaches to transforming loss, pain, and suffering into positive growth and hope. Just as some flowers only bloom in the dark, so too, some people only grow by experiencing tough times. Each chapter explains an empirically based principle for handling adversity, followed by writing prompts designed to help readers experience the axiom personally. Tools such as self-reflection, meaning-making, narrative creation, benefit-finding, and inspired value-based action help readers move through their trauma toward a new exuberance for life.

A marvel of evolution is that humans are not solely motivated by their desire to experience positive emotions. They are also motivated, and even driven to achieve, by their attempt to avoid or seek relief from negative ones. What Motivates Getting Things Done: Procrastination, Emotions, and Success explains how anxiety is like a highly motivating friend, why you should fear failure, and the underpinnings of shame, distress, and fear in the pursuit of excellence. Many successful people put things off until a deadline beckons them, while countless others can't resist the urge to do things right away. Dr. Lamia explores the emotional lives of people who are successful in their endeavors--both procrastinators and non-procrastinators alike--to illustrate how the human motivational system works, why people respond to it differently, and how everyone can use their natural style of getting things done to their advantage. The book illustrates how the different timing of procrastinators and non-procrastinators to complete tasks has to do with when their emotions are activated and what activates them. Overall, What Motivates Getting Things Done illustrates how emotions play a significant role in our style of doing, along with our way of being in the world. Readers will acquire a better understanding of the innate biological system that motivates them and how they can make the most of it in all areas of their lives.

Winner of the 2015 COVR Award for Best Self-Help Book! Blamestorming outlines the reasons why our daily conversations go wrong, explains how to respond when they do and provides tips on how to stop them going wrong in the first place. Based on his experience as a highly respected communications coach for international companies and business professionals, Rob Kendall provides a practical guide to achieving more rewarding and effective interactions with everyone in your life - from your boss to your partner. Rob's techniques have been proven to be effective for thousands of people from all walks of life and are presented in an illustrated step-by-step format that makes them easy to put into practice from Day One. Underpinning the book's approach to consistently having better interactions is an explanation of the warning signals that indicate when a conversation is going off track.

This novella is also published as part of the collection SWEET HOME COWBOY. The Hathaway sisters might have grown up apart, but when they agree to move to Jasper Creek, Oregon, to revitalize their grandfather’s farm, it seems a straightforward decision. Until they meet their neighborhood cowboys… Prickly baker Georgie can’t resist the temptation of the most forbidden cowboy of all. The sisters’ feelings are anything but simple, but with the love and support of each other, they discover that a cowboy might be the sweetest thing of all about coming home.

Dead foods—devoid of any microscopic life—are causing us to feel sick, tired, and depressed. In A Gut Instinct: Conquer Your Sweet Tooth by Tuning Into Your Microbiome, Heather Wise takes you through her personal journey uncovering a hidden inner world of microflora that shapes our mood, physical health, sweet cravings, and even genes. Sweet Palate gives practical steps in rebalancing and healing our gut microbial balance to relieve stress, digestive upsets, inflammation, bloat, excess belly fat, and improve our mood. Wise offers a much sought after alternative to the complex world of fad diets and calorie counting in this easy, evidence-based guide for wellbeing. Rooted in scientific research and providing a number of healthy sweet fixes high in prebiotics and probiotic foods that support the growth of healthy gut flora, this book is a practical guide to help heal our relationship with food and tune into what our gut has been trying to tell us.

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “ City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” — Sigrid Nunez , author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away , and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions . A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

Relieve anxiety, fear, and worry for good! Fully revised and based in the latest research, this second edition of Coping with Anxiety includes the latest DSM updates and provides immediate, user-friendly, and effective strategies to stop anxiety at its source. If you suffer from anxiety, you may try to avoid the situations that cause you to feel uneasy. But avoidance isn’t the answer—and letting your fears and worries constantly hold you back will keep you from living the life you truly want. So, how can you learn to cope with your anxiety while it’s happening? In Coping with Anxiety, Second Edition, renowned anxiety expert and author of The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, Edmund Bourne, offers a clinically proven, step-by-step program to help you overcome the physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of anxiety. The exercises in this book can be done in the moment, whenever you feel anxious, and will help you move past your fears and start living the life you were meant to live. Don’t let anxiety keep you one step behind. This book will show you how to face your fears, overcome panic when it happens, and take charge of your anxiety once and for all.