pen x pencil Audiobooks

With the constant connectivity of today’s world, it’s never been easier to meet people and make new friends—but it’s never been harder to form meaningful friendships. In Frientimacy, award-winning speaker Shasta Nelson shows how anyone can form stronger, more meaningful friendships, marked by a level of trust she calls “frientimacy.” Shasta explores the most common complaints and conflicts facing female friendships today, and lays out strategies for overcoming these pitfalls to create deeper, supportive relationships that last for the long-term. Shasta is the founder of girlfriendcircles.com, a community of women seeking stronger, more fulfilling friendships, and the author of Friendships Don’t Just Happen. In Frientimacy, she teaches readers to reject the impulse to pull away from friendships that aren’t instantly and constantly gratifying. With a warm, engaging, and inspiring voice, she shows how friendships built on dedication and commitment can lead to enriched relationships, stronger and more meaningful ties, and an overall increase in mental health. Frientimacy is more than just a call for deeper connection between friends; it’s a blueprint for turning simple friendships into true bonds—and for the meaningful and satisfying relationships that come with them.

Become a Writing Hero A creative writing mentor in inspirational book form. Imagine having your own personal mentor―someone encouraging yet honest, supportive yet empowering, who could help you set and achieve your goals, turn your moments of doubt and fear into sources of strength, and discover what you’re truly capable of when you’re at your best. Kendra Levin is that mentor. And with The Hero is You , she’s here to help you do the best writing of your life―and live your best life while doing it. A motivational self-care book for writing aficionados. Using a fresh new approach to Joseph Campbell’s archetypal Hero’s Journey, Levin reveals how to be a hero in the narrative of your own process. She weaves together wisdom drawn from her years as a life coach for writers and an editor at the world’s biggest publishing house with behind-the-scenes stories from a panoply of best-selling authors and career entertainers. With over thirty exercises designed to help you reinvent your creative process from the inside out, this book will show you how to: Identify your biggest challenges and render them powerless Start a project that you love―and stick with it Design a structure for writing regularly Great motivational book for anyone dealing with writer's block or other writing obstacles. Whether you’re a first-time writer with a brand-new project or a seasoned pro, you’ll reach the end of this book feeling fulfilled, inspired, and ready to mentor the next writer on their creative journey. Readers of self-help books and personal development books for writers and creatives like The Artist's Way , Bird by Bird , The Artist's Way Workbook , and Big Magic will be inspired and encouraged by The Hero is You .

Breakthrough Innovation Tools for Successful Leadership Innovation needs innovation: Innovation is broken. Business leadership and management struggle to find ways to crack through their own corporate politics or bureaucratic silos, to move from defense to offense, to nurture real breakthrough, to drive visionary creativity in ways that add new value to everything they do. In Innovating Innovation , David Morey, one of America’s leading strategic consultants, will teach, coach, and guide you across eleven concrete and pragmatic steps that unlock and drive day-to-day innovation in your business and help you gain a long-term competitive advantage in your marketplace. Make change and innovation happen: Innovating Innovation synergizes what is best in classic innovation theories with an insurgent strategic model inspired by one of Morey’s first corporate clients, Apple founder Steve Jobs. It shows how to lead innovation that creates the products of visionary genius without the necessity for actual genius. It provides practical tools and guidance on building and leading the teams, working conditions, organizational structures, and cultures of market-made and market-making innovation. It illustrates a roadmap to the disruptive periphery, the organizational margins at which real innovation actually takes place. Innovation can be taught: Innovating Innovation is a framework to counter failure. It directs you, the reader, to the consumer, the very person who will actually tell you how to innovate the benefits to create a future you can own. This book invites you to “think different,” to become a change leader, to go the “wrong” way to get to the right places. And it shows you how to apply the pragmatic lessons of Agile software development to absolutely everything and to accelerate your leadership career and your company’s success by stepping up from mere evolution to punctuated equilibrium, evolution as breakthrough. Your business needs unique innovation: You and your business need innovation as never before and unlike anyone else’s. This is lesson number one. And in the space of eleven chapters, Innovating Innovation offers lesson number two: You don’t need to be a genius to deliver the performances, products, and services of innovation at genius levels in the most opportunity-rich and threat-intensive business environment in history. Your management and leadership skills will improve immensely, taking your business to a level of innovation success beyond what it has ever achieved before. Innovating Innovation is a step-by-step handbook for teaching, and at times even tricking, your organization, your culture, and your company into real-world change. After reading this new battlefield manual for innovation, you will: Learn the Disruptive Periphery Concept and how it can give you the tools to help your business Discover a practical marketing-centric focus applied to innovation Reap the benefits of lessons developed from thirty years of real-world global consulting and training experience

The first authoritative and comprehensive guide to "aging in place"--a burgeoning movement for those who don't want to rely on assisted living or nursing home care--which allows seniors to spend their later years living comfortably, independently, and in their own home or community. For millions of Americans, living in a nursing home or assisted living facility is not how they’d prefer to spend their retirement years. This is why more and more people are choosing to “age in place.” In this empowering and indispensable book, clinical psychologists and aging specialists Mary Languirand and Robert Bornstein teach readers how, with planning and foresight, they can age with dignity and comfort in the place of their own choosing. How to Age in Place offers useful, actionable advice on financial planning; making your home physically safe; getting around; obtaining necessary services; keeping a healthy mind, body, and spirit; and post-retirement employment. A necessary resource for seniors, their adult children, and eldercare professionals, How to Age in Place is both a practical roadmap and inspirational guide for the millions of seniors who want to make their own decisions and age well.

Prior to 1990, fewer than five percent of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, ninety percent or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering. There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how? Open adoption isn't just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It's a lifestyle that may feel intrusive at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of circumstances. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the child involved is paramount. This book offers readers the tools and the insight to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up. Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, Lori and Crystal review the secrets to success, the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. By putting the adopted child at the center, families can come to enjoy the benefits of open adoption and mitigate the challenges that may arise. More than a how-to, this book shares a mindset, a heartset, that can be learned and internalized, so parents can choose to act out of love and honesty throughout their child’s growing up years, helping that child to grow up whole.