All of us struggle with our lives at one point or another. That’s just a universal fact. So it’s natural for us to look for some guidance on bouncing back from the challenges. Recovering from terrible things that happen to us is no easy feat. And every one of us does it in different ways. So it’s natural for us to look for some guidance in any way that we can. Some of us have our friends and families who are always ready and willing to listen. Others have their loyal therapists. But some of us have self-help books.
By reading self-help books, we gain a deeper understanding of our ideas, emotions, and, ultimately, identity. And it helps us realize how we could better improve ourselves to live a quality and balanced life. Here are four self-help books that can guide us through various positive life goals.
Overcoming Struggles and Trauma
The first step to creating a better life for ourselves is getting past the challenges we face. And those challenges, of course, vary from person to person. Some people are trying to recover from a traumatic event in their lives, such as a major accident. Some are trying to get out of an abusive relationship or marriage. And some are trying to recover from a struggle with their own minds and bodies.
Mary Anne Cohen’s book, French Toast for Breakfast: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating, is a prime example of a book that helps its readers heal from such challenges. The book is about eating disorders, which is a subject that’s difficult to tackle. But, with her experience as the director of the New York Center for Eating Disorders, Cohen can guide you as you recover in an anorexia treatment facility. And she will enlighten you as you improve your relationship with food.
Setting Your Career Goals
The next to rebuilding our lives for the better is creating a vision for our future. And, more often than not, our vision starts with setting our career goals. This is understandable because having a fruitful career is something that we can truly be proud of. It’s the product of all of our hard work, patience, and resilience.
Barbara Sher and Barbara Smith’s book, I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It, can guide us with that. It would help us discover our potential and find out what we can do about that. It would also guide us in overcoming the challenges that will come our way as we try to pursue a brighter future.
Getting Your Life Together
Of course, after setting up our future goals, the best thing that we could do next is to improve our discipline. It might be surprising, but this is one of the more challenging things we need to do. It’s because it’s about making sure that, every day, we don’t fail in becoming productive and accomplishing our tasks.
But with Ryder Carroll’s book, The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future, we can find guidance in organizing our day-to-day lives. According to the book, the simple act of listing down our tasks for the day will encourage us to accomplish such tasks. Then, it talks about how important it is to celebrate such tasks. After all, they might be small, but they’re still wins that we deserve.
Finding Happiness
As we envision our future goals and slowly achieve them through our everyday activities, it’s always still important to take a pause and breathe. By taking such breaks, we can remember why we are doing such things in the first place. And, in remembering, we can realize what happiness means for us.
Gretchen Rubin talks about happiness in her massively popular book, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. She teaches us the importance of enjoying life through simple things. So even if we set up major milestones that we want to reach for our futures, we can always step back, relax, and be happy.
We experience various challenges when it comes to our minds and bodies. No mind and body are unfailingly resilient to the various things that happen around us. We fall down and sometimes fail in our careers, no matter how passionate we are about them. And some of our cherished relationships end on a good or bad note.
But there’s always a way to overcome such challenges. And if we need to turn to self-help books, then, by all means, we should do so.
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