Books are simply printed sheets of paper, covered with texts, language, and illustrations created by the author. Books are so influential that they can be a great source of learning, knowledge, and success. It can mold your life and help you achieve your goals. Books are packed with wisdom and life lessons that you can even learn from the lessons of the past.

Books come in different genres. You can read depending on your interest or your curiosity and to your liking. There is fiction, action, and adventure. And there are comic or graphic novels. You can also read classic books, fantasy, or detective mysteries. And most importantly, self-help books, written to help solve personal problems in any particular area of your life.

What to Read 

The best self-help books with great authors are no less best-selling, inspiring, and very motivating. These books help improve emotional well-being, spirituality, and even finances. These books also encourage you to improve in any facet of life, such as these five books to help you reach your goals. 

1. Awaken the Giant Within 

The book Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins explains that many people go through the flow in life without consciously thinking of shaping their destiny. This book is written to shape the readers’ lives by showing the roadmap of self-mastery to create a future in any circumstances. 

Awakening the giant within yourself will help you discover yourself and your limitless capabilities to surmount the fears and the self-limiting beliefs. All these hinder and control you throughout the journey in life.

Also, this book will help you break your constant dependency on external factors like the environment. It will also help you get out and control yourself, your life, and your future.

2. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

The Happiness Project, authored by Gretchen Rubin, is about her pursuit of happiness in scientific research. Rubin wants to maximize her degree to summarize the tasks she wants her readers to follow to pursue their happiness project also.

She breaks the unguided belief that says “unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish.”

The book teaches readers to identify the things that give joy, engagement, and satisfaction. After reading the book, it will inspire you to create your happiness project.

3. No Excuses- The Power of Self Discipline 

No Excuses: The Power of Self Discipline by Brian Tracy emphasizes that success is accomplished through self-discipline, not exceptional talent and good luck. This book guides readers to achieve success in their personal goals, money and business goals, and overall happiness.

No Excuses shows you how to be more disciplined without excuses. You will learn how to be more successful in every aspect of your life without comparing yourself to others’ success. In its 21 chapters content, each chapter contains exercises to help you apply the “no excuses” approach and practice it in your own life. It will help you stop making excuses and succeed.

4. Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Changes Everything 

Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Changes Everything is a New York best-selling book by BJ Fogg. The step-by-step guide that this book contains is designed to make habits from small and positive steps. It also teaches the readers to stick through positive success and celebrate small wins and milestones.

Tiny Habits shares breakthrough discoveries that are easily adaptable in transforming your life. It also teaches you to feel good about yourself and learn to celebrate success instead of feeling bad about failures.

Generally, Tiny Habits makes the process of forming a habit by starting with small steps.

5. The Magic of Thinking Big 

This book, The Magic of Thinking Big, was published fifty years ago and remains as relevant now as it was before. Dr. David Schwartz, the author, answers the famous question “What makes a person successful?” through anecdotes and advice.

The book teaches you to believe that you can naturally achieve your goal; you only have to believe in yourself and do it.

But no matter how well we’re aware of how positive affirmations can help us clear our heads and become a better version of ourselves, it’s not easy to incorporate daily positive affirmations in our routine. This post discusses a detailed step-by-step guide on how you can start practicing daily affirmations.

Understand how affirmations work

When you keep repeating a belief or a value over and over again, it becomes ingrained in your brain and it turns out easier to believe it. 

In the beginning, it might be hard to believe an affirmation like “I am worthy of love,” especially if you’ve been conditioned by a lifetime of doubting your self-worth. The important point is to not give up and keep repeating them even if they don’t sound true at the moment.

A beneficial way of getting into this habit is by marking your daily progress on a habit tracker. You can also hire an accountability coach who will help you stay on track and help your get back with your habit of daily affirmations if you fall off the wagon for some reason.

It doesn’t matter if your self-esteem is high or low, positive affirmations can work for you and rewire your mindset if you word them correctly. 

How to create affirmations that work

Writing your affirmations in the present tense always works better than writing them in the future tense. If you feel “I am worthy of love” sounds too tough at the moment, you can reword it such as “I choose to..”

Here are some other ways to word your affirmations if “I am” feels too overwhelming for you at the beginning:

• “I am learning how to…”
• “I allow myself to…”

Before you write any affirmation, pay attention to how you talk to yourself. Is there a particular habit or area where you keep undermining yourself? Try working on that area first and create affirmations around a habit that you don’t give yourself enough credit for.

Turn your negativity to positivity 

When you’re mindful about the way you talk to yourself, you will start spotting each time you tell yourself negative statements like “I can’t do this” or “What if people think…”

When you see something like that happening, stop yourself and change your negatives into positives. Pump yourself up like you’d pump up your best friend and say things to yourself in a tone that pulls you up rather than pushing you down.

Give yourself compliments. Keep repeating your positive affirmations day after day.

Speak them out loud

If writing your affirmations down doesn’t help, speak them out. Go to a rooftop and scream to the world what you’re capable of.

Give yourself permission to think beyond your bubble of comfort and allow the magic of the universe to bestow you with gifts untold.

Visualize

Sometimes, it might not be enough to simply write or speak the words out loud. Switch your mindset from one of scarcity to an abundance mindset by visualizing a future where you are capable of doing all the things you dream of.

The next time you pick a goal for yourself, visualize yourself achieving it and allow yourself to feel all the positive emotions that will course through your body once you actually accomplish it.

This will provide you with the right push to stick to your goal, even if things get rough at times.

“[Our studies found that] Open Monitoring meditation induces a control state that promotes divergent thinking, a style of thinking that allows many new ideas of being generated. Second, Focused Attention meditation does not sustain convergent thinking, the process of generating one possible solution to a particular problem.” ~ Colzato, Lorenza S. et al.

Dr. Lorenza Colzato is a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition in the Netherlands. Her recent research revealed that meditation can boost your creativity. Specifically, Colzato found that open monitoring meditation (such as when you notice different thoughts and feelings) improves divergent thinking, which is the kind of thought process that helps you brainstorm many ideas. Further, she suspects that meditation enhances creative thinking by improving people’s moods. We asked her a few questions about her research, which you can read in full here.

What inspired your research?

Steve Jobs, who is a very inspirational person. He is arguably one of the most creative minds of our time and he dedicated his life to Soto Zen Buddhist meditation practice.

Steve Jobs has often referred to meditation as the main source of creativity. So, I wanted to test the idea that indeed meditation makes you more creative.

What practical insights can someone take from your study?

The practical lesson for people is that if they need to do a brain storm session at work, they could do an open monitoring meditation (such as Vipassana) before it. By doing so, they will be able  to generate even more new ideas. So, in this respect practitioners could change “when” they meditate.

Do you have any future research planned?

Currently we are investigating how much practice is necessary to obtain meditation effects on creativity and whether this effect is due to a trait (of being an individual interested in meditation), a state (ad-hoc induced by meditation), or both. To test for these possibilities, we are comparing a group of practitioners and a group of novices.

[Tweet “Meditation For Creativity: an interview with cognitive scientist @LorenzaColzato”]

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