No to Resolutions, Yes to Growth!

I don't make New Year's resolutions.

I don't have anything against them, I just know myself. Personally, making a resolution for the year to come is basically setting myself up for failure. It's too daunting, too big, too overwhelming.

I believe in a slow and steady process of personal development and growth. Mine is a growth journey rather than a goal oriented destination.

I've always been an avid reader of thinkers, and dreamers and doers. I recently picked up an Eckhart Tolle book that I had attempted to read 15 years ago. I say "attempted" because although the book was in English and I understood the words and sometimes even the sentences, I had no idea what these thoughts strung together meant. It was a foreign language although it was my native tongue.

On my latest delve into "the book" I laughed. It was all so clear. The book was the same, but I was not. Life had changed me. I no longer needed a secret decoder to be able to understand.

No matter where you are on your own growth journey, the right book at the right time, can break you wide open to a whole new way of seeing yourself and the world. However, the wrong book at the wrong time, might just send you scampering away and curling up in a fetal position, rocking back and forth.

As we start the New Year, I thought I'd share three of my favorite personal development books that don't require a trip to a mountaintop, or a trip on LSD to understand.

You can read any, or none, or all. If you choose to read all, I suggest you read them as numbered below. The insights I gained from each, provided space for what I learned in the next.

I also generally recommend the audiobook version for this type of learning, I find that it resonates more.

1. Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy: by Mo Gawdat. An interesting book from a person you might not initially expect to author this type of book. Gawdat was a bigwig CEO at Google and a systems engineer for IBM. A very smart man with a certain way of thinking. He decided to use his engineering background and critical thinking skills to try to come up with an equation that would lead to happiness. Over 12 years he came up with a happiness algorithm. The equation would be put to the test when he was blind-sided by a personal tragedy.
2. The Surrender Experiment, My Journey Into Life's Perfection: by Michael A. Singer. While the author of the first book that I mentioned takes a very analytical, pragmatic approach to solving the riddle of happiness, the author of this book does the exact opposite. This is the true story of how his life unfolds when he stops resisting what is put in front of him, choosing instead to "go with the flow" of what the universe presents him. We follow Singer through his journey of developing software, to running a multi-billion dollar business, to starting a huge spiritual community, to being one of the FBI's most wanted.
3. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose: by Eckhart Tolle. At the beginning of this, the author states you are either ready for the book, or you are not. I clearly was not when I tried to read it 15 years ago. As I mentioned, although I tried in earnest to get it at the time, the concepts swirled on the pages in front of me like some kind of virtual reality abstract art. I needed some basic stepping stones before I could start latching on. Tolle's work in general, and this book in particular is even more relevant and important than it was when it was first published. He discusses how we are a society of people all being run by our individual ego. The collective mind then comes together to form a collective consciousness of nothing less than insanity. This is an interesting concept if you are just starting down this path of transformation, and an important reminder if you have been on course for a while.

I hope you make the time to check out any (or all) of the books I mention above. If you do, please drop me a line and let me know your thoughts!

Also, If you are JUST starting out playing with personal development and mindfulness, my own book, Mindfulness For People Who Suck At Being Mindful, is a quick easy read which is an introduction to some larger ideas and practices. (You can get it at Amazon through the link above.)

"Always gonna be an uphill battle.Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose. Ain't about how fast I get there. Ain't about what's waiting on the other side
It's the climb."
Performed by Miley Cyrus written by Jessi Alexander and Jon Mabe.