Pat’s Reading List
Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old?: The Path of Purposeful Aging
Grow old on purpose. This book invites readers to navigate a purposeful path from adulthood to elderhood with choice, curiosity, and courage.
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Everyone is getting old; not everyone is growing old. But the path of purposeful aging is accessible to all—and it’s fundamental to health, happiness, and longevity.
With a focus on growing whole through developing a sense of purpose in later life, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? celebrates the experience of aging with inspiring stories, real-world practices, and provocative questions. Framed by a long conversation between two old friends, the book reconceives aging as a liberating experience that enables us to become more authentically the person we always meant to be with each passing year.
In their bestseller Repacking Your Bags, Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro defined the good life as “living in the place you belong, with people you love, doing the right work, on purpose.” This book builds on that definition to offer a purposeful path for living well while aging well.
Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself
How does one person make a difference in the world? People constantly seek to discover meaning in their lives, but as humans take on the challenges facing us in this decade and beyond, we’re searching for it now more than ever.
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Living a Committed Life demonstrates the power of dedication that goes beyond the self and teaches how to live a committed life that enables you to draw on resources and capacities from your most authentic self. In five parts, Lynne Twist shows how to make and keep commitments, engage in individual and collective action, and discover ways to connect and collaborate to make a difference.
By sharing stories and perspectives from her life, Twist reveals her unique experience as a thought leader and activist in multiple causes, from ending world hunger and protecting the Amazon rainforest to empowering women’s leadership. The book presents the guiding principles that have enabled her own success and that turn inspiration into action for everyone.
A fresh way of thinking about spirituality that grows throughout life
In Falling Upward, Fr. Richard Rohr seeks to help readers understand the tasks of the two halves of life and to show them that those who have fallen, failed, . . .
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. . . or “gone down” are the only ones who understand “up.”
Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of life, but the whole thesis of this book is exactly the opposite.
What looks like falling down can largely be experienced as “falling upward.” In fact, it is not a loss but somehow actually a gain, as we have all seen with elders who have come to their fullness.
- Explains why the second half of life can and should be full of spiritual richness
- Offers a new view of how spiritual growth happens?loss is gain
- Richard. Rohr is a regular contributing writer for Sojourners and Tikkun magazines
This important book explores the counterintuitive message that we grow spiritually much more by doing wrong than by doing right.
Experience is making a comeback. Learn how to repurpose your wisdom.
At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley was looking at an open horizon in midlife.
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Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He had the industry experience, but Conley was lacking in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues.
He didn’t write code, or have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son. Conley quickly discovered that while he’d been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner’s mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the “Modern Elder.”
A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life’s biggest transitions
Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning.
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Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changes—from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start. He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change.
What Feiler discovered was a world in which transitions are becoming more plentiful and mastering the skills to manage them is more urgent for all of us. The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. We all feel unnerved by this upheaval. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected, that we’ve veered off course, living life out of order. But we’re not alone.
Life Is in the Transitions introduces the fresh, illuminating vision of the nonlinear life, in which each of us faces dozens of disruptors. One in ten of those becomes what Feiler calls a lifequake, a massive change that leads to a life transition. The average length of these transitions is five years. The upshot: We all spend half our lives in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now.
The most exciting thing Feiler identified is a powerful new tool kit for navigating these pivotal times. Drawing on his extraordinary trove of insights, he lays out specific strategies each of us can use to reimagine and rebuild our lives, often stronger than before.
From a master storyteller with an essential message, Life Is in the Transitions can move readers of any age to think deeply about times of change and how to transform them into periods of creativity and growth.
Experience is making a comeback. Learn how to repurpose your wisdom.
At age 52, after selling the company he founded and ran as CEO for 24 years, rebel boutique hotelier Chip Conley was looking at an open horizon in midlife.
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Then he received a call from the young founders of Airbnb, asking him to help grow their disruptive start-up into a global hospitality giant. He had the industry experience, but Conley was lacking in the digital fluency of his 20-something colleagues.
He didn’t write code, or have an Uber or Lyft app on his phone, was twice the age of the average Airbnb employee, and would be reporting to a CEO young enough to be his son. Conley quickly discovered that while he’d been hired as a teacher and mentor, he was also in many ways a student and intern. What emerged is the secret to thriving as a mid-life worker: learning to marry wisdom and experience with curiosity, a beginner’s mind, and a willingness to evolve, all hallmarks of the “Modern Elder.”
The roadmap for finding purpose, meaning, and success as we age
Many of us assume that the more successful we are, the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. . . .
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. . . But the truth is, the greater our achievements and our attachment to them, the more we notice our decline, and the more painful it is when it occurs.
What can we do, starting now, to make our older years a time of happiness, purpose, and yes, success?
At the height of his career at the age of 50, Arthur Brooks embarked on a seven-year journey to discover how to transform his future from one of disappointment over waning abilities into an opportunity for progress. From Strength to Strength is the result, a practical roadmap for the rest of your life.
Drawing on social science, philosophy, biography, theology, and eastern wisdom, as well as dozens of interviews with everyday men and women, Brooks shows us that true life success is well within our reach. By refocusing on certain priorities and habits that anyone can learn, such as deep wisdom, detachment from empty rewards, connection and service to others, and spiritual progress, we can set ourselves up for increased happiness.
Proven principles for sustainable success, with new leadership insight
PEAK is the popular, transformative guide to doing business better, written by a seasoned entrepreneur/CEO who has disrupted his favorite industry not once, but twice. . . .
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. . . Author Chip Conley, founder and former CEO of one of the world’s largest boutique hotel companies, turned to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at a time when his company was in dire need. And years later, when the young founders of Airbnb asked him to help turn their start-up home sharing company into a world-class hospitality giant, Conley once again used the principles he’d developed in PEAK. In the decade since this book’s first edition, Conley’s PEAK strategy has been developed on six continents in organizations in virtually every industry. The author’s foundational premise is that great leaders become amateur psychologists by understanding the unique needs of three key relationships—with employees, customers, and investors—and this message has resonated with every kind of leader and company including some of the world’s best-known, from Apple to Facebook. Avid users of PEAK have found that the principles create greater loyalty and differentiation with their key stakeholders. This new second edition includes in-depth examples of real-world PEAK companies, including the author’s own at Airbnb, and exclusive PEAK leadership practices that will take you—and your company’s performance—to new heights.
Whether you’re at a startup or a Fortune 500 company, at a for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental organization, this book can help you and your people reach potential you never realized you had.
- Understand how Maslow’s hierarchy makes for winning business practices
- Learn how PEAK drove some of today’s top businesses to success
- Help employees reach their full potential—and beyond
- Transform the customer experience and keep investors happy
The PEAK framework succeeds because it elevates the business from the inside out. These same principles apply in the boardroom, the breakroom, and your living room at home, and have proven to be the foundation of healthy, fulfilled lives. Even if you think you’re doing great, you could always be doing better—and PEAK gives you a roadmap to the next level.
How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live
Yale professor and leading expert on the psychology of successful aging, Dr. Becca Levy, draws on her ground-breaking research to show how age beliefs can be improved . . .
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. . . so they benefit all aspects of the aging process, including the way genes operate and the extension of life expectancy by 7.5 years.
The often-surprising results of Levy’s science offer stunning revelations about the mind-body connection. She demonstrates that many health problems formerly considered to be entirely due to the aging process, such as memory loss, hearing decline, and cardiovascular events, are instead influenced by the negative age beliefs that dominate in the US and other ageist countries. It’s time for all of us to rethink aging and Breaking the Age Code shows us how to do just that.
Based on her innovative research, stories that range from pop culture to the corporate boardroom, and her own life, Levy shows how age beliefs shape all aspects of our lives. She also presents a variety of fascinating people who have benefited from positive age beliefs as well as an entire town that has flourished with these beliefs.
Breaking the Age Code is a landmark work, presenting not only easy-to-follow techniques for improving age beliefs so they can contribute to successful aging, but also a blueprint to reduce structural ageism for lasting change and an age-just society.
How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We Believe
In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality.
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Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus.
In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus’s last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.
Drawing on scripture, history, and spiritual practice, Rohr articulates a transformative view of Jesus Christ as a portrait of God’s constant, unfolding work in the world. “God loves things by becoming them,” he writes, and Jesus’s life was meant to declare that humanity has never been separate from God—except by its own negative choice. When we recover this fundamental truth, faith becomes less about proving Jesus was God, and more about learning to recognize the Creator’s presence all around us, and in everyone we meet.
Thought-provoking, practical, and full of deep hope and vision, The Universal Christ is a landmark book from one of our most beloved spiritual writers, and an invitation to contemplate how God liberates and loves all that is.
Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
We all suffer from unhealthy dependencies that we continually return to in hopes of having a better life.
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But after yet another TV show is streamed or another drink is swallowed, we find we once again feel worse, not better, than we did before. Where is the hope for that fully awakened life we long to live?
World-renowned author Richard Rohr says we can only be healed and find true fulfillment by facing our dependencies head-on. In Breathing Under Water he will guide you to:
- Disentangle from cultural cycles of sin and emptiness
- Discover how to get free from your personal toxic dependencies
- Learn how the Twelve Step program can supplement Christian teaching
- Find compassion for others and yourself
- Enjoy a deeper spiritual life, feeling certain of God’s love for you
Those who are ready to break negative patterns and experience greater internal freedom will find bold hope and transformation in this insightful book.
The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective and History
Richard Rohr and Andrea Ebert’s runaway best-seller shows both the basic logic of the Enneagram . . .
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. . . and its harmony with the core truths of Christian thought from the time of the early Church forward.
Transitions: Making Sense Of Life’s Changes
The best-selling guide for coping with changes in life and work, named one of the 50 all-time best books in self-help and personal development
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Whether you choose it or it is thrust upon you, change brings both opportunities and turmoil. Since Transitions was first published, this supportive guide has helped hundreds of thousands of readers cope with these issues by providing an elegantly simple yet profoundly insightful roadmap of the transition process. With the understanding born of both personal and professional experience, William Bridges takes readers step by step through the three stages of any transition: The Ending, The Neutral Zone, and, eventually, The New Beginning. Bridges explains how each stage can be understood and embraced, leading to meaningful and productive movement into a hopeful future. With a new introduction highlighting how the advice in the book continues to apply and is perhaps even more relevant today, and a new chapter devoted to change in the workplace, Transitions will remain the essential guide for coping with the one constant in life: change.
POWER OF TED* (*THE EMPOWERMENT DYNAMIC)
The Power of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic) is a fable on self-leadership, because how you lead your own life has everything to do with how you lead in other areas.
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It is a tool for both individuals and organizations who want to create more effective communication and relationships. Learning how to transform everyday drama and opt for more growth-oriented solutions, is the priceless gift it teaches.
As you walk with David, the main character, he shares how he is feeling victimized by life. Through serendipity he meets some wise guides, Ted and Sophia, who show David how he can move from feeling like a Victim to being a Creator of his own life.
The Power of TED* offers a powerful alternative to the Karpman Drama Triangle with its roles of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer. The Empowerment Dynamic (TED) provides the antidote roles of Creator, Challenger and Coach and a more positive approach to life s challenges.
The teaching story provides a guide for learning and growing through the challenges we all face in our lives. Its message resonates with everyone who, at some time in their lives, feel victimized by their situation.
Having helped thousands of people and scores of organizations over the past decade, The Power of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic) is being published in this 10th Anniversary Edition to convey a very timely message of hope that all of life, whether at home or work, can be transformed to create satisfying and fulfilling relationships.
Its message is needed now more than ever.
The 10th Anniversary Edition retains the powerful leadership story and adds three new sections:
1. A new Foreword by Lisa Lahey, Ed D, Harvard Graduate School of Education
2. New Study Questions for the Journey
3. A new Preface by the Author
…really smart and helpful information about…stronger, saner, and healthier ways of behaving. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
The Power of TED* is an engaging story that will help you escape from the traps of victimhood and enablement! Stephen M. R. Covey, author of The Speed of Trust and co-founder of FranklinCovey s Trust Practice
Victimhood has become, in our time, a badge, an identity, a game, an excuse for laziness, frivolous law suits, and clever domination of others. I have always taught that Jesus did the victim thing right: He neither played the victim nor created victims of others. I think David Emerald is teaching our world the same wisdom in his Empowerment Dynamic. Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., author of Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
It s no exaggeration to say that our world would be a better place if everyone read it. Lisa Lahey, Harvard Graduate School of Education; co-author, Immunity to Change, and An Everyone Culture
The Empowerment Triangle is a highly original and effective escape from the Drama Triangle. Stephen Karpman, M.D., originator of the Karpman Drama Triangle
When practical advice meets profound, yet simple, explanations for human behavior, we can learn, change, and grow. Annie McKee; co-author Becoming a Resonant Leader, Resonant Leadership, and Primal Leadership
Reading TED* is like having a private session with a gifted spiritual teacher and coach: as you make this delightful journey, you awaken to powerful new possibilities. Jennifer Louden, author of Comfort Secrets of Busy Women and the Comfort Book series
This powerful little book points the way toward a hugely fulfilling life of empowering relationships at work, at home, in the whole of your life. Gay Hendricks, Ph.D. and Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D., authors of Conscious Loving
The Art of Happiness, A Handbook for Living
Nearly every time you see him, he’s laughing, or at least smiling. And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling.
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He’s the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, a Nobel Prize winner, and a hugely sought-after speaker and statesman. Why is he so popular? Even after spending only a few minutes in his presence you can’t help feeling happier.
If you ask him if he’s happy, even though he’s suffered the loss of his country, the Dalai Lama will give you an unconditional yes. What’s more, he’ll tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that the very motion of our life is toward happiness. How to get there has always been the question. He’s tried to answer it before, but he’s never had the help of a psychiatrist to get the message across in a context we can easily understand. The Art of Happiness is the book that started the genre of happiness books, and it remains the cornerstone of the field of positive psychology.
Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Considerd by many to the classic book by the Dalai Lama, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life’s obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace. Based on 2,500 years of Buddhist meditations mixed with a healthy dose of common sense, The Art of Happiness is a book that crosses the boundaries of traditions to help readers with difficulties common to all human beings. After being in print for ten years, this book has touched countless lives and uplifted spirits around the world.
The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World
Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression.
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Despite their hardships—or, as they would say, because of them—they are two of the most joyful people on the planet.
In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness’s eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life’s inevitable suffering?
They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy.
This book offers us a rare opportunity to experience their astonishing and unprecendented week together, from the first embrace to the final good-bye.
We get to listen as they explore the Nature of True Joy and confront each of the Obstacles of Joy—from fear, stress, and anger to grief, illness, and death. They then offer us the Eight Pillars of Joy, which provide the foundation for lasting happiness. Throughout, they include stories, wisdom, and science. Finally, they share their daily Joy Practices that anchor their own emotional and spiritual lives.
The Archbishop has never claimed sainthood, and the Dalai Lama considers himself a simple monk. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.