After college I started to feel a little lost in life. I wasn’t very fulfilled by my work, friends had moved away and I felt like I had stopped working on myself. I knew I was in a rut but I wasn’t sure how to get out of it. I wanted to improve my relationship with myself , find what I was passionate about, and work towards new goals but I wasn’t sure where to start.
It wasn’t until my therapist introduced me to Brene Brown and her book “The Gifts of Imperfection’ that I finally found information that I was looking for. Up until then a lot of the self-help books I read didn’t provide a lot of substance. I think part of the problem was that a lot of the self help books I found at the time focused solely on positive thinking and personal experiences.
As I’ve learned you can’t just will things to be better. It takes honesty, courage, discipline, vulnerability and slew of other things to make changes in life. Once you understand why you have certain behaviors, recognize patterns in your life or things you want to change you can rewire and break from those old habits. The three books listed below provide actionable steps based on data and research. The information I learned from these books changed my life.
I wish I had found these books 10 years earlier in life and I hope they help you as much as they help me. These books made me feel less alone, helped me change my mindset around motivation and hard work, relationships, perfectionism and offered actual strategies to live a more fulfilling and happy life. I constantly find myself referring back to them and recommend them to everyone.
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown
This book is probably my favorite. I love all of Brene Brown’s work but this book came into my life at exactly the right time. I struggled with perfection all of my life. I felt a constant self-inflicted pressure to be perfect. I thought if I were the best, most ideal version of myself I would be praised, loved, accepted and in control. Of course I had it all wrong and my perfectionism actually had the complete opposite effect and held me back in many areas of my life. This book reads like advice from a friend and provides you actionable steps and even resources to explore the topics further on your own.
Grit by Angela Duckworth
This book taught me about the power of perseverance and shifting to a growth mindset. Grit provides fascinating insights on why some people succeed and others fail. From high achievers and top performing Olympians to CEOs there’s numerous traits and qualities they have in common. Sometimes I can get a little hung up on comparison and this book highlights the power of hard work and perseverance over natural talent. This book highlights how we have more control over our circumstances than we might think. Although but it’s not without time, discipline, and effort and that applies for every successful person.
Designing Your Life – How to Build a Well-lived Joyful Life
This book is written by the same professors that created the Design Your Life class taught at Stanford. It teaches you how to think like a designer and reframe your thinking in all aspects of your life. This book has lots of helpful exercises all throughout the book that helps you explore what’s important to you, what your interested in, what your good at, different life paths and a lot more. I was struggling with my career and what I wanted to do with my life and this book brought up questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself before. It helped me try on a new way of thinking and challenged me to look at things differently. My favorite part of the book was that each chapter had an in-depth exercise to complete so that you actually put what you learned about into action.