Welcome to Issue 81 of the SUPERIOR BOOK PRODUCTIONS newsletter!
Happy 2020, Everyone!
It’s hard to believe winter is almost over—at least here in Upper Michigan, I’m hoping so, though we’ve been known to have blizzards as late as May 10. Whether you need a good book to cuddle up with during a late winter storm, or you want something to read on the beach during spring break, this month’s newsletter features some great books for figuring out how to take back control of your life, no matter what your situation. I hope you will check them out and find them beneficial. I know I did.
Think Spring, Everyone.
Tyler
This Month’s Great Book Quote:
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
— C. S. Lewis
In Money Messages: Get Out of the Red and Into the Green, Emotional and Financial Freedom to Transform Your Life, Jody Robinson and Karen Putz come together to create a powerful book that teaches people how to look at their relationships with money and then transform them into emotional and financial freedom. Together, they have created this insightful, thought-provoking look at how we can all improve our relationships with money.
The book, which weaves together interviews and personal stories with practical exercises and reflections, is divided into three sections: Understanding Money Messages, Rewriting Your Money Messages, and Investing in You. Robinson clarifies that before we can have a positive relationship with money, we need to understand what messages we received about money while growing up, such as “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” and also the spending or saving habits we saw others emulate and which we may now be practicing, consciously or not.
To read more, visit Money Messages.
Your Life Shoes is a fun, fascinating, and thoughtful look into the life of Mary McMichael, complete with the lessons she’s learned and guidance and exercises to apply those lessons to our own lives. They say you can never understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes, but the truth is that we all wear different shoes at different times in our lives. As a shoe lover, Mary has decided to take the metaphor a step further, comparing various life issues with different types of shoes, and then exploring how those situations can make us stronger.
Mary begins by using the shoe metaphor in regards to people, stating: “People are like shoes. We wander through our lives just looking around, and people catch our attention. We like the way some look, the way they sound, and the way they present themselves. We explore them a little further in conversation and we become intrigued. We like them and decide to invest in them. We spend more time with them and build relationships with them. As we spend more time with them, we begin to notice their idiosyncrasies, the ones ‘that hurt our feet.’ We keep them around anyway, because they look good, make us look good, or make us feel good.”
To read more, visit Your Life Shoes.
Bertha Barraza’s new book The Sense of Belonging, as its cover declares, is “An Ethnographic Autobiography of Marginalization.” In other words, it’s her life story about being an immigrant from Mexico to the United States. She came to this country as a teenager with her family. She knew little at the time other than that she had to work hard to make a living, and work hard she did, at several minimum wage jobs until one day she had an awakening. She had not finished high school and no one was going to promote her without a high school diploma.
Bertha now knew what she had to do, but a high school diploma wasn’t what she wanted. She decided to quit her job and go to East Los Angeles College and fill out an application. She had no idea what really lay ahead for her. She only knew getting a college education was the first step to bettering her life.
However, this book is not just Bertha’s biography. It’s a look at the processes Bertha underwent to earn an education, and it serves as a guide to students today who want to do the same.
To read more, visit The Sense of Belonging.
In Building a Winning Organization, Dylan Stafford shares his hard-earned secrets about how to build an organization that will keep employees happy and keep customers coming back. Besides drawing upon his academic experiences as UCLA’s Dean of Admissions for its Business Management Program, and his work in corporate America, he also shares the perspectives of students and others in both academia and the business world. And then he mixes it all up by adding a dash of magic—à la Harry Potter.
“Harry Potter?” you may say. Yes, Harry Potter. Dylan understands that today’s younger generations who are entering the workforce grew up reading J. K. Rowling’s novels and watching the films based upon them, so he suggests that we want our organizations to have that extra bit of magic to keep everyone engaged in their work and in our company’s products. He advocates for using Hogwarts as a model for how to add this magic. Then, in each chapter, he relates an aspect of work to Hogwarts. This strategy makes the book fun for the reader, and the examples are clear and the lessons applicable, regardless of whether you’re a Harry Potter fan.
To read more, visit Building a Winning Organization.
Anyone who is tired of attracting Mr. or Mrs. Wrong and still wants to find Mr. or Mrs. Right need look no further. Renée Michelle Gordon has the answer for you in the five-step process she developed to find her own soulmate, and now she shares that process so others can do the same in her new book Finding Your Love at Last.
If anyone is experienced at finding love, it is Renée. She has actually been engaged nine times, but each time, she ended up breaking off the engagement before she went to the altar because she realized the man was not her perfect soulmate. She learned how to make herself appealing to men through online dating websites, but she also learned how to be discerning about which men she dated. When she began online dating, she was hoping to find six or seven potential suitors, one of whom would become her “love at last.” Instead, she was overwhelmed with men who wanted to date her. Using just one dating website, she received no less than 2,874 invitations to connect. With such overwhelming numbers, how could anyone pick the right man?
Well, Renée did it through a very careful five-step process.
To read more, visit Finding Your Love at Last.
In Thriving After Your Stroke, Dr. Steven Edgley shares the tips, techniques, and information needed to survive and thrive after what initially may seem like a devastating event. Edgley has not only suffered from a stroke himself, but upon recovery, he chose to use his medical background to spend his life helping other stroke patients through recovery. Because of this background and knowing the pain, doubt, questions, and struggle that arise from having a stroke, he is well qualified to offer advice and comfort to stroke survivors, and most of all, reassurance that not only can you survive, but you can live a rich and meaningful life long after the stroke happens.
Thriving After Your Stroke is realistic as well as inspirational. Edgley makes it clear that after a stroke, you usually won’t be able to recover fully to the point of going back to the way things were before, but you can recover functional abilities. He shares personal examples of how he learned to speak, type, and move around again. Today, not only does he write books, but he also bicycles and skis, all sure signs that stroke recovery is possible.
To read more, visit Thriving After Your Stroke.
