At this time of year many of us are thinking about plans for the year ahead. Getting expert guidance can help us figure out what we want and how to get there.
These are the most useful books to ask yourself new questions and help kickstart your plans for 2020.
The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul, by Danielle LaPorte
LaPorte believes that instead of chasing achievements, we should focus on the feelings that the achievement will bring us. She argues that “our feelings inform our thoughts. And our thoughts inform our behavior.”
The book explains this philosophy and asks readers questions throughout, to help get to the bottom of why you want what you want. For example, creating your own venture may be the achievement you want at first glance, but the feeling behind that may be independence. If you understand the feeling behind the goal, you open yourself up to more avenues to achieving it.
Choosing Leadership: a Workbook, by Linda Ginzel
This book was originally a set of handouts from Professor Ginzel’s classes on organizational psychology at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where I was a student. The handouts were so useful, that students kept asking for copies for their friends, spouses and bosses, which spurred Ginzel to create the book. Ginzel’s aim is for its readers to become “wiser younger.”
The workbook emphasizes that leadership is a behavior, and thus a choice. Ginzel fights against the stereotypical division between managers and leaders, saying that most of us have to be both. By training our leadership muscle, and understanding what leadership and courage mean to us, we create our own path.
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Another book to originate from an elite university class, this time from Stanford, where the authors teach a course of the same name. In this book, Burnett and Evans apply design thinking to making life and career choices. The foundations of this thinking include prototyping, team-building and a bias for action, which means taking an action to learn from its results, rather than overthinking theories.
Designing Your Life takes readers through questions and exercises to test their assumptions and motivations, and helps track their progress. The book emphasizes that we learn best from experience, and failure is an inevitable part of that.
If you are not sure if this approach is right for you, you can begin by watching Burnett’s YouTube videos explaining design thinking in the context of life design.
Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen
This book is more analytical and “left brain” than The Desire Map, so could be part of a great combination. Once you have figured out the emotions you want to feel from your stated achievements, you can use...
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