Books
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Inspiration and Creativity as Springboards to a Beautifully-Lived Life
Want to add a sparkle to your day? Read Thirty More Chic Days: Creating an Inspired Mindset for a Magical Life by Fiona Ferris. Ferris offers a month of ideas that will turbocharge your inner Parisian chic-ster (and upgrade your daily life experience.) Each chapter represents a day in the month. And each day, the author presents an idea to “up-level” the reader’s ordinary life experience. Whether it’s an idea to free one’s creativity or an idea to set aside a little time for additional self-care, each nugget of advice is gently and persuasively described. One cannot help but be inspired by the author’s sense of enthusiasm and ingenuity! Her…
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Sleep -vs- Calm
I tried a “schedule” experiment a few weeks ago. I read Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning: The Not So Obvious Secret Guarenteed to Transform Your Life and decided to try his 30-day challenge. Here is Elrod’s basic message: how we START our day basically sets the course for how our day goes. Start our day by scrambling out of bed late and panic-stricken (because we hit the snooze button too many times) and we tend to continue on a scrambling, chaotic-feeling course for the whole day. Start our day with a short series of activities that brings us to a calm, focused, grateful mental state and we move through…
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Road Rage or Inner Peace?
Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan. So how do we spend our time when caught in traffic or trapped in the slowest line ever experienced in the history of mankind? Tan gives us some ideas on how to creatively use these brief (or not so) interludes in our busy days. Humorous and thoughtful, Tan offers unusual wisedom and good advice presented in gentle, bite-sized nuggets. I’ve tried his approach to line-survival (the 20-second meditation on loving-kindness) and can honestly report that it works! I could feel my tension seep away as I breathed slowly and focused on the positive intention of sending the (very) slow clerk thoughts of loving-kindness. It…
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Authenticity, Freedom and LESS
The Year of Less – How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy In a Store by Cait Flanders. Cait Flanders writes a blog called CaitFlanders.com. Several years ago, she embarked on a year-long experiment to NOT purchase anything that was not consumable or not needed (or not related to her dream of travel) and documented her journey on her blog. The book about her year of un-consumerism takes her experiences and adds in some background information and post-experiment discoveries that she didn’t write about in her blog. It’s a fascinating read by an interesting and likable author. Her…
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Old Money and New Blood
The Old Money Book by Byron Tully. Humorous, tongue-in-cheek but VERY spot-on advice for thinking about money and our relationship with it. I had the mental image of a visiting great-uncle (looking eerily like an older Winston Churchill) sitting back in a wing-back leather chair in an old English country estate library. In between puffs on his cigar, he acerbically mutters little gems of great financial management advice to the “younger niece or nephew” (us, the reader.) One of the best pieces of advice is that there is quite a difference between “appearance of wealth” and “reality of wealth”. We’ve all heard the idea expressed before – but it is…
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Younger Next Year & Thinner This Year, What’s Not to Love?
Laugh-out-loud funny, irreverent, thought-provoking Chris Crowley (and Henry Lodge, MD, and Jennifer Sachek, PhD) will have you snickering your way to a healthier, happier & more youthful you – no matter what your age or stage of life is. Chris, Harry and Jen have my sweetheart and me rethinking the next stage of our life. And with Chris driving the discussion, it’s a hilarious and encouraging experience. The topic is deep – what do we think our last third of our lives will like and exactly how do we want to be living it? Chris definitely got us thinking and even more important, through his boisterous good humor and wily…
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Coffee with Winston Churchill
40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin. A terrific introduction to the towering, complicated Winston Churchill. Rubin combines a warm, conversational writing style with exacting research. The book reads like a light, easy chat. The author’s tone is so relaxed and personable, one almost takes for granted Rubin’s quality and density of critical analysis. Churchill was described as “larger than life” even during his own lifetime. Rubin does an excellent job in introducing the reader to the ever fascinating, vivid, charming, difficult, tumultuous Winston Churchill.
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Happiness
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Only for people who love both living their life and analyzing it. A deceptively easy read as the author re-evaluates her assumptions & actions in important areas of her own life – all from the perspective of “does this add to my happiness overall?” A very perceptive as well as humorous look at the quirkiness of being human. Note: The author’s insight and humor inspired me to make notes and plans for my own “Happiness Project.”
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Clothes & What They Express About Our Thoughts
You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You by Jennifer Baumgartner. An eye opening perspective on how our closets can be the true mirrors of our psyche. The author has a friendly and warm tone of voice. She describes different women (and one man) and how their stages of life and their closets were intertwined – both the literal (these are the clothes that the people wore every day) and the mental/emotional – the clothes represented how the people saw themselves and their lives. I finished the book and then looked at my own closet with a different (and clearer) perspective.
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The Glamorous French Aunt (that we all wish we had) Talks Style
How To Be Chic & Elegant by Marie Anne La Coeur. Short, to the point, on target. The voice of a stylish Parisian “woman of a certain age” who gives us terrific life and style advice in a blunt, no-nonsense manner.