Fresh-Brewed Life by Nicole Johnson

I was hoping for a little bit of inspiration with this particular reading selection. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The author was very open and honest with her approach to life, which is admirable, yet I still had trouble connecting to her and therefore was unable to feel moved or inspired. This was the first Thomas Nelson BookSneeze eBook that I have disliked. I know this it is a risk with every book that I pick up that I may not like it, but when I am provided with a free book to read and review - it is especially difficult to finish it and then provide those I know with my honest assessment: I didn't like the style of Johnson's writing and I did not think that the way that she shared the difficulties in her own life were what I most need to hear at this stage in my life.

Surviving Your Serengeti by Stefan Swanepoel

Sometimes business self help books can be a little preachy and will turn me off before I even get to the meat of the story. Surviving Your Serengeti is the exception. This “fable of self-discovery” does not seek to bore you with a twenty step plan toward business success. It limits the lessons to seven, in fact. The seven are presented in story format relating the seven skills of enduring, strategizing, enterprising, being graceful, being efficient, taking risks, and communicating to those skills demonstrated by animals in the wild Serengeti of Africa. By using a traveling American businessman as the main character who is learning about the link between nature and skills essential to leading a successful business, the lessons are easy to relate to and offer concrete action steps for recognizing and improving these skills in the workplace. 

The support website listed at the back of the book provides an opportunity to take a short quiz to help readers discover their own dominant skill and offers tips for maximizing that skill and pitfalls to watch out for when doing so.  

This book was an excellent narrative and I look forward to reading more from Stefan Swanepoel.

I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Jolt: Get the Jump on a World That’s Constantly Changing by Phil Cooke

Cooke’s Jolt provides an interesting approach to the common self-help themes of creating priorities, leading by helping others, and staying focused in today’s busy world.  Cooke presents a list of 25 jolts, or action steps, that readers should take to lead a more purposeful life. The examples Cooke provides pull from his experiences as a successful producer in Hollywood, as a husband, and as a father of two grown daughters. Cooke’s tie-ins to the movie business are intriguing and provide a refreshing array of real world experiences to connect the ideas behind the 25 “jolts” and the promised desired outcomes.

The publisher sent me a complimentary copy of this book through BookSneeze®, but all opinions stated are honest and true.          

Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute

It can be easy to become trapped in a cycle of self-deception and find yourself blaming others for everything that is going wrong in your life, both personally and professionally.  In Leadership and Self-Deception, this hopeless feeling of being trapped and unhappy is called “being in the box.”  Through the use of a fictional story that makes up the content of this audiobook, the Arbinger Institute provides real life personal and professional situations which help listeners to identify situations in which they have acted in a self-deceptive manner and provides alternative ways of handling those situations that would have resulted in more positive outcomes.  Caring for and helping others are not foreign concepts, but this audiobook serves as a nice reminder of the wonderful benefits of listening to your inner voice.      

The Final Summit by Andy Andrews

In this story, David Ponder is brought to a Final Summit taking place in a conference room located in heaven.  He is tasked by the archangel Gabriel to lead a group of fellow travelers (those whom Gabriel helped during their lifetime to become better leaders by visiting with past leaders who had to overcome great adversities in their lives) to solve the question “What does humanity need to do, individually and collectively, to restore itself to the pathway toward successful civilation?”  David and his fellow travelers (including Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, King David, Eric Erickson, and more) explore the possibilities on how to solve this question.  The consequences for humanity were grave, according to Gabriel, if they failed to solve the question.   

I liked this book a lot.  The questions posed prompted me to think about issues that are easy to forget about at times.  The overall theme of the book was hopeful and positive, and left me motivated to take the messages to heart.  I do caution those contemplating this book as your next “to-read” that David Ponder is the main character in Andy Andrews’s previous book The Traveler’s Gift.  I had listened to a radio interview recently featuring the author where he claimed it was not necessary to read his first book to appreciate this second book, The Final Summit.  While I liked this book and am glad I read it, I did feel lost for the first third of the book, and never quite felt like I was “in the know” as to what these travelers were referring to and how they were communicating.  I really wish I had read the first book before tackling this new release.    

Click by Ori and Rom Brafman

The ability to connect with so many different people is one part of my job as a librarian that I love. Sometimes, however, those connections are very powerful and extraordinary. You know when you are interacting with the other person that things are just – “clicking”. Whether it is with a total stranger, or a coworker as we work on a project, or a loved one, that sensation of connecting is almost magical. When you are clicking with another person you are able to bounce ideas back and forth without fear of judgment, you are able to communicate verbally and non-verbally, and things happen at a much higher rate than normal with higher levels of quality and success. The Brafman brothers have explored this phenomenon in the book Click. They have looked at academic literature on the subject, and also spoken with many successful people and have pinpointed several key characteristics that foster a greater sense of clicking.

Some people are known to be “schmoozers”, but this book points out that most people who foster the greatest degrees of clicking do so without the aim of gaining anything, they are just naturally curious and adaptable and therefore succeed at faster rates than others in the work force. The last three chapters of the book focus on real-world applications for becoming better tuned to the world around you in an attempt to click with a wider group of people. In other words, if it isn’t your natural state to “click” right away with others, then it gives some ideas for becoming a better “clicker.”