Self-Help

Learn the #1 Secret of the Most Successful Pros: Daily Practice

Eric Maisel knows from experience and observation that the single most crucial element of success for any endeavor is a regular, daily practice. Dr. Maisel, a preeminent creativity coach, therapist, and acclaimed author, shows how and why to implement a daily practice and addresses common challenges. His experience working with bestselling writers, entrepreneurs, musicians, actors, visual artists, recovering addicts, and rehabilitation patients shows as he outlines various ways to approach a daily practice and goes on to help you build a version of this important discipline that suits your life and goals. Real-world stories and practical examples will help you make measurable progress and build satisfaction in your most cherished pursuits.

The Bright Way is an interactive handbook for mastering Diana Rowan’s proven system for freeing your innate creativity.

The Bright Way System has helped thousands of creatives regain their inspiration and motivation, and move past fears so that they can courageously share their visions with the world. It is based on these three principles:

1. Everyone is creative. Creativity happens whenever you directly engage with your chosen activity. (It isn’t just for artists!)

2. You must be creative to be fulfilled in life. If you’re unengaged with life, you will feel dissatisfied, like something is missing. Engage directly with life by reigniting your creativity so that you come back home to your true self.

3. You can tap into your creativity anytime, anyplace, at any age. It’s never too late, and no matter the circumstances, you can be creative.

Written for all creatives from young adults to seniors, The Bright Way’s empowering and reliable system works for a lifetime to help you:

• move through creative blocks so that your creativity consistently flows
• transform performance fear into joyful sharing of your work
• finally let go of self-doubt and embrace unshakable self-confidence

Inspired by Diana’s own journey from severe creative performance anxiety to a fulfilling career as a full-time artist, this handbook is packed with actionable tips and dozens of examples so that you can make this simple yet powerful system truly your own.


Start your Bright Way journey today to access your unique creative voice and shine your light in our new world!

A MASTERFUL BOOK ABOUT BREATHING LIFE INTO ART AND ART INTO LIFE

“Stephen Nachmanovitch’s The Art of Is is a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. To the author, an improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is a product of the nervous system, bigger than the brain and bigger than the body; it is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, unprecedented and unrepeatable. Drawing from the wisdom of the ages, The Art of Is not only gives the reader an inside view of the states of mind that give rise to improvisation, it is also a celebration of the power of the human spirit, which — when exercised with love, immense patience, and discipline — is an antidote to hate.”
— Yo-Yo Ma, cellist

Learn Inner Nurturing and End Emotional Eating

If you regularly eat when you’re not truly hungry, choose unhealthy comfort foods, or eat beyond fullness, something is out of balance. Recent advances in brain science have uncovered the crucial role that our early social and emotional environment plays in the development of imbalanced eating patterns. When we do not receive consistent and sufficient emotional nurturance during our early years, we are at greater risk of seeking it from external sources, such as food. Despite logical arguments, we have difficulty modifying our behavior because we are under the influence of an emotionally dominant part of the brain.

The good news is that the brain can be rewired for optimal emotional health. When Food Is Comfort presents a breakthrough mindfulness practice called Inner Nurturing, a comprehensive, step-by-step program developed by an author who was herself an emotional eater. You’ll learn how to nurture yourself with the loving-kindness you crave and handle stressors more easily so that you can stop turning to food for comfort. Improved health and self-esteem, more energy, and weight loss will naturally follow.

Use Life Skills, Not Willpower, to Stop Overeating

The reason you turn to food when you’re stressed or distressed is that you don’t have better ways of managing life’s ups and downs. According to Karen R. Koenig, an expert on the psychology of eating, you can transform your eating habits — and your life — by developing effective life skills. When you have enhanced skills, you won’t need to turn to mindless eating to make it through the day and will get the best out of life rather than letting life get the best of you. With Koenig’s guidance, you’ll learn how to establish and maintain functional relationships, take care of yourself physically and emotionally, think rationally, and create a passionate, joyful, and meaningful life. When these behaviors take root and become automatic, food becomes what it is meant to be: nourishment and one of life’s many pleasures.

Creative people will experience depression—that’s a given. It’s a given because they are regularly confronted by doubts about the meaningfulness of their efforts. Theirs is a kind of depression that does not respond to pharmaceutical treatment. What’s required is healing in the realm of meaning.

In this groundbreaking book, Eric Maisel teaches creative people how to handle these recurrent crises of meaning and how to successfully manage the anxieties of the creative process. Using examples both from the lives of famous creators such as van Gogh and from his own creativity coaching practice, Maisel explains that despite their inevitable difficulties, creative people possess the ability to forge relationships, repair themselves, and find meaning in their work and their lives. Maisel presents a step-by-step plan to help creative people handle their special brand of depression and rediscover the reasons they are driven to create in the first place.

In his decades as a psychotherapist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel has found a common thread behind what often gets labeled “writer’s block,” “procrastination,” or “stage fright.” It’s the particular anxiety that, paradoxically, keeps creators from doing, completing, or sharing the work they are driven toward. This “creative anxiety” can take the form of avoiding the work, declaring it not good enough, or failing to market it — and it can cripple creators for decades, even lifetimes. But Maisel has learned what sets successful creators apart. He shares these strategies here, including artist-specific stress management; how to work despite bruised egos, day jobs, and other inevitable frustrations; and what not to do to deal with anxiety. Implementing these 24 lessons replaces the pain of not creating with the profound rewards of free artistic self-expression.

* Practical insights and proven techniques for overcoming the challenges and fears that plague creators of every kind
* Teaching tales that convey effective approaches to creating fearlessly and abundantly

Creativity Coaching Essentials shows people how to become more effective creators by guiding them through 12 self-coaching lessons. Eric Maisel, a leading creativity coach, writes each lesson with a novelist's flair, as a narrative complete with examples, exercises, and questions to help readers explore and reflect on underlying issues that may be keeping them from pursuing their urge to create. Topics include committing, planning and doing, generating mental energy, achieving a centered presence, becoming an anxiety expert, upholding your dream, and maintaining a creative life. Maisel has worked extensively with creative people — poets, filmmakers, novelists, dancers — and he revisits some of them in coaching sessions in San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York. Typical are the rock musician who wants to pursue a solo career and the screenwriter anxious to become a poet. Their examples both entertain and instruct, outlining how to discover one's personal muse — and the motivation to keep creating.

The debut book from hit podcaster and life coach Wendy Valentine is a rallying cry, inspirational memoir, and practical guidebook for the millions of Gen X women discovering midlife as the perfect time to craft the life they’ve always dreamed of

Like millions of other Gen X women, Wendy Valentine entered midlife plagued with a host of seemingly insurmountable problems: unemployment, divorce, anxiety, a mountain of debt, the death of her brother, and chronic illness. Looking around and wondering if a window to new possibilities was closing, she held on to a vision of opening a new door instead, a dream of herself driving across the country cool, collected, happy, and singing along with the tunes blasting from her Bluetooth. Unrealistic? Maybe. Still, it worked.

In Women Waking Up, Valentine redefines midlife for women based on her own experience of following her vision, buying an RV, and traveling cross-country seeking new adventures. On the back roads of America, she found herself and identified seven steps any woman can follow on their own road to satisfaction and fulfillment. She lays out this step-by-step process of getting from point A of angst to point B of bliss in the F.R.E.E.D.O.M. method, walking readers through their own midlife makeover process.

Valentine guides readers to explore the eight areas that form a “wheel” of life, or in this case midlife: love, career, friends, family, finance, personal growth, health, and leisure. Along the way, she also reminds readers that they have something they didn’t before: knowledge and experience. Women Waking Up shows how all women armed with these two superpowers of midlife plus Valentine’s foolproof method can find balance, harmony, satisfaction, and the lives they’ve always wanted.

Silver winner of the 2023 Foreword INDIES award for business & economics by Foreword Reviews

Want to know how to speak up instead of shut down, face challenges head-on instead of run the other way, and keep your cool even when others don’t? Talking on Eggshells shows you how. This inspiring book shares everyday character-building situations and offers examples of what to say and not to say so you’ll never be tongue-tied or tongue-twisted again.

Sam Horn’s relatable, real-life stories and energizing, instantly usable insights will help you think on your feet, reduce stress, and deal more proactively and diplomatically with bosses, coworkers, customers, friends, family members, partners, children, even that date who just ghosted you. You’ll love this go-to guide for clearly communicating what you want and need to get the results you desire and deserve.

Seventy-four percent of Americans suffer from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking. In fact, even top professional speakers and accomplished actors experience butterflies before presenting. They never eliminate the butterflies; they just teach them how to fly in formation. How? Michael Gelb’s techniques will help you clarify and shape your message so that your audience — no matter how big or small, in person or virtual — will care about it. Once the message is clear, he teaches you how to convey it in memorable, creative, and effective ways. Gelb shows that public speaking is a skill anyone can learn and enjoy. Mastering the Art of Public Speaking will guide you to rediscover your natural gift for communication while strengthening confidence and presence.

“HURRY, BUY THE BOOK AND TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE.”
— Marla Friedman, PsyD, PC, board chairman, Badge of Life

What if you could stop panic by tapping into a different part of your brain? Through natural stimulation of your vagus nerve, you can end panic and anxiety, and this book can show you how. After years of working to help sufferers of panic and anxiety, licensed therapist (and pilot) Tom Bunn discovered a highly effective solution that utilizes a part of the brain not affected by the stress hormones that bombard a person experiencing panic. This “unconscious procedural memory” can be programmed to control panic by preventing the release of stress hormones and activating the parasympathetic nervous system. This process, outlined in Panic Free, sounds complicated but is not, requiring just ten days and no drugs or doctors. Bunn includes specific instructions for dealing with common panic triggers, such as airplane travel, bridges, MRIs, and tunnels. Because panic is profoundly life-limiting, the program Bunn offers can be a real life-changer.

Get Ready for Unstoppable Inner Peace

Author Corinne Zupko undertook her study of psychology out of necessity when debilitating anxiety threatened to derail her life. Seeking ways to do more than temporarily alleviate her symptoms, Corinne began to study A Course in Miracles (ACIM), mindfulness meditation, and the latest therapeutic approaches for treating anxiety. In From Anxiety to Love, she shares what she learned and gently guides you through the process, helping you undo anxiety-based thinking and fostering mindful shifts in your thoughts and actions. Whether struggling with everyday stress or near-crippling discomfort, you will find that Corinne’s approach offers a new way of healing from — rather than just coping with — fear and anxiety.

Do you know someone who...

— Has trouble being close to others?
— Has a strong need to be right – all the time?
— Acts self-centered and egotistical?
— Never asks for help?
— Expects perfection in self and others?
— Seldom appears vulnerable or weak?
— Has difficulty relaxing?

If so, this person may suffer from counter-dependency, the little-known flip side of co-dependency. The Flight from Intimacy, by psychologists Janae and Barry Weinhold, reveals counter-dependency as the major barrier to creating intimate relationships. People with counter-dependent behaviors appear strong, secure, and successful on the outside, while on the inside they feel weak, fearful, insecure, and needy. They function well in the world of business but often struggle in intimate relationships. Being in a relationship with this kind of person can be extremely frustrating.

The Flight from Intimacy shows readers how to recognize and cope with counter-dependent people. And if you recognize yourself in the description above, this book will help you learn how to change. It teaches readers how to use committed relationships to heal childhood wounds and provides proven ways to use conflicts as opportunities for creating intimate, partnership relationships.

This bestselling book, now in a revised edition, radically challenges the prevailing medical definition of co-dependency as a permanent, progressive, and incurable addiction. Rather, the authors identify it as the result of developmental traumas that interfered with the infant-parent bonding relationship during the first year of life.

Drawing on decades of clinical experience, Barry and Janae Weinhold correlate the developmental causes of co-dependency with relationship problems later in life, such as establishing and maintaining boundaries, clinging and dependent behaviors, people pleasing, and difficulty achieving success in the world. Then they focus on healing co-dependency, providing compelling case histories and practical activities to help readers heal early trauma and transform themselves and their primary relationships.

Breaking Free of the Co-dependency Trap presents a groundbreaking developmental road map to guide readers away from their co-dependent behaviors and toward a life of wholeness and fulfillment.