Below is a list of useful articles and books I’ve come across. I’ve included a brief synopsis of each one. If you are a client and would like to discuss any of the content further, then please let me know.
I have written a few articles myself and these are located on the articles page.
Articles on the web
WHO AM I? YOU MAY FIND THE ANSWER ABROAD
This is an interesting article for those living abroad. According to recent studies, living overseas leads to greater self-awareness because it prompts you to examine your assumptions, more so than when living only in your home culture.
Books
The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg
The Power of Habit delves into how habits emerge within individual lives and is based on hundreds of interviews, and thousands more papers and studies. Duhigg argues that you can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it, which is better news than it may seem. To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. The appendix at the end is a real gem. It includes a framework for understanding how habits work and includes a guide to experimenting with how they might change. If you are a client and wish to spend time exploring a current habit that you’d like to change or a new habit you’d like to start, based on this framework, let me know.
The Confidence Gap
Dr. Russ Harris
The Confidence Gap is an insightful read for those who want to work on increasing confidence. The ideas are based on Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT). By playing by a different set of rules, which Dr. Harris lays out clearly, in combination with mindfulness skills based on ACT, along with clarifying core values and committed action, we’re able to release ourselves from the struggle with self-confidence through ‘psychological flexibility’. If you are a client and wish to explore building confidence according to the concepts described by Dr. Harris, I’d be a happy to do so.
Working Identity
Hermina Ibarra
Working Identity is a must read for anyone who is contemplating changing careers to attain greater congruence between what they do and who they are. Most people experience the transition to a new working life as a time of confusion, loss, insecurity and uncertainty. This makes complete sense. Conventional approach cautions against making a move before we already know exactly where we are going. Career change however, does not follow conventional methods.
The active process of career reinvention involves experimenting with new professional activities, interacting with new networks of people and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities. Ibara argues that “knowing” is the result of doing and experimenting. We discover true possibilities by reaching out to new groups and reworking our story as we tell it to others around us.
To reinvent ourselves, we must live through a period of transition in which we rethink and reconfigure a multitude of possibilities. A successful outcome does not rely on knowing one’s inner-self at the start, but rather on starting a multistep process on envisioning and testing possible futures. No amount of self-reflection can substitute for the direct experience we need to evaluate alternatives based on the fact that we change as we do. I use Ibarra’s approach of envisioning and testing possible futures with all my clients who are considering changing careers to gain greater personal fulfillment.