Everyone knows that a resolution is not a magical wish. It takes hard work and dedication to make your goals a reality. If you’re serious about your self-improvement goals, it’s never too early to start preparing. First, you need the right mindset.
For your self-improvement goals to be made a reality, it is important to identify what you want and make a game plan for how you will achieve it. Here, we equip you with the tools to become the best version of yourself with our literary guide to self-improvement, featuring ten must-read books that will prepare you to start fresh, any time of year.
Designing Your Life: How to Build A Well-Lived Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use the process of creative designers to help readers look at how they live their lives differently. They use the same principles that designers use to solve problems creatively to find a solution to how people can live a more meaningful, purposeful, productive, and creative life.
Through this book, you will be able to step back and think about how you want your life to look in order to fulfill your goals. It is an essential step in creating new and productive habits as well as giving your life creative purpose, no matter what your specific goals may be.
The Wonder Effect: An Adventurous Guide for Igniting Your Passions and Pursuing Your Calling by Adam Haston
The Wonder Effect by Adam Haston is a guide to reigniting your curiosity in order to open new doors and pursue new opportunities in life. This book explores thinking outside the box when it comes to what can come next for you. It encourages and inspires readers with real-life stories with powerful implications and insights. With this book, readers will find that wonder is strongly linked to confidence and that gaining a curious outlook on life will give them the courage to succeed.
This book provides the perfect road map on how to live your life with different ideas in mind and will encourage you not only to dare to dream but also to achieve your biggest aspirations. It puts the power in your hands to become a passionate and fearless person.
How To Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis
Author and therapist KC Davis knows that before you can make great plans to change your life, you’ve got to physically get things in order. In How To Keep House While Drowning, Davis delivers the perfect guide to cleaning and organizing a messy home while feeling overwhelmed by life. This is an essential read to help you start out right.
Davis discusses how stress seemed to cause her life to snowball into disarray and how she was able to clean up the mess of her life by changing her mindset and messiness. She shares how the key to organization starts with compassion. Viewing cleanliness as a daily kindness to yourself, rather than a chore, makes your house feel more like a happy, healthy home.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo
Marie Kondo is another expert who brings home the idea of decluttering and organizing as the first step in your preparation to become a new you. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo provides a method, coined the KonMari Method, that promises lasting results in categorizing and keeping your life in order.
Kondo promises that, once you have decluttered your house, you can begin to declutter your mind. A tidy home is one where motivation and inspiration thrive, so this book is a must-read to prepare for a new you.
Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes by Emily Kasriel
Deep Listening by Emily Kasriel creates an eight-step approach to how we can become better listeners, which will lead to stronger relationships. Kasriel uses scientific research as well as stories that represent the power of listeners and how this skill can benefit you personally, professionally, and creatively.
Deep Listening is also essential to prepare for a new era of you, as it gets to the core of what makes us humans and how we formulate connections. Becoming a better listener will bring you closer to those you wish to be close to, and this book aims to teach readers not only how to listen to others better but also to listen to themselves.
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is the key to self-care and self-love, two essential elements to unlocking your goals. Kishimi and Koga use theories from the psychologist Alfred Adler, which act as a guide to self-forgiveness and self-care. This book frees readers from the burden of others’ opinions and teaches them to gain the independence and presence needed to achieve happiness.
This read will certainly allow you to better understand and form boundaries from those who may harm your goals of self-improvement. It uses mindfulness and cognitive teachings that will bring you closer to the mindset of a person who’s got it all figured out. The Courage to Be Disliked aims to show you how to be who you want to be by focusing on what’s important and blocking out the rest.
Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End of Suffering by Joseph Nguyen
Joseph Nguyen delivers skills to achieve cognitive power in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think. This book gives you the chance to take back power over your circumstances through a psychological understanding of where feelings of suffering, anxiety, and self-doubt come from. Once you have an understanding of these negative thoughts, Nguyen teaches readers how to brush them off and create a completely new outlook on life that effortlessly overcomes negativity.
This book will equip you with strategies and techniques for when your mind may think of self-sabotaging your new goals. With Don’t Believe Everything You Think, you will already be prepared for negative thoughts and know how to overcome them to find emotional stability, peace, and never-ending motivation to achieve your goals.
We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle
In We Can Do Hard Things, Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle unpack and seek out answers to some of life’s toughest questions. They tackle how to overcome when life gives you its worst. They combat this with wisdom and guidance from those they interviewed along the way, using others’ perseverance as a guide and inspiration.
This book will serve as a reminder that, even if you feel alone and have no idea what to do next, someone else has been in your position before and persevered, proving that you can too. It features a collection of guidance from over a hundred people reflecting on how they found a way to continue. In each of our lives, there comes a time when we feel overwhelmed and unsure how to continue. We Can Do Hard Things becomes the ultimate guidebook for how to keep going.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Wintering by Katherine May gives us a unique perspective on what can often be the hardest time of year. With this perspective, May reminds us that, even though winter is a season filled with celebrations and new beginnings, it is also a season of rest and recuperation. May invites readers to experience living in touch with the seasons, using literature, nature, and mythology to guide us to a more intentional lifestyle.
Wintering acts as a vital reminder that, even when we are pursuing new goals and dreams, life cannot be rushed. There are vibrant seasons of prosperity and slow seasons of rest. That does not mean that these seasons of rest are not productive. When aiming to achieve new things, it is essential to find a balance of perseverance and presence. May is here to teach us how to embrace life as it comes.
The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad
The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad is the final essential read for your fresh start. A fresh start will never really sink in without reflection and documentation of the process. This is where journaling becomes a necessity more than a hobby. With The Book of Alchemy, Jaouad gives insights into the importance of journaling and finding your inner self, paired with fascinating journal prompts to work alongside the reading.
Exploring the power and potential of journaling, Jaouad describes how the power of creativity and mindfulness are essential to both the best of times and the worst. This book equips readers with journaling directions, prompts, and questions, as well as insights into life that uncover even the most challenging of life’s mysteries.
Your fresh start starts with you. If you want your dreams to really come true, you must work on turning your goals into reality. This work must begin with finding the right mindset to not only set realistic and beneficial goals but also to develop the inner strength to see them through. We hope these recommendations help you look inward and inspire you to become the best version of yourself.
Want to learn about building a healthy mindset? Click here.
Find these books and more on our Non-Fiction Titles for the Enlightened Mind bookshelf on Bookshop.org.
