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DR. JAN NEWMAN
Whether you are planning a new career or job change, wondering which direction you want to go in, or recovering from trauma, grief, or loss, we have included some recommendations from our MP Team of psychologists.
We invite you to explore these books with openness and curiosity. Yet please take care in relying on experts. Our goal is always to empower people to claim their power and choose.
Although many experts can provide tools and strategies and support to help you along the journey, in the end, YOU are the expert on your life. Any coach or therapist who doesn’t make you feel that in your bones—well, that’s just not the way we roll.
Hopefully, these books can help you get present, lean into discomfort with openness and curiosity, and do more of what matters in life.
DESIGNING YOUR LIFE
Career Decisions, Work-Life Integration
BY BILL BURNETT
“It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you think you are going, what job or career you have had or think you should have. You are not too late, and you’re not too early.”
“For most people, passion comes after they try something, discover they like it, and develop mastery – not before. To put it more succinctly: passion is the result of a good life design, not the cause.”
EMOTIONAL AGILITY
Emotion Regulation, ACT
BY SUSAN DAVID
“Courage is not an absence of fear; courage is fear walking.”
“Who’s in charge — the thinker or the thought? Are we managing our own lives according to our own values and what is important to us, or are we simply being carried along by the tide?”
“Acceptance is a prerequisite for change.”
BEHAVE
Neuroscience, Emotion Regulation, Trauma
BY ROBERT SAPOLSKY
“You don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.”
“If you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress, your health suffers.”
“Nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world-changing.” And, absolutely, incredible.
THE HAPPINESS TRAP
Emotion Regulation, ACT
BY RUSS HARRIS
“The more we try to avoid the basic reality that all human life involves pain, the more we are likely to struggle with that pain when it arises, thereby creating even more suffering.”
“Psychological flexibility is the ability to adapt to a situation with awareness, openness, and focus and to take effective action, guided by your values.”
A LIBERATED MIND
Emotion Regulation, Advanced ACT
BY STEVEN HAYES, CO-DEVELOPER OF ACT
“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It’s about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.”
“Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.”
“[Based on the research on neuroplasticity,] if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?”
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE
Trauma, Grief, Loss, Childhood Abuse
BY BESSEL VAN DER KOLK
“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. . . In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
WHEN LIFE HITS HARD
Trauma, Grief, Loss
BY RUSS HARRIS
“Whoever said ‘practice makes perfect’ was deluded. There’s no such thing as perfection. Practice will help you establish better life skills, but it won’t permanently eliminate self-defeating behaviors. You (and I, and everyone else on this planet) will screw up, make mistakes, and, at times, fall back into old habits. This will happen repeatedly.”
SELF-COMPASSION
Self-Compassion, Shame Resilience
BY KRISTIN NEFF
“Compassion is, by definition, relational. Compassion literally means ‘to suffer with,’ which implies a basic mutuality in the experience of suffering. The emotion of compassion springs from the recognition that the human experience is imperfect.”
“Because self-critics often come from unsupportive family backgrounds, they tend not to trust others and assume that those they care about will eventually try to hurt them. This creates a steady state of fear that causes problems in interpersonal interactions. For instance, research shows that highly self-critical people tend to be dissatisfied in their romantic relationships because they assume their partners are judging them as harshly as they judge themselves. The misperception of even fairly neutral statements as disparaging often leads to oversensitive reactions and unnecessary conflicts. This means that self-critics often undermine the closeness and supportiveness in relationships that they so desperately seek.”
RAISING HUMAN BEINGS
Parenting
BY ROSS GREEN
“When there’s a good fit between skills and expectations, there’s what we call compatibility, and we would expect a good outcome. When there’s a poor fit between expectations and the capacity of the kid, there is incompatibility, and that’s when we see people exhibit challenging behavior.”
IT’S OK THAT YOU’RE NOT OK
Grief and Loss
BY MEGAN DEVINE
“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.
Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive.”
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Please note that we are not recommending these books as any form of mental health treatment. This information is provided solely as informational content. We always recommend that if you are struggling with depression, anxiety, trauma, or a severe mental health disorder you consult your mental health provider before reading any books or using resources that could have difficult content.
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