Best Books for Fresh Perspectives on Hardship

Being human is a layered process. It requires learning as much as we can about ourselves so we can effectively navigate our inner and outer worlds. It’s often about endeavoring to heal from our pasts so that we may arrive at a state of wholeness. The pursuit of wisdom, courage, resilience, and self-love is uneven and ongoing, but bit by bit it accrues to reveal a more empowered and fulfilling way of being. These six books explore distinct yet related approaches to redirecting adversity into opportunities for growth and strength.

1. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Fr. Richard Rohr, is balm in our fractured times. Directed particularly for readers transitioning from the first half of their lives to the second — regardless of their age — Rohr offers readers a pathway for coming to terms when one domain of our life shifts into the next. The Franciscan priest draws from time-honored myths, heroic poems, great thinkers, and sacred religious texts to explore how we can gain perspective on the sequencing, staging, and direction of life’s arc. He emphasizes that what looks like falling down can be experienced as falling upward — how we grow spiritually much more by doing it all wrong than by doing it all right. Rohr’s wisdom illuminates the purpose of our life journey, and the sacred dance that leads “beyond the strong opinions, needs, preferences, and demands of the first half of life toward the true self of the second half.”
2. F*ck Happiness: The Search for Meaning in a World Gone Mad Chasing Happiness, by Shawn Léon Nowotnik, MSW, LCSW, exposes the paradox that the only way to arrive at happiness is to stop chasing it. Nowotnik, a seasoned mental health expert, believes our obsessive pursuit of happiness becomes a trap for too many of us. It leads to mass consumerism and a hunger for wealth — pursuits that prevent lasting satisfaction. Nowotnik establishes how real fulfillment comes from a very different place. He delves into how we can go about rejecting the cultural narrative that happiness is the ultimate goal, and chase meaning instead of happiness to and find balance and joy.
3. Embody: Feel, Heal, and Transform Your Life through Movement, by Toni Bergins, draws from her personal journey of healing from trauma by reconnecting with her body’s intelligence. Through Embody, she introduces readers to her JourneyDance process that weaves together ideas from psychology, movement, music, ritual, and various healing modalities into a single practice. With JourneyDance, Bergins offers a way to safely expand the confines of our comfort zone, allowing us to shift from dissociation to presence, and from a place of stagnation to one of flow and limitless possibilities. Bergins’ book bestows a treasure chest of transformational tools for reuniting the mind and body to pursue spiritual growth and self-mastery.
4. Winner Peace: How to End Inner Conflict and Make Success Inevitable, by Ryan Christensen, offers enlightening insights for dispelling our tendency to falsely equate how we feel with who we are. (It’s what the $10 billion self-help industry teaches us to do.) Christensen challenges the popular self-help cliche of letting go of what no longer serves us.He sensibly argues that all feelings — especially negative ones — are actually valuable signals. They are inner requests for help: “There’s a problem here and I need you to get resources to solve it.” When we endeavor to understand what emotions, such as guilt, shame, anxiety, or doubt, are actually trying to tell us, we can transform limiting beliefs, eliminate self-sabotaging behaviors, and unlock our true potential.
5. Common Wisdom: 8 Scientific Elements of a Meaningful Life, by Dr. Laura Gabayan. After receiving a life-changing diagnosis and having to come to terms that, even with her medical and research background, she could do nothing to prevent Gabayan became intrigued by those whose deeper wisdom allowed them to think outside the box.She undertook an exploration into the concept of wisdom. Common Wisdom describes findings from the findings she distilled after interviewing 60 people deemed “wise” — including a concentration camp survivor, a woman twice widowed, a CEO of five companies, and many others. Eight qualities the wise interviewees share, from resilience to positivity to humility and more, make up the common denominators of wisdom. Gabayan takes the philosophical and makes it practical by placing focus on the ways we can master the specific traits.
6. Crisis Capable: Building Your Capacity to Survive and Succeed in Every Environment, by Fabiana Lacerca-Allen, draws from the author’s gripping childhood experiences growing up in Argentina under military dictatorship. Her father’s outspoken views promoting a democratic government put her family in constant danger — including kidnapping and assassination attempts. Now, a risk management expert, Lacerca-Allen shares key skills to being socially aware and picking up signs that others might overlook.She expertly interweaves her strategies with illustrative personal anecdotes that drive home the importance of situational awareness in a range of circumstances — whether it’s living in a war zone or combating professional blockades. By operationalizing her principles, leaders and their teams will be prepared to take decisive action in whatever challenges come their way.

The fresh perspectives offered in these six books help us face and overcome hardships. We learn skills that enable us to redirect difficulties into opportunities for growth and strength. By bending our life’s trajectory toward greater resilience, self-knowledge, and awareness, we reframe adversity and discover an inner wisdom.

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