|
|
I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It (Paperback) (Paperback)
by Barbara Sher
| Category:
Self help, Career development |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
From this book, you can recapture long lost goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Barbara Sher
Publisher: Dell
Pub. in: August, 1995
ISBN: 0440505003
Pages: 336
Measurements: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00915
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0440505006
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- MSL Picks -
You can trust desire to lead you to the life you were meant to live. Barbara Sher has a direct, no-nonsense approach to finding and leading a meaningful life. Her answers are simple, straightforward - and the kind of things that make you think: "WOW, why didn't I think of that? It's so easy." Its common sense, but somehow we lose track of it, become afraid, lost, forget what we dreamt for ourselves. Her central message do what you love to give your life meaning. Find your resistance by taking action. Sher uses exercises, lots of examples, ideas, personal anecdotes (hers and from other people) "The universe is not going to see someone like you again in the entire history of creation." (Gregorian) That's why its important to live the life you were meant to live - and as Sher states - that life is as individual as you are. If you don't think you remember your dreams ... or don't believe you had any - if you think you're all over the map and want too many things, if you feel you have nothing left, or have lost interest - then there's something here for you too - Sher addresses these problems, and their underlying reasons.
Target readers:
General readers, especially for the people who want to develop themselves.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type (Paperback)
:
|
|
Barbara Sher is a business owner, career counselor, and best-selling author of seven books, each of which provides a down-to-earth, nuts-and-bolts method for uncovering natural talent, pinpointing goals and turning dreams into reality. She has often been named the "godmother of life coaching" by the media and her many fans. Barbara has presented seminars and workshops throughout the world to universities, professional organizations, Fortune 100 corporations, and federal and state government agencies. She has been called "a standup comic with a message" and “the best speaker we have ever seen,” in evaluations. Joining forces with public television, she has also created five hour-long special programs that continue to air in cities around the U.S.
In 1972 Sher invented Success Teams—small groups in which members dedicate their efforts to helping each other find and achieve their goals. Today, Sher's Success Teams are operating in locations across the globe. (see www.shersuccessteams.com) Her first book Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, (1984), has become a classic, selling over one million copies. In addition to its popularity with readers, Wishcraft is used as the text for university classes all over the world and is a standard handbook for career counselors, coaches, social workers and teachers. Her second book, Teamworks: Building Support Groups That Guarantee Success (1989) followed up on the powerful Success Team system.
Noting how many people stated that they didn’t know what life goals to strive for, Sher began hosting problem-solving sessions and used them to design dozens of innovative techniques that freed people from “goal-paralysis.” Her ingenious, sensible and respectful techniques for overcoming resistance have been widely praised by psychologists and career counselors and made her third book I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What It Was (1994), a top seller for the last 12 years after being on best-seller lists all over the U.S. and Europe, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Barbara's fourth book, Live the Life You Love (1996), winner of the top award in the category of “Motivational Book” by the Books for a Better Life Commission (a consortium of all major publishers), is a ten-lesson course that teaches, in an appealing and accessible format, the individual skills needed to identify the reader's own motivational style, find his or her goals and achieve them.
In her fifth book, Barbara took a new and different look at creating a great life after age forty. The book, It's Only Too Late If You Don't Start Now: How to Create Your Second Life At Any Age (1999) found such favor with readers of all ages that it became her first public television pledge special and has been aired continually for over 7 years. Her subsequent public television pledge specials, "Live the Life You Love,” “Map to Success," “Barbara Sher's Idea Party," and her latest, “Refuse To Choose” have also been very popular and have broken fundraising records for PBS stations all around the U.S.
Barbara's sixth book, Barbara Sher's Idea Party, was self-published to accompany her public television show of the same name. (It can be seen and purchased at www.geniuspress.com). This is the first in her upcoming series called HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE WITHOUT STARVING TO DEATH. New books in this series will be showing up every few months on Genius Press, Unltd.
Sher’s latest book, Refuse To Choose (2006) deals with people who have so many interests they’re unable to choose only one (she has named them ‘Scanners’). This subject has obviously struck a nerve. “In the last four months since the book and the TV show have been out in the public eye, I’ve received an astonishing number of impassioned letters,” she said. “And all of them say Thank you!” As usual, Sher’s advice is not what you expect. She finds that Scanners aren’t dilettantes or undisciplined, and they don’t change interests because of A.D.D. or a fear of success. “They seem to be highly intelligent, multi-talented people who need to have more interests than the average person,” she says.
Barbara’s books have been translated into many languages, from Spanish to Arabic and her telephone ‘classes’ are filled with people from every country.
Much of the year Ms. Sher travels throughout the world giving workshops and this year, 2006, she’s adding her week-long Scanner’s Retreats to her schedule. (www.barbarasher.com/CorfuScannerRetreat.html) In the spring and fall she's at her second home in a small village in Central Turkey where she teaches e-commerce to village weavers (www.kilimwomen.com). The rest of the time she's in her New York City apartment writing, keeping up her busy bulletin board and walking her 16-year-old rescued Yorkie, Buddy.
Other Programs and Highlights
Sher has received many awards and an honorary PhD; she has appeared on local and national radio and television shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, the Today Show, 60 Minutes and Good Morning America, and has had feature articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other newspapers and magazines. She was a Life Coach columnist for Real Simple Magazine in 2003. Sher periodically teaches seminars at the Smithsonian Institute, Harvard University and New York University.
|
|
From publisher:
If you suspect there could be more to life than what you're getting...if you always knew you could do anything if you only knew what it was, this extraordinary book is about to prove you right!
A life without direction is a life without passion. The dynamic follow-up to the phenomenal best-seller Wishcraft, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (the New York Times Bestseller) guides you, not to another unsatisfying job, but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart's desire. And in a work of true emancipation, this life-changing sourcebook reveals how you can recapture "long lost" goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever!
You will learn:
* What to do if you never chose to be what you are.
* How to get off the fast track--and on to the right track.
* First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity.
* How to regroup when you've lost your big dream.
* To stop waiting for luck-and start creating it.
|
This book is designed to help you find the good life. By that, I don't mean swimming pools, mansions, and private jets - unless those are really your big passions. But if you picked up a book called I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was, you're probably looking for a lot more than a swimming pool.
You want a life you will love.
A friend's father got it right when he said "The good life is when you get up in the morning and can't wait to start all over again."
Is that you? Or does his idea of the good life sound like an unreachable paradise? If you aren't the kind of person who jumps out of bed every morning excited about the day ahead, I know you desperately long to find a goal that will make you feel like my friend's father. You crave work that will spark excitement and energy; you yearn to find the place where you can make your mark. Albert Schweitzer found his place, so did Golda Meir, and so did the kid next door who practiced guitar day and night. They knew how to live. They believed in what they were doing with all their hearts. They knew their work was important. When you get near people who are pursuing their heart's desire, you can see the intensity on their faces.
Life is just too short to live without that kind of focus.
In the early 1980s, two Harvard psychologists completed a study of people who called themselves happy. And what did happy people have in common? Money? Success? Health? Love?
None of these things.
They had only two things in common: They knew exactly what they wanted and they felt they were moving toward getting it.
That's what makes life feel good: when it has direction, when you are headed straight for what you love.
And I mean love.
I don't mean what you're skilled at. I don't really care what your skills are. When I was a single working mother with two babies, you know what my skills were? I could clean house like a demon; catch a moving bus with my arms full of laundry, groceries, and kids; and squeeze a dollar until the picture of George Washington screamed for mercy.
I do not want the career that uses those skills, thank you.
I don't believe you live the good life by doing what you can do; you live it by doing what you want to do. I don't even think your greatest talents necessarily show up in your skills. All of us are good at things we're not madly in love with. And all of us have talents we've never used.
Relying on your skills to guide you is simply unacceptable. That's why I don't intend to give you personality tests or skills assessments to find out what you should be doing.
I know what you should be doing.
You should be doing what you love.
What you love is what you are gifted at. Only love will give you the drive to stick to something until you develop your gift. That's the way really big things get accomplished in this world - by people no different than you and I who know what they want and put everything they've got behind it.
If you don't know what you want, you can't get out of the starting gate - and that's discouraging. But you're not alone. Recent figures show that as many as 98 percent of Americans are unhappy in their jobs. And it isn't only financial considerations that keep them where they are; they simply don't know what to do instead. What you may have thought was your private little nightmare turns out to be heartbreakingly common.
Well, I have a surprise for you.
You do know what you want.
Everybody does. That's why you feel so restless when you can't find the right track. You sense there's some particular work you are meant to be doing. And you're right. Einstein needed to formulate theories of physics, Harriet Tubman needed to guide people to freedom, and you need to follow your original vision. As Vartan Gregorian said, "The universe is not going to see someone like you again in the entire history of creation." Each of us is one of a kind. Every living person has a completely original way of looking at the world, and originality always needs to express itself.
But many of us get stopped. Every time we resolve to change our lives, every time we go to pick up the baton and get into the race, something happens. For some mysterious reason our determination melts. We look at the baton and think "This race isn't it." And we put down the baton, uneasy because time is slipping away, frightened that we'll never find "it."
There are two reasons for this.
One reason it's so hard to know what we want is that we have so many options. This wasn't always true. Our parents and their parents had fewer choices and clearer goals. It's a tribute to the success of our culture that so many of us have the freedom to search for our own life's work.
Freedom is glorious. But freedom also torments us because it requires us to create our own goals.
Did you know that fewer people get depressed during war than in peacetime? In a war, everything is important. Day to day, you know exactly what to do. Your life may be frightening, but the struggle to survive gives you direction and drive. You don't waste any time trying to figure out what you're worth or what you're supposed to do with your life. You just try to keep alive, save your home, help your neighbors. The reason we love to watch films about people whose lives are in danger is because every move is loaded with meaning.
When there's no emergency to rise to, we have to create goals that have meaning. You can create such goals if you know what your dream is - but this is a relatively new way of living. The old way to live was to let necessity create your goal; the new way is to use your dream to create your goal. We have had very little practice at this new way.
The second reason you don't know what you want is that something inside you is stopping you from knowing. Your dreams are obscured by some kind of internal conflict. It's not as easy as you might think to spot inner conflicts. Often they're disguised as self-reproach. "Maybe I have no talent," "Maybe I'm just lazy," "If I were smarter I'd have done more with my life."
If there's one thing I want you to get out of reading this book it's to know that not one of those statements is true.
The first goal of this book is to shine a spotlight on your particular inner conflict so you can see it clearly outlined. As soon as you see what's been in your way, you'll know exactly why you haven't created the life you wanted. You'll quit reproaching yourself. You'll understand that you've been unable to get moving for a reason.
Our culture is full of simpleminded myths of blame, such as "If you really wanted something badly enough, you'd go out and get it," and "If you're sabotaging yourself, you lack character." Nobody ever asks the obvious question: "Why would anybody want to do himself harm by sabotaging himself?" It takes curiosity to find the answer to that question, and judgmental people always lack curiosity.
In the following chapters we're going to stop all this blaming and swap it for honest, nonjudgmental curiosity. I have the deepest respect for sincere curiosity - and very little respect for self-righteousness. The useful answers, the answers that help us solve problems, are always the more forgiving ones. They're based on a line of inquiry that assumes there is always a good reason for everything. There is certainly a good reason you lost direction, and this book is going to help you find it.
Until then, just remember, whatever you were doing until you picked up this book, you were not being lazy or stupid or cowardly. Even self-improvement programs, no matter how helpful, are often judgmental. They are often based on the assumption that you don't have what you want because you haven't developed the right way of thinking. They assume you've got to get fixed before you can get what you want.
Well, forget that.
You don't have to become a better person or develop a different attitude to have a life you love. As you are, you are good enough. In fact, the smartest thing you can do is to go ahead and get what you want before you do anything to improve yourself. Getting your life on track will do wonders for your "bad" attitude.
I have no intention of suckering you into some program that tells you to stand up straight and be a different person. Life just isn't that simple, and wishful thinking won't make it so. I don't think people solve problems with positive thinking either. Propping up your thoughts, pretending to feel different than you really do, is not a sturdy enough system for the long haul. Creative visualization has its limitations too. I've met a lot of people who can't visualize, and others who feel strongly conflicted even imagining what they love. And "create your own reality" sounds empowering, but its flip side is that you can end up blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong. That's not fair. You're not big enough to take on fate single-handedly, and you don't need to.
What you do need is to understand why you don't know what you want. Once you begin to understand the perfectly good explanation for your confusion, you will finally be able to do something about it.
The second goal of this book is to show you how to do something about it. I've put tools and strategies in each chapter to help you extricate yourself from your internal conflicts every time you need to-now and in the future.
The first three chapters of this book are for every reader. They're the chapters that shine a light on your conflict and illuminate its contours for you. Once you see the general shape of your problem, you'll be able to flip to a chapter in the book that will give y...
|
|
| View all 10 comments |
C. Clark (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-06-19 00:00>
Maybe you're just out of college wondering how you ended up with a business degree when you hate business. Or you've been spending way too much time on the job/in life daydreaming about some other job or life. Or maybe, like me, all seems right with your world, but you have a nagging feeling there's something else you should be doing. Barbara Sher's book will help you sort it all out. She'll help you figure out what's at the root of these feelings and how to understand and handle them. Through a series of exercises, explanations and examples she guides you to discover just what it is that you truly want to do. And then she shows you how to get to do what you want.
You have to be ready to do a little psychological work on yourself, think hard about your past and realistically about your future. You have to be ready to put aside the excuses and fears, and Sher knows them all, and commit yourself to working towards the life you want to live. If you're looking for something easier, like tests or checklists to tell you what you should be doing, this book might not sound like it's for you. But buy it anyway. I read all the books with the tests, the checklists, the affirmations and the goal making, etc... and they got me nowhere. This book finally got me somewhere.
|
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-19 00:00>
If you are looking at this book as a way of finding a new career or vocation you are way off base. This book is about finding out what you want to do with your life not what job you want to do. Sure, there are chapters that deal with jobs but the main point of the book is that you can find what will truly fulfill you in life. Your job (the thing you do to make money) is not who you are - it's just the thing you do so you can finance your life. Barbara Sher wants your life to be worth financing and your job to be rewarding too. Who can fault her for that? |
Kim Boykin (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-19 00:00>
A lot of people had told Barbara Sher that her book "Wishcraft," about getting what you want, was of little use to them because they didn't know what they wanted. So she wrote this book for those of us who need help figuring out what we want. After three introductory chapters, the remaining eleven chapters discuss eleven different forms of resistance to knowing what you want. I suspect that most readers will, as I did, find a few of the chapters especially relevant and won't bother reading past the opening sentences of some other chapters.
I particularly related to the chapters about being afraid to commit to something prematurely, and about not being interested in anything at all. There's also a chapter for you if you're afraid to take risks; if you're afraid of succeeding and leaving your loved ones behind; if you want too many different things; if you're succeeding spectacularly at something you don't really want; if you feel that what you really want is trivial or unworthy; if you've just been through a big life change and don't know what to do next; if you had a dream but it's become unattainable; if you resist doing anything ordinary or mundane; and if you're trying hard to love something you don't really want.
|
John M Flora (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-19 00:00>
I bought this book in hardcover in 1995 and stopped reading after 2 chapters because I realized that if I kept reading I was going to have to change my life. I also realized I wasn't ready. If you approach this book conscientiously and use it as a tool, you truly can do anything you want with your life. That's a simultaneously scary and liberating thought. So, if you've just been "taking what they're giving 'cause you're working for a living," buy this book and get ready to be empowered.
|
View all 10 comments |
|
|
|
|
