What kind of life do you want for yourself? What choices will create this kind of life?
In his New York Times bestseller Happier, positive psychology expert Tal Ben-Shahar taught us how to become happier through simple exercises.
Now, in Choose the Life You Want, he has a new, life-changing lesson to share: Drawing on the latest psychological research, Ben-Shahar shows how making the right choices—not the big, once-in-a-lifetime choices, but the countless small choices we make every day almost without noticing—has a direct, long-lasting impact on our happiness.
Every single moment is an opportunity to make a conscious choice for a happy and fulfilled life. Choose the Life You Want covers 101 such choices, complete with real-life stories, to help you identify and act on opportunities large and small.
The ultimate “encyclopedia” of self help. I have to admit that I’m a fan of Tal Ben Shahar. His first two books plus his Positive Psychology training course have positively influenced my life.He even influenced my MBA research orientation when I choose the “Sense of Coherence” , a coping model that Tal advocates, as the core of my MBA Leadership research thesis , which made it initially controversial to my school (dealing with psychology rather than pure business) . Yet it was a great academic experience with a lot of contribution to my resilience.When this book came out and I passed through its table of content, I didn’t expect much more than a “me too” version of his compilation book “Even Happier”.To my surprise, this book turns out to be the best & most practical work for Tal!Not only that the format of the book is easily accessed through the “lessons” presentation style that can be chosen by the reader according to situational needs, but also the book is written in a style that combines scientific perspectives with inspirational stories & creative metaphors in a literary style.On the other hand, I find at least 30% of the psychological interventions & advises in the book as novel & never presented before by Tal: Lessons like Loving-kindness meditation, deceptive brain messages, listening to silence and many more, were indeed A-ha moments to me.The greatest lesson I learned was this: It seems that over- analysis of oneself through dealing with self help books can be a source of misery rather than happiness, real happiness comes from focusing outward rather than onward. That was a real sound advice to me , as a self-help addict reader.By the end of the book, I realized that Tal has covered almost everything in the realm of the empirically tested self help & P.P techniques.That’s why now I choose to call this book the “encyclopedia” of self help.The only downside of this book is that it has too much of “good things” that can be sometimes overwhelming. To benefit from the book, I had to go picky & choose what sounds more influential to my life.But yes, Tal has done it again.
101 Nuggets For Living Life Good In this book about happiness and living the good life, the positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar teaches that regardless of circumstance we can choose how we are going to conduct our life. We can choose to make choices in the way we construct our own lives and how we respond to circumstances. He dispenses this wisdom in the form of 101 nuggets of advice that are 2 to 3 pages long each.For anyone who has read popular self-help books, especially those whose topic is positive psychology and mindfulness, or Ben-Shahar’s previous books, you aren’t going to get a lot of new material here. The value in this book lies in its format. Organized in such short easy to read lessons, the format allows the reader to skip around, read one lesson per day or week, or any other way one chooses to absorb the material.The advice is good and there is a great deal of wisdom in this book’s pages. I found it valuable even though there was nothing spectacularly new in its ideas. It is upbeat and positive and gives one hope, especially in these days of general pessimism about the future, that one can indeed choose the life one wants.Recommended.