Confidence Classic: How to Train Your Brain for Unlimited Success with John Assaraf

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg draws on extensive research to explore how habits develop into automatic behaviors that influence personal lives, businesses, and communities. He explains why unhealthy habits are notoriously difficult to break and provides a practical framework to help you understand and change any habit.

In this guide, we’ve restructured Duhigg’s key ideas to focus on how your habits form and what you can do to change them. We’ve also compared and contrasted each key concept with updated research on habit formation and expanded on Duhigg’s advice with actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and psychologists.

Like many people, Mo Gawdat was trapped in a cycle of negative thoughts and emotions until, after the death of his beloved son, he devised a formula to escape. His background as a software engineer helped Gawdat realize that our brain functions like a computer—so, if we want it to produce happiness, all we need to do is program it with the right code. In That Little Voice In Your Head, Gawdat explains how to understand and program your brain so you can experience the world in ways that produce positive actions and emotions.

In this guide, we’ll start by explaining how your brain functions. Then, we’ll explore the faulty methods your brain uses to process information, causing unhappiness. Finally, we’ll discuss how to replace these methods with new ones that will ensure happiness. In our commentary, we’ll compare Gawdat’s ideas with those of other experts on happiness, psychology, and brain science.

Why is it so hard to change who we are? Why do we get stuck in the same old patterns of unhappiness and lack of fulfillment? In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza suggests that it’s our habits that keep us from growing and creating the life we want, and he offers a detailed guide on how to get rid of those habits and replace them with habits that move us toward our ideal selves. Dispenza is a best-selling writer with a Doctorate of Chiropractic degree who has extensively studied such fields as neuroscience and cellular biology.

In our guide, we’ll explore how our habits determine our lives, how we can change them, and what our new selves will be like. We’ll also examine the science underlying Dispenza’s ideas and compare them to other authors’ ideas on self-improvement and changing our habits.

Stress is inevitable—from work deadlines and family responsibilities to unexpected challenges that pop up throughout the day—but it doesn’t have to weigh down your life. These five micro-habits can help you reduce your daily stress.

In The Way of the SEAL, retired Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine outlines strategies adapted from his military experience to help business leaders master the challenges of today’s rapidly evolving world of work. The explosion of technology has forever altered the corporate landscape. Leaders must have a balanced, flexible, forward-driving mindset to navigate the change.

Divine blends SEAL strategies, yoga, and martial arts to create mind-body training techniques to build powerful leaders. After publishing The Way of the SEAL in 2013, he authored Staring Down the Wolf and Unbeatable Mind. Divine founded six multimillion-dollar businesses, including SEALFIT and Unbeatable.

In this guide, we’ll discuss modern work world challenges that resemble a SEAL battlefield and examine Divine’s strategies to identify your values, focus on your goals, embrace uncertainty, and harness your mental strengths. We’ll look at actions leaders can take to lead and succeed in a complex business world. Finally, we’ll provide views from leadership, military, and mental health experts that support, counter, and contextualize Divine’s ideas.

We’re often taught that stress is harmful and best avoided, but The Upside of Stress aims to prove otherwise. Kelly McGonigal argues that stress isn’t the enemy it’s typically made out to be—rather, it’s an ally we should embrace. By changing your mindset on stress, McGonigal claims you can transform it into a resource that leads to enhanced health, greater success, and a more meaningful life.

McGonigal is a health psychologist and professor at Stanford University. She teaches that when it comes to transforming stress, key mindset shifts—like viewing stress as normal and focusing on helping others in order to help yourself—make all the difference.

In this guide, we’ll see what ancient philosophers and modern stress experts have to say about the influence of your mindset on stress. We’ll also look deeper into the studies that support McGonigal’s argument and reconcile her research with updates in psychological literature. Finally, we’ll discuss practical ways to apply McGonigal’s ideas in your daily life.

Many people assume their ideal life will never be more than fantasy, but in reality, you have the power to create the life you dream about. In this book, life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins provides insights and strategies to help you take control of every aspect of your life, from your emotions to your focus. In many cases, you can make transformational changes to your life through small adjustments, such as swapping out just one word in your vocabulary.

In this guide you’ll learn how your bad habits are wired in your brain, how to decode your negative emotions to find solutions to them, and how to create your destiny.

This guide compares and contrasts Robbins’s ideas with those of other popular self-help authors, as well as current scientific theories. This will provide you with background and a deeper understanding of the lessons in Awaken the Giant Within, as well as some alternative methods for taking control of your life.

In The 5 AM Club, Robin Sharma contends that the early bird really does get the worm. He explains how adopting an early morning routine will activate your creativity and productivity, allowing you to discover your inner genius and maximize your abilities. By spending your first hour every day working on your mind, body, heart, and spirit, you’ll gain the tools to become influential in your field, achieve your goals, and create a lasting impact on the world. Our guide explains the principles behind the 5 AM Club, breaks down the basics of habit formation to help you jumpstart your new morning routine, and explores Sharma’s advice for sticking with this routine for good. We also go deeper into why some people find it easier to wake up at the crack of dawn, why you can’t stick to habits even when you know they’re good for you, and what other experts say to help you reach your full potential.

Many of us are unknowingly trapped by inherited beliefs, societal expectations, and unquestioned rules that limit our potential. In The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, entrepreneur and self-help expert Vishen Lakhiani provides guidelines to help you escape from those psychological and cultural restraints. Ultimately, he seeks to empower you to live a happy, purposeful life—and to decide for yourself what such a life looks like.

This guide will start with how to examine the ideas your upbringing imposed on you and discard the ones that no longer serve you. We’ll then describe Lakhiani’s two-pronged approach to self-improvement: improving beliefs and improving habits. To conclude, we’ll discuss how to balance being content in the present with being excited about the future.

Our commentary will compare Lakhiani’s principles with other influential self-help books such as Awaken the Giant Within. We’ll also provide scientific research to support Lakhiani’s ideas. Finally, we’ll offer ideas to help you get started on reinventing your mind and your life.