ASIN 0767906632
UPC 9780767906630

Life Makeovers: 52 Practical & Inspiring Ways To Improve Your Life One Week At A Time Hardcover – September 1, 2000

by Cheryl Richardson (Author)
Author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Take Time for Your Life now shows you how to reclaim your life one week at a time

Cheryl Richardson, bestselling author and one of the most sought-after lecturers in the country, knows firsthand how tough it can be to juggle the daily demands of living in a fast-paced world, and how easily you can become disconnected from your true self and what makes you happy. In Life Makeovers, Cheryl has taken all the know-how and insight she has gleaned from her years as a personal coach and distilled it into a simple, year-long program that shows how making small changes, over time, can have a huge impact on the quality of your life. In fifty-two simple yet profound essays, Richardson provides a plan for both reflecting and taking action, along with specific, practical advice and exercises to help readers gradually and permanently remodel their lives, week by week. Easy to use and fun to read, this workbook is the perfect companion to Take Time for Your Life. Topics include:
The Gift of Time: It's Self-Management, Not Time Management
Are We Having Fun Yet: When Life Gets Too Serious, Here's What to Do
Give Your Brain a Vacation: For Finding the Best Ideas, Try This
Standing in the Shadow: Whose Talent Are You Hiding Behind?
Stop Juggling and Start Living: Here Are Some of the Balls to Drop
Close Encounters: How to Make a Deeper Connection with Others

Her brief, personal essays will inspire you to make changes, and her Take Action Challenges, which appear with comprehensive resource sections at the end of every essay, will guide you through small steps that will slowly teach you to think, act, love, work, and even laugh in a whole new way. Written in Cheryl's signature, heartwarming style, Life Makeovers is the ideal book for anyone looking for a balanced way to reclaim their life one step at a time.

How often do you daydream about living a better life—a life that reflects more of you, your values and deepest desires? How many times have you come to the end of a busy week and toyed with the fantasy of packing abag and leaving it all behind?

The "Life Makeover" program is a powerful year-long program for change. It is designed to support you in changing your life one week at a time. Each chapter consists of a topic of the week and contains a Take Action Challenge and a Resources section to support you in taking action quickly and easily.

Be prepared for your life to unfold in wonderful ways. As you clean up the clutter, reconnect with your inner wisdom, strengthen your character, and take on the challenges of high-quality living, you'll find that the lost parts of yourself start to come together to form a pretty amazing life!


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What do you need to change to make your life work better and make you happier? Top-level personal coach Cheryl Richardson, author of the popular Take Time for Your Life, shows you how to make your life over, one week at a time, using her philosophy of "extreme self-care." The result: you'll reevaluate your life and connect to what matters most to you, improving the quality of your life.

Life Makeovers is organized into 52 chapters, one for each week of the year. (Procrastinators: don't wait until January 1 to start--just call this week "week 1" and get going.) Each chapter has a specific theme with a "Take Action Challenge": a practical strategy to put a change into action immediately. For example, week 1 encourages you to reflect on what you've done right by writing down your five greatest accomplishments and three ways you've grown in the past year. Week 5 helps you manage your time by creating an "Absolute Yes" list of your five top priorities for the next 3 to 6 months. Week 20 helps identify behaviors that trigger feelings of irritability or frustration with a "I know I'm headed for trouble when..." list and three things you'll put in place to support your self-care when these happen. Additional topics range widely, such as exploring your internal rules and standards, asking for support, improving your sleep, shaking up your daily routine, and sharing with those in need. Each chapter also includes several well-chosen resources for exploring the topic further.

If you use Life Makeovers as it's designed, you'll have the wisdom and inspiration of one of the best personal coaches in the business for a whole year. You'll have to work with her--no instant magic here--but it will be worth it. --Joan Price

Review

"Cheryl Richardson is here to guide you on a yearlong personal discovery journey. Get ready to improve your life."
-Complete Woman

"[Richardson] offers fifty-two warm and profound essays intended to reconnect us to our 'authentic' selves. Life Makeovers is true to its mission of making life less demanding."
-Chicago Tribune

From the Inside Flap

Author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Take Time for Your Life now shows you how to reclaim your life one week at a time

Cheryl Richardson, bestselling author and one of the most sought-after lecturers in the country, knows firsthand how tough it can be to juggle the daily demands of living in a fast-paced world, and how easily you can become disconnected from your true self and what makes you happy. In Life Makeovers, Cheryl has taken all the know-how and insight she has gleaned from her years as a personal coach and distilled it into a simple, year-long program that shows how making small changes, over time, can have a huge impact on the quality of your life. In fifty-two simple yet profound essays, Richardson provides a plan for both reflecting and taking action, along with specific, practical advice and exercises to help readers gradually and permanently remodel their lives, week by week. Easy to use and fun to read, this workbook is the perfect companion to Take Time for Your Life. Topics include:
The Gift of Time: It's Self-Management, Not Time Management
Are We Having Fun Yet: When Life Gets Too Serious, Here's What to Do
Give Your Brain a Vacation: For Finding the Best Ideas, Try This
Standing in the Shadow: Whose Talent Are You Hiding Behind?
Stop Juggling and Start Living: Here Are Some of the Balls to Drop
Close Encounters: How to Make a Deeper Connection with Others

Her brief, personal essays will inspire you to make changes, and her Take Action Challenges, which appear with comprehensive resource sections at the end of every essay, will guide you through small steps that will slowly teach you to think, act, love, work, and even laugh in a whole new way. Written in Cheryl's signature, heartwarming style, Life Makeovers is the ideal book for anyone looking for a balanced way to reclaim their life one step at a time.

How often do you daydream about living a better lifea life that reflects more of you, your values and deepest desires? How many times have you come to the end of a busy week and toyed with the fantasy of packing abag and leaving it all behind?

The "Life Makeover" program is a powerful year-long program for change. It is designed to support you in changing your life one week at a time. Each chapter consists of a topic of the week and contains a Take Action Challenge and a Resources section to support you in taking action quickly and easily.

Be prepared for your life to unfold in wonderful ways. As you clean up the clutter, reconnect with your inner wisdom, strengthen your character, and take on the challenges of high-quality living, you'll find that the lost parts of yourself start to come together to form a pretty amazing life!

From the Back Cover

"Cheryl Richardson is here to guide you on a yearlong personal discovery journey. Get ready to improve your life."
-Complete Woman

"[Richardson] offers fifty-two warm and profound essays intended to reconnect us to our 'authentic' selves. Life Makeovers is true to its mission of making life less demanding."
-Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Cheryl Richardson, author of The New York Times bestselling books Take Time for Your Life: A Personal
Coach's Seven Step Program for Creating the Life You Want and Life Makeovers: 52 Practical and Inspiring Ways to Improve Your Life One Week at a Time (Broadway Books), supports busy people in achieving professional success without compromising their quality of life. Voted one of the top ten coaches in America by readers of The Professional Coach, she was the first president of the International Coach Federation and holds one of their first Master Certified Coach credentials. She is also the recipient of the 2000 Motivational Book Award for Life Makeovers from Books for a Better Life, which honors the year's most outstanding books and magazines in the self-improvement genre.
As a professional speaker, Cheryl has designed and presented programs to universities, Fortune 500 companies, educational conferences, and professional associations. Her work has been covered widely in the media including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Health Magazine, New Age Magazine, Publisher's Weekly and a cover story in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

How often do you daydream about living a better life—a life that reflects more of you, your values and deepest desires? How many times have you come to the end of a busy week and toyed with the fantasy of packing a bag and leaving it all behind? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that in today’s world most people live with a nagging sense that something’s missing or that life is passing them by. So many of us long for time to discover who we are and what we really want before it’s too late.

For the last nine years I’ve worked as a personal coach helping clients to reevaluate their lives and connect more deeply with what really matters most. The goal was to improve the quality of their lives. The improvements varied, depending on the client. For some, new jobs that honored their values and their need for a life outside of work helped make a difference. For others, getting the right support or putting smart systems in place allowed them to eliminate the stress of success. And, it was not uncommon for clients to scale back or simplify their lives dramatically in order to reclaim the peace and serenity they desired. Each client’s story was unique, and yet they all had one common goal—to live a more authentic life, one that reflected their values and most treasured priorities. Let’s see if any of these stories sound familiar. . . .

As Olivia stands by the window in her office looking out over the city, she wonders where her life is headed. Working as a manager for a high-tech company, she feels like she’s been on a wild ride. Stock prices are up, sales are strong, and she’s been a major contributor to the success of her division. Her work used to be rewarding, but now Olivia feels miserable. Although she found the life she thought she wanted, she feels as if she’s lost herself.

Olivia gets up early every day, hits the gym by 6, gets to her desk by 8, and on most nights leaves the office after 7:30. She daydreams about how life used to be when she spent more time with her friends, dated on a regular basis, and had more time to herself. At this point Olivia says that her life feels like one long routine day after another. She’s tired, lonely, and ready for a change.

Olivia’s situation is a good example of what happens when we dedicate so much of our life to work—we end up missing our life. We forge ahead, get many of our needs—such as the need for community, recognition, or accomplishment—met at work, and suddenly discover that we no longer have a personal life to go home to. This realization can be a hard pill to swallow.

Sometimes, however, the problem is a little different. For example, in David’s situation, his success has given him much more than he bargained for. Sitting at his desk at the end of a busy day David wonders if all his hard work is really paying off. His consulting business is more successful than ever. He’s made more money this year than in the last two years combined. And, he can barely remember the days when he worried about making payroll. Yet David walks around with a nagging feeling that something is missing. Although he’s reached the level of success he always hoped for, it doesn’t feel the way he expected it to feel. He has more responsibility than ever—a loving wife, three small kids, a large house in the country, and twenty-five employees to manage. Instead of feeling happy about the role he’s created for himself, David says he feels like an employee working for everyone else. He often fantasizes about selling the business, downsizing his family’s lifestyle, and trying something new. David’s not sure he’s willing to continue paying such a high price for success.

Or there’s Margaret, whose unhappiness has more to do with an inner challenge than with her external circumstances. After dropping the kids off at school, Margaret drives to work feeling conflicted. The mother of two boys and the owner of a wholesale gift company, Margaret feels like she’s being pulled in two different directions. On the one hand she thrives on the excitement and sense of accomplishment that she gets from growing a successful company; on the other, she longs to be with her boys while they’re growing up. The stress of this conflict is starting to wear her down. It’s hard enough juggling what feels like two full-time jobs (her business and her family), but the added pressure of this inner turmoil makes it unbearable. Margaret knows that something’s got to give.

Although the details of your life may be different, the feelings of frustration, exhaustion, and loneliness may be all too familiar. For many of us who live in a fast-paced, adrenaline-fueled society, questions about meaning, purpose, and true happiness are faithful companions in the day-to-day creation of our lives. We long for something more. Years of searching for happiness and fulfillment in the external world of work have taken their toll. We’ve lost ourselves in the daily madness of our busy lives.

As a personal coach I became a partner with my clients, and during our weekly meetings I’d help them to reevaluate their priorities, redefine success based on a more holistic perspective of life, and take the necessary actions to bring about the positive changes they desired. Each week clients would leave with an action plan, and I quickly noticed that the small weekly homework assignments started to make a big difference. One client, who had lived in a chaotic, cluttered environment for years, started creating order out of chaos and regained a whole new perspective on his life. Another client, who had suffered from the heavy burden of debt created by years of financial irresponsibility, began to make small weekly changes that improved her financial health, and her savings started to grow.

During my time working with clients I learned a lot about what prevents us from living authentic, meaningful lives. And as I shifted my attention from working with individuals to working with groups, I received a lot of feedback on what was holding them back as well. In December 1998 I published Take Time for Your Life in order to share this knowledge with a larger audience. In this book I took readers through the same coaching process that I used with clients in my private practice. The steps in the book were designed to help readers take a realistic look at their lives and to help them evaluate what needed to change in order for them to feel happier and to live a higher-quality life.

For example, I encouraged readers to begin making self-care a top priority, so they could make proactive life choices instead of reactive ones. I led them through a process of getting their priorities straight, identifying and eliminating those things that were draining their energy, and investing in their financial health, so they would feel more fully in charge of their lives. I introduced readers to the challenges of living in an adrenaline-crazed society, and I showed them how to slow down and begin exchanging unhealthy forms of fuel, like caffeine, sugar, and anxiety, for healthier forms, like a supportive community and a personalized spiritual practice.

I also went out on the road speaking about these topics to larger audiences who felt disillusioned with their lives. As I spoke to audience members and read through the letters and e-mails I received from readers of my first book, it was clear that these strategies were working and that my readers wanted more. They wanted to continue to hear about others who were making changes in their lives, and they wanted bite-sized homework that they could implement on a weekly basis to support them in making the changes I had outlined in the book. That’s when I decided to use technology to my advantage.

In January of 1999 I launched an on-line newsletter called Life Makeover for the Year 2000. I designed the newsletter to support readers by providing simple, practical strategies that they could use to improve their personal and professional lives on a weekly basis. Based on my experience while coaching clients, I decided to use the “one week at a time” process not only to help make change easier for more people, but to make the process fun and effective as well. Each week I chose a random topic that addressed a certain area of personal or professional growth, and I added a specific action that readers could take during the week to help improve this area. As readers began taking action, their lives started to change. And all of the small changes they were making started to add up.

The Life Makeover community began to grow as readers started forwarding the weekly newsletters to friends, family members, coworkers, and colleagues around the world. For example, one woman, the dean of a well-known university, distributed the newsletter to everyone at her school. Another reader, the president of a manufacturing company, decided to send the weekly newsletter to every employee at the company. What started out as a community of a few hundred quickly grew to several thousand within one year.

The foundation of this weekly process was rooted in my basic coaching philosophy of extreme self-care. This concept, introduced to me by my colleague, Thomas Leonard, challenged readers to take such good care of themselves that at times the program even felt a bit self-indulgent. There was an important reason for this. In my experience as a coach I learned that when clients took extremely good care of themselves by doing things like taking time off on a regular basis, saying no more often to people or projects or situations that drained them, and listening to and acting on their inner wisdom, their stress levels went down and their life satisfaction increased. They also began to care for others in a much healthier way. This realization became my guiding vision—to help peo...
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Broadway Books (September 1, 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 210 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0767906632
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0767906630
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.59 x 0.83 x 8.52 inches

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