Inner Excellence: Read-Alikes for Championship-Level Inspiration
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As the Philadelphia Eagles advance in the playoffs (GO BIRDS!), football fans everywhere are looking for a copy of A.J. Brown's viral sideline read, Inner Excellence.
While the Free Library does carry digital audiobook copies of the self-help title on Libby, our main catalog doesn't typically carry physical copies of self-published books. But if audiobooks aren't your thing and you're looking for something similar in the Free Library catalog, here are a few read-alikes to Inner Excellence:
Head in the Game: The Mental Engineering of the World's Greatest Athletes (2017) by Brandon Sneed
Featuring an intriguing blend of science and sports that explores how some of the worlds greatest athletes are utilizing the last frontier of performance-enhancing technology — the mental mapping and engineering of their own brains — for peak performance, and what it means for the future of athleticism, sports, and the rest of us. Moneyball showed how statistics were revolutionizing baseball. The Sports Gene revealed the role genetics play in sports. Now, Head in the Game examines the next evolution: how mental engineering — the manipulation of the cognitive processes of the brain — can make gifted athletes even better.
Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes A Day (2021) by Amishi Jha
From the constant buzz of your phone, the lure of your media feed, to your unrelenting, all-encompassing, and ever-growing mental to-do list the demands on your attention have never been so severe. The result is an escalating crisis where we feel mentally foggy, scattered, and overwhelmed. Remarkably, the solution to our attention crisis has been right here in front of us the entire time. Acclaimed neuroscientist, Amishi P. Jha, PhD has dedicated her life's work to understanding the science of attention at every level from brain imaging studies in a lab to field-testing soldiers, athletes, students, and firefighters. Her mission has been to scientifically determine how we can harness the full power of our attention to better meet all that life demands. Dr. Jha expertly guides the reader through fascinating research, debunking common assumptions, and offering stunning new insights into where presence and purpose really come from. Peak Mind reveals remarkably easy-to-adapt flexible 12-minute-a-day exercises to lift the mental fog, declutter the mind, and strengthen focus so that you can experience more of your life.
The Playmaker's Advantage: How to Raise Your Mental Game to the Next Level (2019) by Leonard D. Zaichkowsky
Discover how to improve your mental game — the next frontier in sports training — no matter your age or experience and become the Playmaker or the decisive general on the court or field.
The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think of You (2024) by Michael Gervais
With the proliferation of social media, the intense pressure to succeed, and our overreliance on external rewards, metrics, and validation, FOPO is running rampant. Our concern with what other people think about us has become an irrational, unproductive, and unhealthy obsession in the modern world. And its negative effects reach into all aspects of our lives. In The First Rule of Mastery, Michael Gervais shows us the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the world outside us to the world inside us. As one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between the mind and human performance, Gervais takes an in-depth look at the noxious effects of FOPO while laying out the mental skills and practices we need to achieve personal excellence — the same skills he's taught to the top performers in the world including sports MVPs and Fortune 100 leaders and teams. Filled with fascinating stories from the worlds of sports and business, leading-edge science, and insights from the popular Finding Mastery podcast, The First Rule of Mastery is a much-needed wake-up call that when we give more value to other people's opinions than our own, we live life on their terms, not ours.
How Champions Think in Sports and in Life (2015) by Robert J. Rotella
How Champions Think in Sports and in Life is a guide to success in all aspects of life — not just sports — from business to relationships to personal challenges of every variety.
The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You (2020) by Elaine Aron
Do you have a keen imagination and vivid dreams? Is time alone each day as essential to you as food and water? Are you noted for your empathy? Your conscientiousness? Do noise and confusion quickly overwhelm you? If you've answered yes, you may be a highly sensitive person (HSP) and Dr. Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person is the life-changing guide you’ll want in your toolbox.
The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made (2020) by A. Mark Williams
Get inside the minds of elite sportsmen and women and discover what it takes to be the best. This is the story of superhuman performance and the playbook for the superstars of tomorrow. Never have the best sportspeople seemed so far removed from the rest of us. So how are these extraordinary athletes made and what do their achievements tell us about success? The Best reveals how the most incredible sportspeople in the world got that way. It is a unique look at the path to sporting greatness. This is a story of origins, training, luck, and serendipity, as well as of sports science and cutting-edge technology. Packed with gripping personal stories and interviews, you will discover how the best athletes develop the extraordinary skills and muscle memory that allow them to perform remarkable acts without consciously thinking about them. The Best deconstructs the myths, like the notion that 10,000 hours of practice are needed to make it to the top, and explores the hidden power of the mind to reveal how athletes really think and process information during high-octane competition. it gets inside the minds of champions, deconstructing what athletes see during matches and explaining how they do what they do. Drawing on examples and lessons from throughout the sporting world, this is for anyone who wants to know what it takes to be the best.
10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works (2014) by Dan Harris
After having a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, Harris knew he had to make some changes. A lifelong nonbeliever, he found himself on a bizarre adventure, involving a disgraced pastor, a mysterious self-help guru, and a gaggle of brain scientists. Eventually, Harris realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had both propelled him through the ranks of a hyper-competitive business and also led him to make the profoundly stupid decisions that provoked his on-air freak-out.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes Are High (2022) by Joseph Grenny
Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever. The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation — especially difficult ones — leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You'll learn how to: respond when someone initiates a crucial conversation with you Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it and communicate more effectively across digital mediums. When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences, handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences, or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results. Whether they take place at work or home, with your coworkers or your spouse, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (2023) by Peter Attia
Wouldn't you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health. For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and type-2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting. This is not "biohacking," it's science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia's aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, and to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover: why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn't tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack; that you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging; why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug" — and how to begin training for the "Centenarian Decathlon;" why you should forget about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern; why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all. Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.
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