Episode 6: 2018 Summer Reading List

Hello my Friends,

Welcome to another edition of Winners Ways Podcast. This is Episode 6 of this Program and today I will basically be sharing my summer reading list.

If you know me very well, you will know already that I enjoy reading books. I love reading books that will motivate, educate, and inspire me. I read a lot of self-help books and my core areas of focus are:

– Leadership

– Relationship

– Business & Career

– Spiritual

– Personal Finance

I truly believe that there is a lot we can all learn by reading books and I encourage everyone to read at least one book a month if they can. Trust me, you will see lots of benefits. And it’s so easy these days to lay your hand on all sorts of books that will help you.

You can get free eBooks online, scribd.com has lots of free books that you can download. You can also subscribe to audible to just listen to books if you are the type that does not enjoy reading books. There are tons of $0.99 eBook on Amazon that you can download on your mobile device to read as well. So you have so many ways you can get books to read. No excuse.

Because I truly believe in the positive impacts that books can have in readers lives. It is to this end that I am starting a new tradition whereby each year I will the books that inspire me most to you my audience. It will be titled “My Summer Reading List.

Grab the books here:

Without keeping you waiting for too long….

Let’s dive immediately into my 2018 Summer Reading List”

Get your hopes up: By Joyce Meyer

In the book “Get Your Hopes Up”, Joyce Meyer teaches readers how to transform their lives by tapping into the power of hope. One of the most powerful forces in the universe is hope and she rightly defined it as -the happy and confident anticipation that something good is going to happen.

Regardless of where one is in life, it is impossible to live successfully and to the fullest without hope. With GET YOUR HOPES UP! Joyce will help readers achieve a lasting sense of hope, built on their faith in God. Hope is only as strong as its source. This book helps readers avoid misplacing their trust in unreliable things and help them ground their hope steadfastly in God for limitless joy and possibilities for their lives. As Joyce explains, “Without hope in God, there isn’t much you can do, but with Hope in God, there isn’t much you can’t do.”

I love the many aspects of hope you will find in this book and perhaps my favorite is that of what Joyce called spiritual possums. Whenever a difficulty or storm comes into their life, they play possum. They stop moving as if they have hit an impenetrable wall and their faith and hope go right out the window. Rather than getting active, they get passive. When times get tough, when they’re dealing with pain or disappointment, they freeze. They just stop moving. Does this sound familiar? Have you ever found yourself in a holding pattern because of an unexpected trial or a crushing disappointment? I want to encourage you amid your pain that sometimes the very best thing you can do is just keep moving. You may not have all the answers yet. You may still be shocked by the circumstances around you. You may even feel like the world is caving in around you. Amid those difficulties, if you’ll just keep moving, it will help you not to become hopeless.”.

For anyone facing a difficult time or situation, this is the perfect book to help them move past the situation for now and see what God has in store for them today.

TAKE AWAY: The main idea of this book is that you must always hope for good things to happen to you every day and not just in a passive way. You must connect your faith with plans to see your dream in life come true.

– If you have no job, be hopeful that a job will come, but you must continue to apply

– If your business is not moving as planned, you’ve got to be hopeful that things will pick up but continue to strategize and work on plans.

– If your health is failing, you must be hopeful for a turnaround, keep praying and follow Doctor’s recommendations.

– No matter what may be going on in your life: Broke, Childless, Lonely, Depressed etc. Stay Hopeful.

Richest Man in Babylon: By George Clason

In life we all have ambitions that we wish to accomplish, righteous desires that we wish to gratify. To bring our ambitions and desires to fulfillment, we need to be successful with money. The financial principles laid out in “The Richest Man in Babylon” can act as a guide to anyone willing to follow them as they move from total lack to possessing abundant financial resources.

The cast was set in the ancient city of Babylon, and the story was centered on the goal of the King of Babylon to ensure that all of the citizens were taught how to acquire wealth. The king consulted with Arkad who was the richest man in Babylon to pass on his knowledge to other men in the city. Have you ever wondered why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Why is it that the top 1% makes much more than the next 90% of the population combined? How did Jeff Bezos gate amass $150 billion? The world’s population is just over 7 billion. Think about it, if Jeff gives each person in the world a billion dollar, he will still have over $100 billion.

TAKE AWAY: The goal of this book is to teach you how to earn money, keep money, and to make your surpluses earn more money. This book will teach you how to increase your financial net worth. Below are the seven principles highlighted in the book that can help anyone that wants to achieve financial prosperity.

o Pay yourself first

o Control your expenses

o Make your money work for you

o Protect your money from loss

o Own thy own home

o Have a retirement and insurance plan

o Increase your ability to learn

Winners Ways:By Adebola Alabi

Winners’ Ways is a book that seeks to motivate the readers to find their true passion in order to live happy and fulfill purpose while on earth. The book was written to remind everyone that God created us with good plans and kind thoughts and that no matter what we go through, the intention of God is that all of humans should succeed and win in the race of life.

It also provides the reassurance that anyone can win and be what they want to be simply by following some core principles shared by the fictional character Dango, as written by the author. Dango delivered series of powerful coaching section to his employees whom he found to be in lackluster state, and he explained strategies that can be followed in order to bust forth and start a forward movement in life.

This is not a book about how to become rich but it is about how to find and connect with your passion and live a purposeful life.

There are many books about success, I consider some of the books out there to be very useful and valuable, while most others are full of misconceptions about success. In our society today, we have been conditioned to think about success only in terms of material wealth. While it is good to be wealthy, measuring success based on material possession alone is incomplete in the grand scheme of things. This is because success can mean different things to different people, to some having good health, families, and children will be considered as being successful. Some other consider success as being happy, or working in a certain job, or living a certain lifestyle. Fame, power, and prestige are what some other people use to evaluate success. And to many people still, success is being able to do whatever they want at any time they desire. So, to correct this obvious misconception, I will like to establish that “True success should be measured by how happy you are doing what you are meant to do here on earth”.

TAKE AWAY:

Everyone wants to win and achieve success at what they do.
Most people do not know how to take the first step towards their goals.
People widely – and often wrongfully – associate success with money and material possession only.
Success means different thing to different people.
To find meaning to your life, you may need to change your thinking and develop some new attitudes.
Know your passion, work on your passion by serving others and you will fulfill your purpose.
You must love your life in order to become successful, and to love your life, you need to discard the herd mentalities. Don’t follow the crowd.
There are multiple challenges on the path to a successful life. You may need to break barriers and knock down impossibilities in order to win.
There is nothing new that someone has not tried before. What if it is possible to learn from other people that have achieved success in the area you are interested in?
Rekindle your dreams. You may have experience failures in the past, don’t give up. Keep the hope alive.

Unleashed: By Gregg Thompson

Imagine for a moment that you are the kind of person who insists on seeing the greatness in others, challenges them to live up to their own standards, and holds them accountable for outstanding performance every day of their work life. You are a leader coach. Central to the thesis of Unleashed is that gifted and talented people already exist within our organizations, but that many of them are not maximizing their potential. Talent is everywhere it is waiting to be unleashed. And the unleashing process is the primary role of the Leader coach.

Unleashed is about expecting greatness from your team. The great expectations model of coaching is about leaving a permanent, positive mark in the lives of the people around you. It is about making a real and lasting contribution. It’s about your legacy.

As a coach, you are an instrument. You must be able to inspire the trust necessary for others to want to share their most daunting problems and ardent dreams with you?

Coaching cannot happen unless another person invites you in to do so.

Every leader must answer three crucial questions before setting out to coach:

Have you earned the right to coach?

Authentic
Self-esteem
Noble Intention

“Managers must know and live their most important values (authenticity), by being fully aware of their unique strengths and gifts (self-esteem), and by having a genuine interest in the success of the Talent (noble intention)”

Are you capable of establishing the kind of relationship necessary for coaching?

Appreciation
Confrontation
Accountability

“This is a unique and special relationship, in which the Talent is appreciated at his best, confronted with his own talents and aspirations, and held accountable to live up to his own highest standards.”

Are you willing to engage in the kind of conversation that stimulates changes in performance?

Discovery
Creation
Commitment

“The dangerous conversation is a wide-ranging exchange between the Leader Coach and the Talent exploring aspirations, values, and the current situation, taking its participants to new depths (discovery), generating new possibilities, opportunities, and perspectives (creation); and forging new action plans and accountabilities (commitment).”

TAKE AWAYS

Unleashed is about expecting greatness from your team.
Any place where people work, there are enormous, untapped potential waiting to be developed and deployed. Talent is everywhere it just need to be unleashed.
It is the job of the Leader coach to unleash those talents and bring out the greatness in the team.
Coaching for high performance means challenging each individual to perform at a higher level – regardless of how well or poorly he has been doing up until now.
The great coach deliberately seeks out others’ highest potentials, often intentionally overlooking their shortcomings in the process.
Coaching is about figuring out what another person most wants and become an advocate for them achieving it.

The Total Money Makeover: By Dave Ramsey

The book “The Total Money Makeover” is about steps we all need to take to achieve financial freedom by making certain behavioral changes that will be considered “abnormal in this present age and time. It uses Proverb 22:7, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is a slave to the lender” to dissuade people from going into debt. It is about living a debt-free life and making sure that one only acquires what we truly can afford. It further explains the power of income, and how saving and investing can help anyone to become wealthy by exploiting the benefits of compound interest. We can all kick out debt of our lives, if we learn to live within our means, and be contented with what we have.

The book shared several success stories about people that have gone through financial peace university with Dave Ramsey and the transformation they experienced. It does not employ the quick fix approach, but it provides guides about how everyone can become better managers of their finances using budget as a tool to tell their money to go at the end of each month.

Ramsey debunks the many myths of money (exposing the dangers of cash advance, credit card reward, payday loan, car loan payment, & debt consolidation) and attacks the illusions and downright deceptions of the American dream, which encourages nothing but overspending and massive amounts of debt. “Don’t even consider keeping up with the Joneses,” Ramsey declares in his typically candid style. “They’re broke!”

TAKE AWAY: The Total Money Makeover isn’t theory. It works every single time. It works because it is simple. It works because it gets to the heart of the money problems: you. Anyone can win in the game of money. Below are seven baby steps to reach financial freedom.