In My Hands Today…

What the Taliban Told Me – Ian Fritz

When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He hadn’t been accepted into college thanks to an indifferent high school career. He’d too often slept through his classes as he worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his trailer-dwelling family in Lake City, Florida.

But the Air Force recognizes his potential and sends him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan. By 2011, Fritz was an airborne cryptologic linguist and one of only a tiny number of people in the world trained to do this job on low-flying gunships. He monitors communications on the ground and determines in real time which Afghans are Taliban and which are innocent civilians.

This eavesdropping is critical to supporting Special Forces units on the ground, but there is no training to counter the emotional complexity that develops as you listen to people’s most intimate conversations. Over the course of two tours, Fritz listens to the Taliban for hundreds of hours, all over the country night and day, in moments of peace and in the middle of battle. What he hears teaches him about the people of Afghanistan—Taliban and otherwise—the war, and himself. Fritz’s fluency is his greatest asset to the military, yet it becomes the greatest liability to his own commitment to the cause.

In My Hands Today…

The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness – Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

The Japanese phenomenon that teaches us the simple yet profound lessons required to liberate our real selves and find lasting happiness.

The Courage to Be Disliked shows you how to unlock the power within yourself to become your best and truest self, change your future and find lasting happiness. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Freud and Jung, the authors explain how we are all free to determine our own future free of the shackles of past experiences, doubts and the expectations of others. It’s a philosophy that’s profoundly liberating, allowing us to develop the courage to change, and to ignore the limitations that we and those around us can place on ourselves.

In My Hands Today…

Don’t Believe Everything You Think – Joseph Nguyen

In this book, you’ll discover the root cause of all psychological and emotional suffering and how to achieve freedom of mind to effortlessly create the life you’ve always wanted to live.

Although pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

This book offers a completely new paradigm and understanding of where our human experience comes from, allowing us to end our own suffering and create how we want to feel at any moment.

No matter what has happened to you, where you are from, or what you have done, you can still find total peace, unconditional love, complete fulfillment, and an abundance of joy in your life.

No person is an exception to this. Darkness only exists because of the light, which means even in our darkest hour, light must exist.

Within the pages of this book, contains timeless wisdom to empower you with the understanding of our mind’s infinite potential to create any experience of life that we want no matter the external circumstances.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think is not about rewiring your brain, rewriting your past, positive thinking or anything of the sort.

We cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. Tactics are temporary. An expansion of consciousness is permanent.

In My Hands Today…

Beyond the Wand: The Magic & Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard – Tom Felton

Tom Felton’s adolescence was anything but ordinary. His early rise to fame in beloved films like The Borrowers catapulted him into the limelight, but nothing could prepare him for what was to come after he landed the iconic role of the Draco Malfoy, the bleached blonde villain of the Harry Potter movies. For the next ten years, he was at the center of a huge pop culture phenomenon and yet, in between filming, he would go back to being a normal teenager trying to fit into a normal school.

Speaking with great candor and his signature humor, Tom shares his experience growing up as part of the wizarding world while also trying to navigate the muggle world. He tells stories from his early days in the business like his first acting gig where he was mistaken for fellow blonde child actor Macaulay Culkin and his Harry Potter audition where, in a very Draco-like move, he fudged how well he knew the books the series was based on (not at all). He reflects on his experiences working with cinematic greats such as Alan Rickman, Sir Michael Gambon, Dame Maggie Smith, and Ralph Fiennes (including that awkward Voldemort hug). And, perhaps most poignantly, he discusses the lasting relationships he made over that decade of filming, including with Emma Watson, who started out as a pesky nine-year-old whom he mocked for not knowing what a boom mic was but who soon grew into one of his dearest friends. Then, of course, there are the highs and lows of fame and navigating life after such a momentous and life-changing experience.

In My Hands Today…

Making Relationships Work at Work: A toolkit for getting more done with less stress – Richard Fox, Anneliese Guerin-Letendre

Nowadays, work is all about relationships

Getting things done depends on getting along. And when relationships are difficult, it’s not just our work that suffers: it’s often our health and wellbeing too.

Making Relationships Work at Work is the first book to cover comprehensively all the main components of building and maintaining great relationships at work.
Based on 50 years’ experience of working with a wide variety of organisations, teams and individuals and packed with practical strategies, tips and tools for making work relationships work better, it will not only help you to become more effective with less stress, but also to enjoy your working life more.

Richard Fox is a partner in The Learning Corporation, a pan-European firm of leadership coaches, facilitators and business mentors. He is a PCC credentialed coach with the International Coach Federation, a Master NLP practitioner and a member of the International Association for Coaching. He helped create The Learning Corporation after a successful period as a partner with KPMG, having played a leading role with them in setting up an office and developing a thriving client base. As a leadership coach Richard helps leaders and managers create and sustain an environment in which people can express themselves, optimise their potential and do their best work.

He is an experienced business mentor, facilitator and coach with specialist skills in the key areas of developing people in line with strategy; collaborative working, talent development, building strategic alliances, partnerships and structured networks. As a master facilitator, Richard works with organisations facilitating workshops on e.g. personal effectiveness, building networking capability, visioning, strategic thinking, managing change, leadership, coaching and mentoring, organisational learning, team working, creativity and innovation.