Reviewed by Vincent Dublado for Readers' Favorite

Business author Paul L. Gunn Jr. looks at empathy as an important factor in business in his book, Succeed the Right Way: What Every Compassionate Business Person Must Know. This author has an ardent desire for you to see a pathway to success or change the way you handle business leadership. At the same time, it also addresses young or budding entrepreneurs to include the value of empathy in their business practices. As the recent pandemic has changed the way we do business, the book argues that connection becomes very critical more than ever. A mindset of caring while seeking success with empathy at the helm is at the forefront of this humble 199-page business book. It gives a solid rationale on the success of relationship-focused practices and how this helps to expand capacity and potential.

Empathy in business is an urgent clarion call. In an age where we are placed in isolation, it becomes incumbent upon businesses to harness creativity to better reach out to customers. Empathy is also the most important attribute of a leader to sustain their position of having people to lead. Of course, for most people, it doesn’t come easily, and that’s where this book comes in handy. Paul L. Gunn Jr. helps you to rewire your perception of this virtue. Contrary to some popular beliefs, empathy is not for the weak; it is simply an undervalued skill that Gunn Jr. wants you to tap into to better maximize your grasp of leadership. A definitive source on the use of empathy in business, Succeed the Right Way serves as an excellent reference guide to anyone who has experienced setbacks in business and management.

Reviewed by Astrid Iustulin for Readers' Favorite

There is nothing like a collection of quotes to clarify the most important things about a topic. This is also true for themes such as business and work and Tom Peters' Compact Guide to Excellence is here to prove it. Thanks to the many quotes collected in this book, Peters invites us to reflect on 13 central themes, such as giving value to people before anything else, the importance of training, the principles of leadership, and why learning to listen is essential. After reading and meditating on all the quotes that Peters shares, you will have more precise ideas about these concepts.

I have always liked quotes because I value the wisdom they have. However, before reading Tom Peters' Compact Guide to Excellence, I did not think I would ever find a book containing that many quotes, so much so that I used it to jot down my favorite quotes myself. Therefore, I am thrilled to have this volume about approaching work. Tom Peters has chosen quotes that can change a person's point of view and make you feel enriched after reading them. He also inspires us to put the principles into practice systematically and consistently. I particularly appreciated the quotes dedicated to listening and how it is the most valuable skill for a leader; I know from personal experience how true that is. After reading this guide, I hope many professionals will thrive, and I highly recommend it.

Reviewed by Vincent Dublado for Readers' Favorite

Winning Your Biggest Paycheck: Career Advancement and Financial Freedom Through Sales Productivity and Empowerment! by Edmund Yeung sounds like the Holy Grail for moneymaking success, but it sets you up for more realistic expectations. This financial and motivational guide is aimed at people who want to make positive changes and breakthroughs in their careers, lives, and especially earnings. It is also aimed at marketing and sales executives to help them use proven strategies for improved sales productivity. Provided that earning a huge paycheck is at the top of your priority list, this book can lead you to increase your professional value, while the strategies can be applied to whatever industry or profession you are in. It gives three simple, easy-to-follow, but powerful ways to develop approaches that will make you purpose-driven.

Edmund Yeung offers his 25-year experience as a creative strategist. He lays the foundation for your career advancement by making you focus on the fundamentals and where the financial reward is a by-product of your understanding of the rules of engagement. As a sales guru, he concentrates on methods that involve customer advocacy. Whatever your field of discipline, Winning Your Biggest Paycheck will unleash your earning potential beyond your wildest dreams. But as this is no instant solution to earning a fat paycheck, the results will depend on how well you employ the strategies outlined, along with cultivating the proper mindset. Like any science, the techniques for professional productivity are evolving, and Yeung gives you the tools and processes that are today’s best practices. They will certainly remain relevant in the years to come. It is sure to inspire you to make significant changes in your career.

Reviewed by K.C. Finn for Readers' Favorite

Elevating Your Origins to Love: A Guided Journey of Transformation, Healing and Power is a work of non-fiction in the motivational, introspective, and self-help subgenres. It is best suited to the general adult reading audience and was penned by Susan Drury. This intellectually stimulating guide examines the social constructs of the human world and the process by which we learn to “be human” from as early as birth. It points out how this can be damaging to our emotional and psychological well-being if we don’t step back and examine where this advice came from when we are adults. Drawing on her own experience, the author describes different moments of revelation and the process of transformation and offers practical advice and meditations to help readers evaluate their perspectives.

Susan Drury balances the tricky realms of emotional, meditative self-help, and the world of social science and psychology fabulously well to deliver this well-balanced guide to living. I found her criticisms of the assumptions of truth that we make to be well-examined. The different psychological states of early development were explained in accessible terms and were fascinating to read. There’s never a moment where emotion, pain, or suffering are overlooked or ignored, but there’s also a deep thread of logic, reason, and critical thinking that underpins every principle to keep us grounded and well-guided during the process. Elevating Your Origins to Love is a highly recommended read for those in need of a fresh perspective, and an ideal book to have by your side when you start a new phase of your life.

Reviewed by K.C. Finn for Readers' Favorite

Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn't Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It is a work of non-fiction in the motivational writing, self-help, and inspirational subgenres. It is best suited to the general adult reading audience and was penned by author Laura Gassner Otting. As its title suggests, this work is intended to inspire those who are keen on chasing success to revisit their perspective on the concept and find new practical and sustainable ways of feeling fulfilled and living off the energy of their own potential. Where some see success as the daunting prospect of “so now what next?”, this work flips the script and encourages us to take control of our own potential.

Author Laura Gassner Otting captures all the spirit and excitement of achievement that many of us have when we are young children and revisits the concept of putting pressure on ourselves to create a new source of empowerment and energy. I really love the way this work is penned because it feels so enthusiastic and powerful, but also gives readers the freedom of choice, as though we can achieve everything we might ever dream in life, but also, if you’re feeling great where you are, that’s totally valid too. The author’s friendly and communicative tone makes the work accessible, no matter what field or approach in life you’re coming at it from, because the emotions she discusses are totally universal. Overall, Wonderhell is a well-organized and deeply considered book that really taps into what makes us tick, and it’s something I’ll be exploring again and again in the year ahead.

Reviewed by K.C. Finn for Readers' Favorite

A Path to Excellence: The Blueprint to Achieving Your Greatest Potential is a work of non-fiction in the self-help, self-improvement, and motivational writing subgenres. It is best suited to the general adult reading audience and was penned by author Tony Jeton Selimi. As its title suggests, this proactive and inspirational read is intended to offer a practical pathway to a better life for readers seeking to improve their prospects in business, home life, finance, and general harmony. Learning to bridge the gap between the life you have and the life you desire can be challenging, but Selimi’s work paves that path with easily integrated steps to make small adjustments to the body and mind that will have a much larger impact over time.

Author Tony Jeton Selimi has penned a masterful treatise on emotional intelligence and positive change, all with a view to making the very best versions of ourselves come into being. I really enjoyed the writing style as the narrative felt confident and authorial but also personal, as though the reader is talking to a very learned friend. There’s an assuredness in Selimi’s work that will definitely ring true for anyone who has dabbled in self-help before, but the structure that Selimi gives to each principle and the accessibility of his model means that anyone can pick this book up and start applying principles for a better life at once. I especially found the conversations in the back matter to be interesting, including ‘#Loneliness,’ which I feel could be a whole book on its own these days. Overall, I would certainly recommend A Path to Excellence as a worthwhile and helpful read for anyone seeking a new way to improve their outlook on life.

Reviewed by Pikasho Deka for Readers' Favorite

It's a given that people will face obstacles and have to overcome their struggles in the pursuit of their dreams. Become the Fire: Transform Life’s Chaos into Business and Personal Success is a self-help motivational guidebook by Elisa Schmitz aimed at helping readers to turn their inner conflicts into fuel on their path to success and fulfillment. Born to a Yugoslavian immigrant father and a Puerto Rican mother, Elisa always felt like an outsider. In this book, she demonstrates how being an outsider helped develop her situational awareness, leading her to become the director and executive editor for the Disney Interactive Media Group. She was a divorced single mother raising three children while battling health issues who found inspiration during her situation and built a successful company. The book also contains stories and interviews with ten self-made women from diverse backgrounds who carved their paths to success.

Highly driven people find motivation even amidst adversity. Elisa Schmitz's story of her own life and that of ten similarly empowered women is just the kind of book you need to read if you're an aspiring entrepreneur. Become the Fire teaches you to recognize the opportunities and seize them with both hands to fulfill your vision. You will learn how motivation plays a key role in manifesting courage in a person, just as resilience is the key to becoming friends with failure. Schmitz's writing style is crisp and concise, with the meticulous structural organization of the subject matter that makes for a smooth reading experience. A motivational and informative read.

Reviewed by Joshua Olokodana for Readers' Favorite

Spiritual science, out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, cosmic entities, reincarnation, light bodies, astral projection, heaven, the creator, and the universe-multiverse question. An "all-star" cast of topics that have always been a mystery to humanity, giving away precious little across the ages, but no more! How to Kiss the Universe answers all the questions you might have about life, including the ones you have yet to think of. Following years of living without any deep contemplation of life whatsoever, Jozef Simkovic takes a keen interest in his spirituality after overcoming a life-threatening health challenge. Urged on by friends, he enrolled at The Monroe Institute, and a spontaneous journey to spiritual enlightenment was set in motion. Jozef turned out to be a quick study, and he kept developing until curiosity took him to the Reptilian planet. Unbeknownst to him, a reptilian king took notice of his activities and breached the inter-realm membrane some days later, attacking him in his sleep with the intention of possessing him and stopping him from telling us about the Other Side in this startling book titled How to Kiss the Universe.

How to Kiss the Universe: An Inspirational Spiritual and Metaphysical Narrative about Human Origin, Essence and Destiny is a shocking and scintillating account of spiritual journeys, cosmic exploration, and huge universal secrets written by Jozef Simkovic. At times, the narrative is so rational that it's plainly undeniable. Other times, it's just wild. But Jozef allows the reader to draw their own conclusions from the narration, which is obviously philosophical, albeit with mystical overtones one would wish weren't so real. Apart from its unique content, which could have put this book in a genre of its own, How to Kiss the Universe compels you to reassess your beliefs without invalidating your religious orientation. I loved the titling of each chapter and the thought-provoking questions they answered—such as why evil still exists despite the supervision of a loving supreme being. The story is told in short and well-structured chapters that make it easier to read. However, Mr. Simkovic's occasional humor and consistent use of relevant quotes at the beginning of each chapter make it a lively read. How to Kiss the Universe is one of those books everyone needs to read, especially at the point of self-discovery.

Reviewed by Francis Mont for Readers' Favorite

Ditching Success? A Career Ventured; A Life Regained by Batoul I. Ajlouni is a memoir with an intriguing title. Written from the first-person point of view, it documents the author’s journey from being an ambitious career woman, thriving on challenges and success to ultimate burn-out, disillusionment, and, finally, an honest soul-searching aimed at understanding and redefining herself. The honesty in the thoughts and the writing stands out and rings true to the reader. It is also highly informative about the business world in general and Jordan as a country in particular. Through her extensive travels to “four continents, seventeen countries and forty cities”, she provides insight into different sceneries, cultures, and business practices I had not been familiar with before. Her process of rediscovering her own identity culminated in understanding her deepest inner values and summarized what she found by writing this book.

Writing a memoir is a very intense and often painful experience and can be highly revealing to both author and reader. If it’s not done with total honesty and merciless clarity, it is a wasted effort. Batoul I. Ajlouni does not fail this test and, as a consequence, she has written a compelling testimony about the price one has to pay for ‘success’ as well as the price one has to pay for abandoning it. This is the greatest value of this book – it forces the reader to ask themselves the same tough questions and confront unpleasant doubts about life choices they may have made in the past. It also encourages introspection and critical assessment of the road behind and searches for alternative paths ahead. The writing is clear, easily followed, and the emotional context is infectious to the reader. I can sincerely recommend it to anyone who ever had doubts about the value of success. Ditching Success? A Career Ventured; A Life Regained is well worth considering if this sounds like you.

Reviewed by Astrid Iustulin for Readers' Favorite

Some people have unique experiences to tell and, when they write their books, show readers how incredible their lives are. This is the case with Katharine Branham, the author of How I Found My Superpowers: An Introduction to the Spirit World. In her book, Branham recounts her life starting from her childhood when she was abused and first discovered her superpowers. She saw figures in the closet where she was locked up and also a man standing at the foot of her bed. She could also see people's energy fields and understand their moods. Follow her on the incredible journey that would lead this little girl to practice her superpowers as an adult.

How I Found My Superpowers tells the extraordinary story of an incredible woman. Katharine Branham has fascinatingly recounted her experiences and I am sure readers of this book will be intrigued by the beautiful storytelling. Branham's journey provides moments of great interest. In addition to revealing her superpowers to the reader - the most extraordinary thing is her predicting the Covid pandemic - it also makes them reflect on how life changes. In her case, particularly the relationship with her mother. I have read these experiences with great pleasure, and I am sure many readers will agree with me. I recommend this book to all those interested in the spirit world and who want to get to know it through the experience of an amazing person like the author.