Resolve to live with intention.

In Once a Passenger: A Journey toward Intentional Living by Tina Attalla she shares, in her words, “how I felt like a passenger in my own life and finally got into the driver’s seat, only to give the control back to the Lord. I reveal the dark place of disillusionment I found myself in after having checked all the right boxes of the successful woman and feeling stuck in a vicious cycle of materialism and consumerism.” Learn how you, too, can break the cycle and live with greater intention. Read more about her path to this book here.

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Resolve to create compassionately.

I could not wait to read Mitali Perkins’ forthcoming book Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives so I got an advance reader copy. It’s the perfect book for me, as someone who writes but also feels like, with so much going wrong in the world, maybe writing isn’t enough or even necessary. Reading this book is like having Mitali by my side, encouraging with her words and offering tools for those of us who are creative and want to make the world a better place, praying that our creativity is a balm.

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Resolve to stay inspired.

Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work
and Life by Allison Holzer, Sandra Spataro, and Jen Grace Baron explores the lesser researched field of inspiration, and offers ideas for how to engineer inspiration to better serve both work and life. “Simply put, when individuals feel inspired, they are more inclined to build stronger connections and community with others,” write the authors. In addition to numerous examples of how different individuals spark and nurture inspiration, Holzer, Spataro and Baron share eighteen “engines of inspiration” with useful explanations for how to use the one or two that work best for each individual.

Purchase Dare to Inspire on Bookshop | Amazon | Audible.

Resolve to use time wisely and well.

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done is my favorite of Laura Vanderkam’s many productivity books (and I’ve read them all), because it drills down to the essence of why we think about using our time in the first place—not just to be more productive, but to use our time to live full and meaningful lives with our loved ones in the limited time we have. Based on a time perception and time diary study Vanderkam did of almost one hundred people who have families with children and who work full time, Vanderkam came up with “the secrets of people who have all the time in the world.” They are: 1-Tend your garden. 2-Make life memorable. 3-Don’t fill time. 4-Linger. 5-Invest in your happiness. 6- Let it go. And 7- People are a good use of time. You can read my full review of Off the Clock here. (Also check out Juliet’s School of Possibilities (reviewed here) and I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time (reviewed here).

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Resolve to achieve your goals.

I extensively reviewed Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals by Michael Hyatt on this blog post and this one. Your Best Year Ever is a readable and useful book of steps for effectively achieving both personal and professional goals based on some of the latest research on human behavior and motivation. Three of my biggest takeaways was how regret can be a force for change, gratitude can contribute to goal achievement, and working on goals in community helps us to better achieve them.

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Resolve to build better habits.

In Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, Gretchen Rubin does not take a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to building good habits (and breaking bad ones). She instead describes “Four Tendencies” that people fall under when it comes to keeping habits: obliger, questioner, rebel, and upholder. As a tendency, this means that no one is boxed into any one category, but a general trend towards a certain type of behavior. For people with each of these tendencies, Rubin offers suggestions for how they can harness those tendencies to best build up good habits. Read my full review of the book here.

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Resolve to build stronger connections with family

I knew all about the benefits of reading picture books aloud to young children. But The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids by Sarah Mackenzie took it to an entirely new level – that the benefits of reading together continue even after children have learned to read on their own. I became a zealot for reading aloud together with my kids as soon as I had finished this book – for all the benefits of reading aloud, the biggest and most important benefit to me, which Mackenzie goes into great detail in The Read-Aloud Family, is the way reading
together builds lasting connections. As a family we have built stronger connections by reading aloud and listening to books together. I highly recommend this book, as well as The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in an Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon, which I reviewed
extensively here.

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Audible

Resolve to focus.

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal doesn’t parade what is now conventional (though slightly unrealistic) wisdom about social media and phones (such as getting rid of your phone or shutting down all your social media channels). Rather, it provides a framework for how to address the root causes of our seeking out distractions, regardless of the type, and tools for living life with more focus. As someone who fights distraction in many contexts (especially prayer), this book provides some great tools.

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Resolve to live with more joy.

Is your word of the year JOY? My own book, Putting Joy into
Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church is the book for you. In it I describe seven practices that help us reorient ourselves to live lives of joy – even in the midst of struggles. Each practice includes stories from church history and contemporary times to connect the concept to living examples, and is followed by specific ways we can integrate it into our lives. So many people who have read the book already have found it helpful. You can learn more about it, watch me speak about it, or listen to audio interviews and podcasts about it here.

Purchase Putting Joy into Practice from Paraclete Press | Bookshop | Amazon | Kindle | Audible