Books for Living -- Part 2

There are numerous books for one’s personal growth as a trip to any Barnes and Noble will testify. Many of the ‘new’ books are often rewritten editions of concepts and guidelines for living that were presented in books written decades ago.


Some of my favorite books that have given me guidelines in building the structure of my values and attitudes for my life journey are presented below.




Born to Win, Muriel James & Dorothy Jongeward (1971)


Galileo wrote, “You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.”


Born to Win uses the psychological theory of Transactional Analysis (TA) to provide the basic tools for self-understanding of how we interact with ourselves and with others. Just as we learned to diagram sentences in school to understand word structure, TA teaches us how to easily diagram the behavioral interactions we have with self and others.


Each chapter concludes with gestalt experiments to allow the reader to apply the concepts to their own lives and actively make them real for us.


Topics include the structure and development of ego states, the human hunger for stroking, how we structure our time, how we develop and live out our individual life scripts, psychological games that we play to implement and seek rewards for our life scripts, etc.


This is a book that takes many complex ideas and presents them in an understandable manner. As usual, one can develop many insights about self and others from reading these books; the choice to implement them remains an individual decision.




The Listener, Taylor Caldwell (1960)


Early in my teaching career, I discovered that many of my students needed my listening skills far more than they did the content of the social sciences curriculum for which I had been hired to teach.


I found that these young people had a strong and real need to have someone listen to them. The need was not from a “patient” or even as a “student”, but a human soul. My students would come to my classroom before school, during lunch and after school to seek out a human being who cared enough to listen to the frustrations and bewilderments of their lives, now and for the future.


Like many adults, I had filled my life with activities and tasks that allowed for little time to listen to the needs of others. Reading books like The Listener allowed me to finally see the power of listening and how it can be one of the most valuable gifts we each have to give another.


Taylor Caldwell’s gift in this book is to remind us of who is always present to listen to each of us and accept whatever we have to say without judgment. Her writing had a powerful impact on my spiritual growth.




The Façade, Jim Cole (1971)


This is another small book with a powerful message regarding the façade that we each build to present ourselves in a favorable light to others. It also protects us from the behaviors of being real with self and our society.


There are many similarities to the writing of John Powell. Maintaining our facades takes lots of energy, tends to be hurtful for us, and is often rationalized to avoid realizing that this defensive façade is frequently for protecting me from fully knowing myself.


The Façade also helps us become aware of the many games we play to help others maintain their facades so that neither of us is allowed to drop our defenses and be real with other. We settle for superficial relationships.




The Knight in Rusty Armor, Robert Fisher (1990)


Using a fairy tale style of writing, the author takes the reader on a journey, which offers many insights into how we protect ourselves from the joys and pains that come with self-knowledge. The knight finds himself so well protected by armor developed over his life that he has no awareness of his feelings and how to learn from the gifts received by interacting with others.


This book relates the journey that the knight takes when he realizes that he is the basis of his own problems. Merlin is his facilitator, guide, questioner, and friend. Together they take the Path of Truth that takes them through three castles: silence, knowledge and will/daring.


Eventually the knight reaches the Summit of Truth where he sees “his life clearly, without judgment and without excuses. He accepted full responsibility for his life, for the influence that people had on it, and for the events that had shaped it.”


Each of these books has shaped me in many significant ways. I hope that you will find personal value from any that you choose to read.




Comments are welcome. Email: silverchatline@gmail.com