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Recommended Books

As an executive coach, Ann has supported thousands of clients, colleagues, and employees in identifying solutions that have enabled them to make more effective personal and business decisions.

In her search for the keys to personal mastery, Ann has read over 3,000 books that cover a wide range of personal mastery principles and practices on — spirituality, shamanism, health and healing, personal excellence and productivity, and wealth creation. The following is a list of recommended books that will expand your perspective, help you achieve personal and professional success, and support you on your path of mastery.

We will continue to update this list of recommended reading, so check back with us to discover the books that will support your quest to manifesting your vision.

Carol Adrienne, Find Your Purpose, Change Your Life: Getting to the Heart of Your Life’s Mission

“When you take the perspective that everything that happens – or doesn’t happen – in your life is necessary to the fulfillment of your life purpose, you begin to become more alert and tuned in to what you may have been oblivious to before. This one assumption gives you a sense that no matter what your external world looks like, you have the ability to learn, grow, and choose the next step.”

Arrien, Angeles, Ph.D., The Four Fold Way

“The archetype of the Healer is a universal mythic structure that all human beings experience. Among indigenous cultures the Healer supports the principle of paying attention to what has heart and meaning. Healers in all major traditions recognize that the power of love is the most potent healing force available to all human beings. Effective Healers from any culture are those who extend the arms of love: acknowledgment, acceptance, recognition, validation, and gratitude.”

Assaraf, John & Smith, Murray, The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life

“Big thinkers always have the big picture in view, no matter where they are in the process or what they are doing. They look at the whole business as a puzzle, and they see each of the individual pieces as well as the relationship of that piece to the bigger picture. They know at all times exactly where they are and where they want to be, and they have a clear picture of what’s needed to bridge that gap.”

Atwater, F. Holmes, Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living with Guidance

“An out-of-body experience isn’t something that happens to you. It’s just another way of being, an alternative available so that you might know, might recognize who you really are. The true out-of-body experience you seek includes the realization that you are and always have been and always will be greater than your physical body in both physical life and beyond.”

Braden, Gregg, Walking Between The Worlds: The Science of Compassion

“Imagine the power inherent within the ability to determine whether you respond to life through anger, allowing or joy! More than any time in recorded human history, this is a time of responsibility, personal responsibility. You determining your response to your world is perhaps the greatest expression of personal mastery.”

Chopra, Deepak, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

“The deepest hunger in life is a secret that is revealed only when a person is willing to unlock a hidden part of the self. In the ancient traditions of wisdom, this quest has been likened to diving for the most precious pearl in existence, a poetic way of saying that you have to swim far out beyond shallow waters, plunge deep into yourself, and search patiently until the pearl beyond price is found.”

Dwyer, Wayne, The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way

“You’re already connected to those you want in your life — so act like it. Mystically speaking, there’s no difference between you and another person. A weird concept, perhaps, nevertheless valid. This explains why you can’t hurt another person without hurting yourself, nor can you help another person without helping yourself. You share the same Source energy with everyone, and consequently, you must begin to thin and act in a way that reflects your awareness of this principle.”

Ferriss, Timothy, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, And Join The New Rich

“Retirement planning is like life insurance. It should be viewed as nothing more than a hedge against the absolute worst-case scenario: in this case, becoming physically incapable of working and needing a reservoir of capital to survive.”

Freke, Timothy, Shamanic Wisdomkeepers: Shamanism In The Modern World

“They have the power to heal, to receive visions, and to penetrate the mysteries of other realms: shamans are the representatives of spirituality in our material world. Sometimes they claim to have the ability to fly or to communicate with ancestors and animals. Wherever they live and whatever their culture – Native Americans, Tibetan, Celtic, Hawaiian, African – they speak for humanity’s most ancient indigenous traditions.”

Gelb, Michael J., Discover Your Genius: How To Think Like History’s Ten Most Revolutionary Minds

“Through some magnificent act of insight, intuition, inspiration, brain wave, conviction, whatever we might call it, the genius sees or senses something from a different perspective. Their new perspective provides a view that ultimately proves so compelling that we can never see things in quite the same way again.”

Gerber, Michael E., Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies

“Entrepreneurs are made, not born. There is no corner on creativity. There is simply the desire to express it. Once that desire appears, you can be assured that you have awakened the entrepreneur within. The very presence of that desire means that the entrepreneur is up and dreaming.”

Hughes, James, Altered States: Creativity Under the Influence

“Creativity runs like a thread through all human nature. The paradox of creativity is that it contains ingredients that are both extraordinary and everyday. To bring something – an idea, an object – into external reality out of “nowhere” is associated with a whole range of “abnormal” states of consciousness from daydreaming and fantasy to trances and drug-induced hallucinations.”

Kessel, Brent, It’s Not About The Money: Unlock Your Money Type To Achieve Spiritual And Financial Abundance

“Whether we hoard, splurge, or give it all away, we perpetually repeat ineffective behavior patterns with money because we are accustomed to specific states of being where money is concerned. We are used to a particular level of anxiety or calm craving or avoidance, scarcity or abundance. And no matter what changes occur in our outer circumstances, the unconscious mind, if it remains unexamined, untrained, and unconnected to our spirit, will recreate those old, familiar circumstances in our financial life.”

Lobenstine, Margaret, The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One

“The most obvious trait shared by Renaissance Souls is our love for variety over concentrating on just one thing. This doesn’t mean that we can’t concentrate on what we’re doing! Quite the contrary – when we’re working at peak performance, we are as absorbed and detail oriented as neurosurgeons.”

Martin, Patricia, Renaissance Generation: The Rise Of The Cultural Consumer And What It Means To Your Business

“The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was a flowering of civilization — a “rebirth” of art, scientific invention, culture, and humanity itself. However, the moment right before birth is often a dangerous and complicated one. Our world today has reached a critical turning point. The passage into a better and brighter time will demand individuals and organizations that posses a force of creativity powerful enough to challenge the status quo, disrupt the marketplace, and transform society.”

McTaggart, Lynne, The Field: The Quest For The Secret Force Of The Universe

“Every day in the laboratories, these scientists caught a tiny glimmer of the possibilities suggested by their discoveries. … Their work suggested a decentralized but unified intelligence that was far grander and more exquisite than Darwin or Newton had imagined, a process that was not random or chaotic, but intelligent and purposeful.”

Mountain Dreamer, Oriah, The Invitation

“I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life. I am guided, sometimes driven, by an ache to take the necessary risks that will let me live close to what is within and around me. And I am sometimes afraid that it will be too much, that I will not have, or be connected to, whatever it takes to be with it all, to bear the exquisite beauty and bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive.”

Perkins, John, Shape Shifting: Shamanic Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation

“I thought about what he had said. We in northern cultures are obsessed with the idea of succeeding or winning. Yet the great poets and philosophers of all times have pointed out that failure is an important part of life, that welcoming and honoring the declining, the aging, the dying side of us is essential if we are to live fully.”

Phillips, Michael, The Seven Laws of Money

“Guilt also plays an extremely powerful role in our relations to money. There are large numbers of people who feel that they have too much money, there are many who feel that “other people” have too much money, and there are many who sometimes feel that they have devoted too much of their lives to seeking money.”

Sky, Michael, The Power of Emotion: Using Your Emotional Energy to Transform Your Life

“Everything connects. We live in a worldwibe web, truly, as every living thing connects to every living thing. Yet when it comes to a typical relationship between two or more people, or two or more groups of people, disconnection seems the prevailing truth. We live as if the body forms an impermeable boundary, dividing each of us from the rest of the world.”

Stevens, Jose, Ph. D., with Lena Stevens, The Power Path: The Shaman’s Way to Success in Business and Life

“Shamans spend their entire lives learning, discovering, and walking the path of power, exercising and developing their ability to manifest power in a way that brings the best results and the minimum of negative consequences. They are thus the world’s foremost experts in the ways of power and in walking the challenging and fascinating trail that leads them to become what they call a man or woman of knowledge.”

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

Twist, Lynn, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“Rarely in our life is money a place of genuine freedom, joy, or clarity, yet we routinely allow it to dictate the terms of our lives and often to be the single most important factor in the decisions we make about work, love, family and friendship.”

Alberto Villoldo, Ph. D., Courageous Dreaming: How Shamans Dream The World Into Being

“The creative individual is a master of courage, the person in the crowd who proclaims that “the emperor has not clothes” when everyone else is afraid to speak up. She can do this because she’s true to herself and her dream, and she has no fear. She may not be a dancer or a poet, but she lives her life as an artist, surrendering to the power of creativity, seeing beauty everywhere.”

Alberto Villoldo, Ph. D., The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers

“However, in the more ancient, feminine theologies, we were never expelled from the garden or separated from God. (For example. The Australian Aborigines weren’t kicked out of Eden, and neither were the sub-Saharan Africans or the Native Americans.) Instead, we were given the garden in order to be its stewards and caretakers.”

Alberto Villoldo, Ph. D., Shaman, Healer, Sage: How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine Of The Americas

“I am not bestowing grace or any such thing on anyone,’ Don Antonio was quick to explain. ‘I merely held a sacred space in which you experienced infinity. You did the actual work yourself.’ He was letting me know that he had created the sacred space where healing happens. The energy within that space and the assistance from luminous beings in the Spirit world empowered me to heal myself.”

Wilde, Stuart, The Trick to Money Is Having Some!

“Money is a thought-form. It is a symbol of energy, and as such, it has no real, intrinsic value. It is neither good nor bad, positive nor negative. It is impartial. The guy who wrote that “money is the root of all evil” just flat out didn’t have any! You can’t make it through the physical plane without it. And whereas sometimes the love of money can cause people to become evil and weird, it is a fact that without money you cannot be free.”