A refreshing, positive guide for taking care of your people and forming deep connections in the digital age.
FRIENDSHIP IN THE AGE OF LONELINESS:
An Optimist’s Guide To Connection
by Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky
Running Press, May 2021
(chez Levine Greenberg Rostan – voir catalogue)
We are lonelier than ever. The average American hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years. Research has shown that people with close friends are happier, healthier, and live longer than people who lack strong social bonds. But why— when we are seemingly more connected than ever before—can it feel so difficult to keep those bonds alive and well? Why do we spend only four percent of our time with friends? In this warm, inspiring guide, Adam « Smiley » Poswolsky proposes a new solution for the mounting pressures of modern life: focus on your friendships. Smiley offers practical habits and playful reminders on how to create meaningful connections, make new friends, and deepen relationships. He’ll help you develop a healthier relationship with technology, but he’ll also encourage you to prioritize real-world experiences, send snail mail, and engage in self-reflective exercises.
Written in short, digestible, action-oriented sections, this book reminds us that nurturing old and new friendships is a ritual, a necessity, and one of the most worthwhile things we can do in life.
Adam Smiley Poswolsky is a millennial workplace expert, motivational speaker, and author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough and The Breakthrough Speaker. Smiley helps companies attract, retain, and empower millennial talent, and he has inspired thousands of professionals to be more engaged at work. His TEDx talk on « the quarter-life crisis » has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, and he has spoken in 15 countries about millennials, multigenerational engagement, and fostering connection and belonging in the workplace. Smiley’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, USA Today, Fast Company, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, CNN, and the World Economic Forum, among many other outlets.
With 50+ sweet, lightly guided prompts, this journal will encourage you to record memorable moments with friends, reflect on what you love about yourself, and list the things that make you happiest (pizza, cookies, other snacks). With adorable illustrations throughout, space for list-making and journaling, and ideas for pampering yourself, it’s a fun new way to interact with Pusheen, Stormy, Pip, and the gang. 
TIRED AS F*CK will examine how our culture exhausts us—looking at the dark side of self-help through Caroline’s own experience—and how she used rest to defy cultural expectations. As she had done with the F*ck It Diet, Caroline felt she needed to apply an extreme approach to all other areas of her life—to her career and social life, to dating and the way she talked to herself. Caroline recognized that she was making choices that were keeping her exhausted and she had to figure them out. She decided for the next two years she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do. Looking at how she became exhausted, with chapters such as “How to Get Debilitating Performance Anxiety” and “How to Secure a Miracle Tooth,” through the debilitating power of positive thinking in chapters such as “How to Only Think Positive Thoughts, or Else,” and “How to be an Actual Children’s Birthday Clown,” to her rest-seeking sections including “How to Figure out What’s Depleting You” and “How to Be Ok Dying Alone,” TIRED AS F*CK is not a self-help book, it’s a cautionary tale. It’s an honest look at the dogma of wellness and spiritual self-improvement culture. It will revel in the healing power of rest.
In another 6-week creativity program, Julia Cameron focuses on cultivating the art of prayer in one’s life to unblock creatively and live a more authentic, joyful life. TALKING TO GOD is a perfect follow-up to The Listening Path, which shifted our perspective to the creative art of attention, fostering re-engagement with one’s environments and building deeper connections to gain insight, clarity and deepen our creativity. TALKING TO GOD takes us to the next level; through inspiring stories and revealing exercises, Julia will guide her reader to find a way forward as an artist, through prayer. In another 6 week creativity program, Julia’s audience can delve into the inextricable link between spirituality and creativity, and put prayer into their daily practice. The book explores the questioning and seeking of a higher power, and finding solace, answers, gratitude, joy and creative growth through prayer.
Rachel Hollis sees you. As the millions who read her #1 New York Times bestsellers Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, attend her RISE conferences and follow her on social media know, she also wants to see you transform. When it comes to the “hard seasons” of life—the death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job—transformation seems impossible when grief and uncertainty dominate your days. Especially when, as DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING reveals, no one asks to have their future completely rearranged for them. But, as Rachel writes, it is up to you how you come through your pain—you can come through changed for the better, having learned and grown, or stuck in place where your identity becomes rooted in what hurt you. To Rachel, a life well-lived is one of purpose, focused only on the essentials. This is a small book about big feelings: inspirational, aspirational, and an anchor that shows that darkness can co-exist with the beautiful.