Product Description

Now in paperback, the New York Times bestseller--featuring a powerful program that shows you how to reclaim your life one week at a time.

Cheryl Richardson, the bestselling author of Take Time for Your Life, known to millions for her "Lifestyle Makeover" series on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," recognizes firsthand how tough it can be to juggle the daily demands of living in a fast-paced world, and how easily you can become disconnected from your true self and what makes you happy. In Life Makeovers, she has taken all the know-how and insight she has gleaned from her years as a personal coach and distilled it into a simple, year-long program that shows how making small changes, over time, can have a huge impact on the quality of your life. In fifty-two simple yet profound essays, Richardson provides a plan for both reflecting and taking action, along with specific, practical advice and exercises to help readers gradually and permanently remodel their lives, week by week. Easy to use and fun to read, this workbook is the perfect companion to Take Time for Your Life.
Topics include:

*The Gift of Time: It's Self-Management, Not Time Management
*Are We Having Fun Yet: When Life Gets Too Serious, Here's What to Do
*Give Your Brain a Vacation: For Finding the Best Ideas, Try This
*Standing in the Shadow: Whose Talent Are You Hiding Behind?
*Stop Juggling and Start Living: Here Are Some of the Balls to Drop
*Close Encounters: How to Make a Deeper Connection with Others

Her brief, personal essays will inspire you to make changes, and her Take Action Challenges, which appear with comprehensive resource sections at the end of every essay, will guide you through small steps that will teach you to think, act, love, work, and even laugh in a whole new way. Written in Richardson's signature, heartwarming style, Life Makeovers is the ideal book for anyone looking for a balanced way to stop dreaming about a better life and start living one.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63723 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-24
• Released on: 2002-12-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
What do you need to change to make your life work better and make you happier? Top-level personal coach Cheryl Richardson, author of the popular Take Time for Your Life, shows you how to make your life over, one week at a time, using her philosophy of "extreme self-care." The result: you'll reevaluate your life and connect to what matters most to you, improving the quality of your life.

Life Makeovers is organized into 52 chapters, one for each week of the year. (Procrastinators: don't wait until January 1 to start--just call this week "week 1" and get going.) Each chapter has a specific theme with a "Take Action Challenge": a practical strategy to put a change into action immediately. For example, week 1 encourages you to reflect on what you've done right by writing down your five greatest accomplishments and three ways you've grown in the past year. Week 5 helps you manage your time by creating an "Absolute Yes" list of your five top priorities for the next 3 to 6 months. Week 20 helps identify behaviors that trigger feelings of irritability or frustration with a "I know I'm headed for trouble when..." list and three things you'll put in place to support your self-care when these happen. Additional topics range widely, such as exploring your internal rules and standards, asking for support, improving your sleep, shaking up your daily routine, and sharing with those in need. Each chapter also includes several well-chosen resources for exploring the topic further.

If you use Life Makeovers as it's designed, you'll have the wisdom and inspiration of one of the best personal coaches in the business for a whole year. You'll have to work with her--no instant magic here--but it will be worth it. --Joan Price

From Library Journal
Read by Richardson, a professional coach, this audiobook offers many suggestions for finding the space to live a more fulfilling life. The author has assisted many people in breaking out of lives that they consider unsatisfactory. Designed as a program of action, the tape may seem more appropriate for personal ownership rather than library collections. However, it provides good direction for anyone who is feeling overwhelmed and overburdened. Each of the exercises is accompanied by examples of how the plan has worked in the lives of either Richardson or one of her clients. At the end of each section, the listener is encouraged to make one or more specific changes during the week. A lively production; recommended to any library interested in self-help materials. Kathleen A. Sullivan, Phoenix P.L.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Cheryl Richardson is here to guide you on a yearlong personal discovery journey. Get ready to improve your life."
-Complete Woman

"[Richardson] offers fifty-two warm and profound essays intended to reconnect us to our 'authentic' selves. Life Makeovers is true to its mission of making life less demanding."
-Chicago Tribune -- Review

Customer Reviews

Awesome Follow-Up to Her First Book
If you read _Take Time for Your Life_ and thought, this book is soo great, but I don't know how to organize this, then you want this book. Richardson takes the steps presented in her first book and breaks them down into 52 tasks (neatly designed to take 1 year obviously). The titles to the chapters are catchy, the exercises are useful, helpful, and not designed to take massive chunks out of your life, in fact, they are designed to put more time in your life, I think. Her style is easy and not too preachy -- she makes this fun as changing your life should be. Consider this a personal consultation with Cheryl Richardson (with a much lower price tag) :)

Good to Know
The author comes across very direct. She tells you what is wrong and how to correct it. She feels that only truth heals. She offers valuable solutions to some of our common problems. I gained significantly from reading the book. I would also highly recommend the book An Encounter With A Prophet where much healing truth also abides.

Excellent Tool To improve your life
This "book" is excellent if you look to it and use it as a self help "tool" or "mannual" and not as a book for spiritual guidance or merely an enjoyable read. It is simply written but very well written .Precise and to the point and this is why it is so effective.However, to improve your life using this book you must be willing to work with it over a long period of time and not to just read it over a couple of hours or a couple of days.It should be used slowly to affect change and you're supposed to work with one chapter at a time over a period of a year.I think this makes lots of sense as old habits die hard and good new habits take time to set in.For example: the first week you're supposed to write 25 things you are most proud of accomplishing over the past year.It took me about 4 days to find all 25 things , but at the end I really felt good about myself, before that I used to (negatively)think that my time flew without getting anything done.Many books will spend pages and pages telling you about the benefits of positive thinking,and how to achieve it. This book actually fostered positive thinking with one very simple exercise. This is the beauty of this book! Another example:The next week I found one goal that I felt I needed to focus on and then wrote three actions that I will take each week to achieve this goal.Prior to that I used to set so many goals to work on at the same time , with no clear plan of action as to exactly how to achieve these goals. Over the past few months this book made me feel good about myself, introduced me to the satisfaction of self-care , made me respect my priorities and now I have a schedule that reflect these priorities, it helped me find time slots for doing things that really matter to me like excersising and spending quality time with my family, and helped me create a much needed balance between my different roles in life.I finally achieved some goals I've been talking about wanting to achieve for years. Highly recommended.Two other highly recommended books for a better life are: The seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey and the 10 dumbest mistakes smart people make and how to avoid them by Arther Freeman and Rose Dewolf.