
Title : It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be
Author : Paul Arden
Rating : 4 Stars out of 5.
Summary : good advice
Yes its a great little book that contains good advice, makes you think differently and motivates. But I wonder how many people read the book and then acted on it, any of it?! It would be better as a daily calender giving you 1 piece of advice each day which you might then actually act on.

Title : The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide
Author : Sean Covey
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : A truly wicked book...
I picked up this book merely because I had heard a lot about the seven habits of highly effective people. I don't think I really expected to learn anything from it. I guess I was, and still am really, the archetypal know it all teenager who doesn't need any help with anything. However, this book shows you life strategies that really do work. Some of the things in it are so simple that you wonder why you never thought like that before. This is a great book for teenagers, because we are often probably more likely to listen to a book than to a person.

Title : Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More
Author : Joe Vitale
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Highly Purifying Stuff in a Toxic World
I had first come across Dr. Hew Len's work in healing a ward full of criminally insane patients on the Disappearance of the Universe discussion group. The amazing thing about his healing technique was that he never actually met these people, he would instead look within himself to whatever it was that was causing this outward manifestation of illness and negativity, knowing that everyone and everything is ultimately One and connected (as any spiritual guru will tell you). He knew he was, at some level, ultimately responsible for the issue.
He used an ancient Hawaiin technique called Ho'oponopono to cleanse the negative feelings that came up in him as he thought about these people by using the same 4 phrases over and over ("I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you"). As he did so, he was evoking his higher Self, or Divinity, to remove the negative feelings, and replace them with its Self (namely Pure Love). This had the effect of removing the negative programs that were running in these 'criminally insane' people so that gradually they were able to live normal lives again.
This book then is a great coverage of this remarkably simple technique, and the fact that all it boils down to in life is to cleanse, cleanse, cleanse our negative memories, feelings and data so that we can become one with the Divine and inspired by It/Him (as opposed to dictated by decisions formed by our fretful conscious minds). We are a sum total of our memories, and bound by interhuman programs handed down to us over millenia, so to clear and cleanse these means unbounded joy and freedom, and Oneness with the Divine, our ultimate goal in life!
This is a MUST READ by even the most hardened and skeptical of souls!!!! Do yourself a favour: go release yourself!!

Title : Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Author : Robert Cialdini
Rating : 3 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Good, but not totally convincing or that useful
I bought this book for two reasons - one to make myself more alert to sales techniques, and two to see if there are any useful insights to glean that could be applied to other areas of life.
On both counts the book delivers. Having recently been pitched to at work by a media tracking agency and nearly taken the bait (didn't in the end) I immediately recognised the use of reciprocity and scarcity to try and harry me into signing up. That alone was worth buying the book for, and I will definitely use that insight in future.
In addition, the chapter on consistency is also very useful. I've been involved in trying (and failing) to get people behind certain campaigns in the past. As such the discussion about getting people to make small commitments to establish a self image which they then feel the need to act consistently with both rang true on a personal level, and seems like something worth trying out in future.
So why only three stars? For one I did not find elements of the book convincing. The section dealing with newspaper coverage of suicides is the bit that really troubles me. Some of the data seems both to be limited and have been interpreted quite loosely. I would need a lot more convincing that the stats are being interpreted reasonably, it looks far too rough and ready. Given that this book is really about behavioural biases surely it should be extra careful about interpretaion of data as this is something we humans tend to be very bad at, always looking for patterns that aren't there and so on. That then leads me to query the hypothesis built on top of the data and to be honest I find myself not buying it. That also makes me query whether other chapters suffer from similar flaws.
Secondly, the book isn't actually that useful once you get your head around the key techniques because, as a previous reviewer says, simply having the knowledge that you have biases doesn't make them go away. To be really useful the book should have spent as much time reinforcing ways to resist the influence of biases as it does explaining what they are.
That said it is very readable, and I got what I wanted from it, but it could have been better.

Title : The Richest Man in Babylon
Author : George S. Clason
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Every teenager should be given this book at school.
With personal debt at it's highest ever level this book should be given to every child before they leave school and enter into the financial mine field and every adult should buy it. It is so simple to read, no jargon or complicated investment ideas, just good old common sense advice (which isn't common!). The best ever financial book you could buy.

Title : Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People for Change
Author : William R. Miller
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Wonderful book
I found this book very helpful indeed and many of its techniques have been successful in my practice.
Other Related Resources:
1: http://daily-reflection.com/be-cautious-of-teeth-whitening-by-beauty-salons/
2: http://hoomancan.com/blog/?p=222
3: http://www.myinkblog.com/2008/08/04/design-inspiration-with-a-yellow-focus/
4: http://www.richdadwisdom.com/?p=476
5: http://www.zx81.org.uk/links/deliberate-scam-by-anthony-robbins.html