Steven Kotler decodes the secrets of those elite performers--athletes, artists, scientists, CEOs and more--who have changed our definition of the possible, teaching us how we too can stretch far beyond our capabilities, making impossible dreams much more attainable for all of us.

From Dr. Jonathan Davidson, director of the Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Program at Duke University Medical Center and one of the most respected experts on anxiety disorders, comes the definitive and solution-filled book about anxiety. This book offers self-assessment tests and serves as a comprehensive treatment guide for one of the most common health concerns in America.

For most of us, the major questions of life continue to perplex: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live? In the late nineteenth century, a class of thinkers emerged who made solving these problems central to their work. They understood that human questions demand human answers and that, without understanding what it means to be human, there are no answers. Through the biographies and theories of luminaries ranging from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm, Frank Tallis shows us how to think about companionship and parenting, identity and aging, and much more. Accessible yet erudite, The Act of Living is essential listening for anyone seeking answers to life's biggest questions.

The coauthors of the New York Times –bestselling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: how we see ourselves Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past fifteen years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback , they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. Thanks for the Feedback is destined to become a classic in the fields of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.

Malcolm Gladwell argues that something is very wrong with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.

A leading psychologist reveals how our most misunderstood emotion-pride-has shaped our minds and our culture, and shows how we can harness its power. Why did Paul Gauguin abandon middle-class life to follow the path of a starving artist' What explains the massive success of Steve Jobs, a man with great ideas but weak programming skills and a questionable managerial style' How did Dean Karnazes-the famed "Ultramarathon Man"-transform himself from a directionless desk jockey into an extreme athlete who once ran fifty marathons in fifty days' As the renowned emotion researcher Jessica Tracy reveals in Take Pride, each of these superachievers has been motivated by an often maligned emotion: pride. Its dark, hubristic side is well known, but Tracy shows that pride is also essential for helping us become our best, brightest selves. By making us care about how others see us and how we see ourselves, pride makes us strive for excellence. In the right doses and the right contexts, it has been proven to boost creativity, motivate altruism, and confer power and prestige on those who display it. But while pride can inspire feats of genius, Tracy explains, it can also compel acts of apparent insanity and spectacular self-destructiveness, causing some people to seek status not through hard work but through intimidation, deception, and self-aggrandizement. Avoiding the bad kind of pride while nurturing the good kind might just be the secret to success. In Take Pride, Tracy explains why our species came to feel pride in both its good and bad varieties, and how we can make this double-edged emotion serve us-rather than the other way around.

Did you know that chimpanzees can swear? Or that we do most of our swearing in our first language? Have you ever noticed that swearing is an excellent painkiller?In delightfully fun and accessible language, backed by riveting historical case studies and the latest cutting-edge research, Dr. Emma Byrne explores the science behind swearing and why bad language might actually be good for us. Swearing, it turns out, is socially and emotionally essential. Not only has some form of swearing been around since the earliest humans began to communicate, but it has been shown to reduce physical pain, prevent violence, help stroke victims recover their language, and help people work together as a team. Swearing Is Good For You is a fascinating and fun look at the new science of bad language.

Have you ever wondered how you could possibly survive a physical assault or imagined what you would do if someone followed you in a dark parking lot? Most likely you have--it's human nature to wonder. Most of us never get past those theoretical questions because we just don't want to think about it. But what if we did? In Survival Mentality: The Psychology of Staying Alive, you'll learn how to prepare now to give yourself the very best chance of surviving a life-threatening emergency. When we hear about someone surviving a great challenge, we often hear that the person "rose to the occasion." But in fact, psychologists find that people do notrise to the occasion. In moments of terror, people revert to their lowest level of training and preparation. Knowing that, the trick is to bring up your "lowest level" by continually improving your training and preparation, practicing for survival now, and building the resilience that will sustain you in times of adversity. In Survival Mentality: The Psychology of Staying Alive, you'll not only explore survival skills and strategies, but you'll also hear the stories of individuals who used those techniques to survive real-world situations. Through the details of their stories, Professor Zarse helps you identify the psychological factors that served them best. Many of the survivors that are discussed in this course had no specific survival training, but their life experiences had helped them build significant psychological strengths. These survivors had what it took. In this course, you'll learn that you, too, can build what it takes to survive in a crisis.

Clinical psychologist and author of The Defining Decade, Meg Jay takes us into the world of the supernormal: those who soar to unexpected heights after childhood adversity.

Whether it is the loss of a parent to death or divorce; bullying; alcoholism or drug abuse in the home; mental illness in a parent or a sibling; neglect; emotional, physical or sexual abuse; having a parent in jail; or growing up alongside domestic violence, nearly 75% of us experience adversity by the age of 20. But these experiences are often kept secret, as are our courageous battles to overcome them.

Drawing on nearly two decades of work with clients and students, Jay tells the tale of ordinary people made extraordinary by these all-too-common experiences, everyday superheroes who have made a life out of dodging bullets and leaping over obstacles, even as they hide in plain sight as doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, parents, activists, teachers, students and readers. She gives a voice to the supernormals among us as they reveal not only "How do they do it?" but also "How does it feel?"

These powerful stories, and those of public figures from Andre Agassi to Jay Z, will show supernormals they are not alone but are, in fact, in good company.

Marvelously researched and compassionately written, this exceptional book narrates the continuing saga that is resilience as it challenges us to consider whether -- and how -- the good wins out in the end.