Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Rest of Your Life - Hardcover

Leider, Richard J.; Shapiro, David A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1881052672 ISBN 13: 9781881052678

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Pub, 1994

Synopsis

Repacking Your Bags provides a simple yet elegant process to help you separate what's weighing you down from what you need to find true fulfillment. It shows how to "unpack" your physical, emotional, and intellectual baggage and "repack" for the journey ahead. It will help you define and live your own vision of the "good life," balancing the four elements critical to personal fulfillment: living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, and on purpose.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Repacking Your Bags takes you on an enlightening journey - providing a unique opportunity to set down the burdens you're carrying, check them out to see if they're really making you happy, and discover new ways to lighten your load. Lively and intelligent writing, personal examples, and stories collected in hundreds of interviews illustrate a comprehensive guide for balancing the demands of work, love, and place in order to create and live your own vision of success. Repacking Your Bags will help you become who you really want to be when you grow up - no matter how grown-up you are; find your true home - where you really belong; enrich your relationships with the people you love; and develop a clearer sense of purpose in everything you do.

Reviews

Career development counselor Leider (Life Skills) and freelance writer Shapiro here contend that many "mid-life inventurers" (those undergoing a mid-life crisis) lose their sense of what they want from their personal and professional lives. This simplistic guide is intended to help readers redefine their own version of the "good life" and offers a formula to achieve it. The authors advise readers to discard excess "baggage" such as possessions, responsibilities and relationships in order to reintegrate "work, love, place, and purpose." Citing thinkers from Alfred Adler to Dante and Norman Cousins, they couch their suggestions in metaphorical, slogan-like terms and use sometimes arbitrary-sounding "Postcard exercises" to be exchanged with a "Dialogue Partner." Having "fully unpacked your relationship bags" and chosen only things "you can't live without," you are presumably ready to select a new purpose, way of life and environment. 30,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A delight to read. . . . This soulful, richly human book is leavened with healthy bits of humor and individual exercises that keep the reader really involved. More than a book, it's an experience.

For every man and woman who is searching for a creative way to simplify, to clarify, and to live what matters, Repacking Your Bags is an essential, alive guide.

The authors describe "repacking"' as the ongoing process of reevaluating and reinventing our lives. Throughout the book's five sections, training consultant Leider (The Power of Purpose, Fawcett, 1985) and coauthor Shapiro argue that there are four elements (work, love, place, and purpose) critical to a successful life and that we must live "passionately for today and purposefully for tomorrow." All of this has been said before, but some authors are able to take familiar concepts and give them new meaning or appeal. Unfortunately, that is not the case here. A major marketing campaign and interest from attendees of Leider's workshops will bring requests from some patrons. Otherwise, only the largest public libraries needing to fill their self-help shelves should consider this derivative work.
January Adams, ODSI Research Lib., Raritan, N.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Pub
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1881052672
• ISBN 13: 9781881052678
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230