Books like The Power Is Within You — picked by fans

This story has remained one of my most favorite of all time.

While teaching English at a community college, I assigned this book to my students. Its tale, about a young Andalusian, Santiago, who leaves home to seek his destiny, changed my students’ lives and mine.

Together, we grew to appreciate that the best teacher is personal experience. We identified how travel teaches lessons, such as using caution judiciously and the necessity to work hard to achieve goals.

We also discussed how travel provides opportunities to develop skills like learning new languages and raises awareness about other people’s customs and perspectives. 

This book helped me shift my mindset, and I first picked it up during a stressful phase of my life. I gave myself some time to simply breathe and take it in. It reminded me that the “now” is not just a passing second, but a sacred space where peace and clarity live.

I love how it helped me stop living in the echo of yesterday or the fear of tomorrow. I remember closing my eyes and whispering, “This moment is enough,” and feeling my shoulders relax for the first time in weeks. It helped me feel more connected with myself, my son, my clients, and in doing so, intentionally live every moment with more compassion, stillness, and supremacy.

This book changed the way I was living my life. It literally changed the words I used to speak about my future plans/goals and made me want to dream big. It leads you to make the connection between what we think and what shows up in our lives. This was an epiphany moment for me. That, we are, who we spend time with, the books we read, and the TV we watch. And thus, the people around us become mirrors of ourselves. It made me examine my thoughts on a minute-to-minute basis and ultimately start living in the present moment. It introduces you to the benefits of daily gratitude and of being of service to others.

Although not from a working-class background himself, a young George Orwell set out to discover and report on the conditions of working-class lives in Paris and London during the early part of the 20th Century.

I love this book because, although written nearly a hundred years ago, it remains vitally resonant today. Orwell left the relative safety of middle-class suburbia and went on the road, working in Parisian restaurants as a dishwasher and joining the massed ranks of homeless tramps in the UK, even venturing down to Kent to join the ‘Hop-Pickers.’

Ellcock curated a remarkable selection of images that are provocative, transformative, and universal – an anthology of archetypes, scanning the world’s vast catalog of visual images from cultures, religions, time periods, political viewpoints, and media. I don’t know a more comprehensive anthology of moral, political, environmental, social, and cultural images, all vivid, challenging, and eternally relevant. 

Learning to set boundaries – with work and with other people – was essential to helping me to recover from burnout, and this book is a practical how-to guide for how and why to set them.

In my own life, and in my work as a clinical psychologist, I have seen how chronic people-pleasing tendencies, and saying “yes” to everything, can lead to exhaustion and burnout. Having this book as a tool has helped me to be more intentional about saying no, and more assertive about standing up for my own needs.

As the author, Nedra Glover Tawwab, states in the book, “Burnout is overwhelming, and boundaries are the cure.” I couldn’t agree more!

I’ve always been committed to personal growth, and as a high-achiever, I’m constantly setting new goals. This book is a faith-based guide to transforming your life by aligning your habits with your God-given identity. He offers a paradigm shift that argues that lasting change doesn’t come from willpower alone but from changing how you see yourself through the lens of who God says you are.

This has informed the way I see my goals and has taught me that if I want to change my behavior or accomplish a goal, I need to renew my mind systems, and relying on God’s strength, I can break negative patterns and form new, life-giving habits. I recommend this book to all the women I work with as a life coach, and it’s been the most practical and powerful book that has contributed to my recent professional and personal success. 

My father instilled in me a love for books and before he passed away at 92, this was his favorite one. We would read it separately during the day and discuss on our nightly Facetime calls. Being a pharmacologist, Dad loved the breakdowns of how the brain works. And I, who have long been interested in why we do the things we do, was completely drawn to the idea that we could retrain our brain. Consider this book a science-based version of “The Secret” and so much more. And had I known about manifesting when I first came to this country and experienced those first feelings of being an outsider then maybe I could have manifested away that angst. I mean, a girl can dream. 

I love the big message in this book, which is to focus more on finding the right question instead of the right answer.

I read the intro before going into a coaching session and used the idea of question-thinking with the person I was coaching. We looked at the questions she was asking herself as she went into a meeting with her maternity cover and together we turned those into positive and curious ones. She later came back and told me it worked, and the meeting went much better than she thought it would. Personally, I’ve gotten a lot of benefits from noticing when I’m asking myself judger questions and turning those into learner ones instead. Read the book to find out what I mean.

As a lifelong educator and coach, I’m constantly helping people think about their futures. One piece of advice I always give is to grab a copy of this book. Johnson is a futurist who works with large corporations, governments, and institutions on planning for the years and decades ahead. In this book, he brings his “future casting” process to the individual level, helping people change their story about their future and then showing them how to get there.

The future can feel daunting. Before reading this book, even I used to get tripped up thinking about it. Johnson reassures us with his measured thoughts on the topic and his clear, actionable program for seeing the future and your rightful place in it.