These are 6 books that absolutely changed my thinking and shifted my mindset completely. There were game-changing mindset expanders!

Here’s a quick summary and some insights if you’re not familiar with these game-changing books. I’d highly recommend them when you need something inspiring to read or to get you out of a major life funk.

Untamed  Glennon Doyle

This arrived in the mail the week after most of us started our pandemic quarantine in March 2020, and woah was it so delicious during that time with all of its short lessons dropping numerous wisdom bombs. The essence of the book’s collection of anecdotes from her life is to unapologetically be yourself – be Untamed. In her journey of divorcing her husband and marrying soccer Olympian Abby Wambach, she describes how she slowly and eventually came to love herself completely and fully. Her raw insights and her style of writing are what make her one of the top powerhouse personalities and extremely relatable. Her new honest-talk “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast is the #1 new 2021 podcast according to Apple Podcasts and one of my faves.

Big Magic  Elizabeth Gilbert

I couldn’t get into this book when I first ordered it years ago but last year I reread it, and boom it was exactly what I needed to understand. Gilbert argues that as a writer, she knows that our best ideas aren’t our own. The ideas come to us specifically as a creative gift. They are in fact inspired through us, with us as the vessel that will uniquely share it with our special lens of the world. Gilbert encourages us to play, be lighthearted about our creativity and not take it all so seriously. By sharing her experiences in her most famously charming ways, she says our ideas are a joy in life and we should simply embrace them as visiting friends. This book is like a best friend’s encouragement walking us through the ups and downs of the creative journey (that even best selling authors like Gilbert go through).

The Way of the Happy Woman  Sara Avant Stover

Stover wrote a book about self-care before it became a movement. In this book, she outlines how women are specially tuned to leverage the beauty of seasonal cycles for ultimate self-nourishment. It’s essentially a guidebook for each of the four seasons, filled with loving rituals and practices, optimal foods and recipes for the season, single-day retreat agendas, and movement (yoga flows), and reflection questions. It’s provided me with a rhythm to each year and another way to appreciate the uniqueness of each season. So much gratitude for finding this book.

The New Earth  Eckhart Tolle

This book became famous when Oprah and Tolle co-hosted a groundbreaking (at the time in 2008) web series on the book. They helped make this spiritually-advanced content easier to grasp and it worked for me. My copy of the book is so marked up because it is life-changing. In the book, Tolle explains how our ego-based thinking and behaviors lead to our anger, pain, and suffering. He helps us transcend that ego and awaken to a new consciousness that is completely liberating. Did I say it was life-changing?

The Desire Map  Danielle LaPorte

Danielle LaPorte has always lovingly challenged us to rethink what we think we want. In this book, she teaches us that behind our resolutions, goals, dreams — is a “Core Desired FEELING” that we chase in trying to reach that goal. In this book/part workbook, she guides us through our desires and helps us uncover how we can use those core desired feelings and emotions to guide us in doing, having, and experiencing them in so many more creative, everyday ways (as well as the big ideas too). It’s game-changing.

Atomic Habits  James Clear

In this hugely popular recent book, James Clear points out that we all fail at new habits, not out of poor discipline, but because of bad learning systems. He teaches us why habits matter and what he’s learned in intentionally creating tiny incremental changes that ultimately lead to massive change. He defines “the micro habit” as a habit we can complete in 2 minutes. We also learn about habit stacking, how our environments affect us, automating habits, immediate rewards, and how to get back on track. If you’re a believer in habits making the [person], this is a must-read.

Let me know in the comments which of your favorite books was a mindset expander for you? Have a game-changing book to recommend? Loved any of the ones above too? Share it below