The Voice of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace, by Don Miguel Ruiz, is a small, but mind-expanding book based on ancient Toltec wisdom. The Toltec society formed thousands of years ago near what is now Mexico City, in order to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones. An expansion of his popular book, The Four Agreements, this new volume offers more Toltec wisdom: Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best. Ruiz describes his own spiritual journey but offers many Points to Ponder that will propel you on your own search for wisdom and inner peace. So what are you waiting for? With books like these to guide you, put your best foot forward and march confidently into the new year. The best is yet to come! Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

From Ken Linder, an attorney and career counselor for some of the country’s most prominent journalists, comes Crunch Time: 8 Steps to Making the Right Decisions When it Counts. Making the right decision is not always an easy task, but Linder’s book offers logical steps to find the choice that is right for you. He uses many relevant scenarios to illustrate his points, such as the recent imbroglios of former President Clinton, Martha Stewart and Kobe Bryant. One really bad decision, he warns, especially if it involves a display of poor character can tarnish all of the good things you may have previously accomplished. Linder offers Strata-Gems at the end of each chapter to encapsulate his main messages and encourages you to celebrate and savor the constructive decisions you have already made.

Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

Joel Osteen’s book Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, offers an outline for a higher level of existence in the here and now. Osteen is the young, enthusiastic pastor of the diverse, Houston-based Lakewood Church, which has more than 30,000 members, and his inspirational television program is viewed in 100 million households worldwide. Clearly, Osteen’s outline for a life of health, abundance and victory comes from a Christian perspective. He believes that while God wants to help us, we must do our part to allow God to promote us, to increase us, to give us more. The seven steps he describes are a means to opening that path. Like Ford, he encourages us to dream big and move beyond the mundane. Osteen recognizes that life can throw everything from disappointment to disaster at us, but his outlook remains optimistic. Our human tendency, he writes, is to want everything easily. But without opposition or resistance, there is no potential for progress. Without the resistance of air, an eagle can’t soar. Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

Remember the old adage: Good, better, best; never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best ? Well, here are four books that can show you how to move from mediocre to marvelous in 2005. Best-selling author Debbie Ford (The Dark Side of the Light) offers a guide to reaching out and grasping the life we have always dreamed about in The Best Year of Your Life: Dream It, Plan It, Live It. Stop believing that the best year of your life exists somewhere off in the future, she admonishes. According to Ford, the time is here and now, and the choice is yours. As the title indicates, the book is divided into three sections. The Dream It section emphasizes the importance of dreams and desires, and how creating a powerful intent is the first step in creating your best self. The Plan It section offers a structured approach to defining and achieving goals which includes strategic exercises and straightforward examples, such as a 15-question checklist for taking charge of your life. Finally, the Live It section explains how to put those plans into action with zest, integrity and joy. Ford does not shirk from acknowledging that her plan requires effort, commitment and courage. But if you give 100 percent to the process, she ensures that having your best year yet will be more than a pipe dream; it will be your destiny. Linda Stankard continues to be her own work in progress.

Sometimes broad black humor is required, and sometimes the suffering is too delicate for anything other than the most quietly astute words. Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change is an unusual hybrid of health memoir and favorite poems book, detailing former teacher, researcher and editor Madge McKeithen’s struggle with her son Ike’s mysterious illness. McKeithen is consoled by compulsively reading poem after poem ripped from magazines and books and tucked into thick medical files that she ferries from clinic to clinic while trying to figure out what is happening to her son. I became a poetry addict, she writes, poems became almost all I could read. Blue Peninsula features excerpts of works by Billy Collins, Donald Hall, e.e. cummings, Louise GlŸck, Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Czeslaw Milosz and many others; their precise, concentrated wisdom becomes at times near lifesaving for McKeithen as she faces her son’s uncertain future and herself as mother, diagramming the words and her own procession through isolation, frustration, sorrow and small slivers of light. Do I have it in me to reach for Peace, Hope, even Delight? McKeithen asks, referencing the Emily Dickinson poem that gives the book its title.

White-knuckle flyers and their struggles while suspended in those big aluminum tubes in the sky inspired Chicken Soup for the Soul Presents The Fearless FlightKit. Compiled by pilots Ron Nielsen and Tim Piering, the kit contains a pocket-sized guide to bring onboard that explains every sound and sensation during takeoff and landing. The Real Life Fearful Flyer Stories booklet details the sagas of ordinary people who are also licking their panic habits. Finally, the kit’s 30-minute “Flight Harmonizer” CD grounds fearful thoughts before and during flight with a mesmerizing blend of voices, sounds and music. Some intonations soothe (“Your seatbelt is firmly attached. You are safe.”); others lead flyers into New Age territory (“It’s about taking off in all areas of your life”). Obsessing about crashes and other terrifying possibilities will be almost impossible while this gentle symphony swirls through your ears.

But the most persuasive aspect of the kit is the confession of Fearless FlightKit creator Nielsen, who flies commercial aircraft and also has a degree in counseling. “I really believe in the power of self-disclosing,” says Nielsen, who was nearly grounded by his own fear of flying during his Air Force training. “My expertise comes from my own fears in life.”