At the 2024 Ascension Chamber of Commerce Women in Business Luncheon, five esteemed female leaders shared invaluable wisdom from their professional experiences. Explore their recommended reading list, easily accessible in both print and digital formats, with your library card at your local Ascension Parish Library! If you don’t have a library card, find out how you can get one for free.
Recommended by Jackie McCreary
The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day with Passion & Purpose
by Matthew Kelly
eBook on Libby
Do you ever feel that if you weren’t so busy you would be happier, healthier, more effective, more fulfilled…and maybe even a better person? Once every twenty-five years or so, a book comes along that perfectly identifies our common search and struggle for happiness, and teaches us how to find lasting fulfillment in a changing world. This is that book. Not since M. Scott Peck published The Road Less Traveled have we experienced a voice as refreshing and authentic as Matthew Kelly’s.
The Rhythm of Life will help you to bring into focus who you are and why you are here. Through this book Matthew Kelly will help you discover your legitimate needs, deepest desires, and unique talents. He will introduce you to the-best-version-of-yourself and lead you to a life filled with passion and purpose.
Recommended by Jackie Baumann, PE
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe
eBook on cloudLibrary
eAudiobook on cloudLibrary
United Nations Champion of the Earth, climate scientist, and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe changes the debate on how we can save our future.
Called “one of the nation’s most effective communicators on climate change” by The New York Times, Katharine Hayhoe knows how to navigate all sides of the conversation on our changing planet. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas, she negotiates distrust of data, indifference to imminent threats, and resistance to proposed solutions with ease. Over the past fifteen years Hayhoe has found that the most important thing we can do to address climate change is talk about it—and she wants to teach you how.
In Saving Us, Hayhoe argues that when it comes to changing hearts and minds, facts are only one part of the equation. We need to find shared values in order to connect our unique identities to collective action. This is not another doomsday narrative about a planet on fire. It is a multilayered look at science, faith, and human psychology, from an icon in her field—recently named chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy.
Drawing on interdisciplinary research and personal stories, Hayhoe shows that small conversations can have astonishing results. Saving Us leaves us with the tools to open a dialogue with our loved ones about how we all can play a role in pushing forward for change.
Recommended by Greta Fleming Gordon
A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen
eBook on cloudLibrary
In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the bestselling novelist and columnist, reflects on what it takes to “get a life”—to live deeply every day and from your own unique self, rather than merely to exist through your days. “Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us,” Quindlen writes, “because unless you know the clock is ticking, it is so easy to waste our days, our lives.” Her mother died when Quindlen was nineteen: “It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on for the darkest possible reason. . . . I learned something enduring, in a very short period of time, about life. And that was that it was glorious, and that you had no business taking it for granted.” But how to live from that perspective, to fully engage in our days? In A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen guides us with an understanding that comes from knowing how to see the view, the richness in living.
Recommended by Dr. Tracee Short, MD, FABA
We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power by Rachel Rodgers
eBook on cloudLibrary
eAudiobook on cloudLibrary
We Should All Be Millionaires details a realistic, achievable, step-by-step path to creating the support, confidence, and plan you need to own your success and become the millionaire the world needs you to be.
Only 10 percent of the world’s millionaires are women, making it difficult for women to wield the economic power that will create lasting equality. Whatever is stopping you from having seven figures in the bank—whether it’s shaky confidence, knowledge gaps when it comes to wealth building tactics, imposter syndrome, a janky mindset about money (it’s okay, we’ve all been there!), or simply not knowing where to begin—this book shows you how to clear every obstacle in your way, show up, and glow up.
We Should All Be Millionaires will forever change the way you think about money and your ability to earn it.
In this book, Rachel Rodgers— a Black woman, mother of four, attorney, business owner, and self-made millionaire— shares the lessons she’s learned both in her own journey to wealth and in coaching hundreds of women through their own journeys to seven figures.
Recommended by Kayla Fuselier Clouatre
What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles
eBook on cloudLibrary
What Color is Your Parachute? has been the best-selling job-hunting book in the world for more three decades, in good times and bad, and it continues to be a fixture on best-seller lists, from Amazon.com to Business Week. It has well over eight million copies in print and has been translated into 12 languages around the world. With an extended preface that addresses job loss, vacancies, and outsourcing and updated references on how to use the Internet in your job-hunt throughout, the Parachute addresses the top concerns of today’s job-hunters. In the words of Fortune magazine: Parachute remains the gold standard of career guides.
More Business Resources from the Library
Do you want to start or improve a small business? Let APL be your guide with the Business Resource Center, where you can stay informed about upcoming seminars, local information for business owners, and online databases to support your work.
Ascension Parish Library subscribes to a variety of databases to help small business owners stay current with business news and assist with in-depth research. The databases can be used in the library or accessed from your home or office with a current library card.
Shelf Analysis 