Showing results by publisher "Penguin Random House Australia Audio" in Relationships, Parenting & Personal Development

How do you rebuild a broken life? Where do you begin? These were the questions Gregory Smith asked himself after stumbling out of a NSW rainforest in 2000, close to death after living as a hermit in the wild. Determined to turn a wretched life into one worth living, Gregory stripped himself bare emotionally, psychologically and spiritually to undertake an extraordinary personal reconstruction. Today, with a PhD to his name and a loving family by his side, Gregory has overcome a life of homelessness and despair to become one of society's great teachers.

The challenge of anxiety never tests you more than when you become a mother. From conceiving, to pregnancy, to birth and forever more, there are infinite reasons for your anxiety to be heightened. The impact on mothers isn't just the anxiety itself, it's the stop sign it seems to put up in front of you at almost every turn. Anxiety can stand in the way of living a rich, full and wonderful life and from fulfilling your potential personally, professionally and as a mother. But this doesn't have to be your reality.

To coincide with the release of her groundbreaking new documentary Embrace Kids, leading body image activist and powerhouse change-maker Taryn Brumfitt has collaborated with leading body image expert Dr Zali Yager on one of the most important health issues of our times—helping our children and teens feel comfortable about, and confident in, their bodies. With chapters on how to role-model body confidence, appreciate your own body and create a positive home environment, Embrace Kids is full of evidence-based suggestions and supportive, practical advice.

Ian Whitworth built national companies from nothing. Coronavirus hammered some of them flat. Yet he's fine with that. Because when the chaos is swirling and shit is getting real, there's opportunity. Now is the time to put yourself in control - where no boss or virus can take you down. So many talented people want to give it a shot, yet they're held back by the big business myths. But success is simpler than your crusty CEO wants you to think.

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes that too many Australian boys have got it too easy - and the result is a generation of ‘boofheads’: boys with huge egos who think they are too good to stack the dishwasher or turn up to school. They expect the world and give little in return. But things are about to change. From the author of the groundbreaking Australian best seller The Princess Bitchface Syndrome and researcher Elly Robinson comes this essential companion book for boys.

Jenna Holmes, known affectionately by her community as P Mami, has cultivated a lifestyle centred around extracting the most pleasure from the simplest of things. The ones readily available to us if we just open our eyes: a perfectly juicy peach, an ocean swim on a hot day, a salted margarita rim, a hyena laugh with a friend. With her trademark infectious energy, in this book Jenna shares the nine core principles that guide all the decisions she makes - big and small - to build the most creative and inspired life possible.

We are all crazily busy. Yet many of us know that we still need to take the time to learn how to get better. Better at productivity. Better at achievement. Better at running our minds and bodies in the optimum way to enhance our rate of success. So how can we fulfil our potential when there's so much else to do? Win Fast offers succinct, proven strategies in no-nonsense language to help us rise to a new level in our personal and business lives, to be more productive and efficient and to exceed our goals.

Saroo Brierley's journey home to a small village in India with the help of Google Earth became an internationally best-selling book and inspired the major motion picture Lion. But the story of how his adoptive mother, Sue, came into his life half a world away in Tasmania is every bit as riveting. In this uplifting and deeply personal book Sue reveals for the first time her own traumatic childhood. The daughter of a violent alcoholic whose business gambles left her family destitute, she grew up in geographic and emotional isolation.

Chrissie Foster is the mother who brought the rich and powerful Catholic Church to its knees over its global abuse of children, including two of her daughters, Emma and Katie. Like the Boston Globe's Spotlight team, she built an undeniable case in her first book Hell on the Way to Heaven, which helped inspire Australian governments to hold world-leading inquiries.

After sharing their artistic frustrations at the school gate, two women decide to take a risk: to co-write a book about early motherhood. Off-colour, offbeat, off their heads, they begin—but then, what is motherhood if not messy, non-linear, multi-authored and potty mouthed? Together they gather scenes and songs, poems and text messages, insights and ephemera, alive to both the playfulness and the danger of co-creation.

For forty years David Meagher harboured a secret. Then in mid 2018 a text message from an old school friend forced him to confront his past and finally deal with it. Secrets and Lies is a story about child sexual abuse. The culture that enabled it. How the perpetrator groomed his victims. How it finally came to an end. And how four decades after the crimes were committed his victims embarked on a successful two-year journey to bring the offender to justice. David Meagher delivers an intimate account of the lasting impact of child sexual abuse on survivors.

The Forgotten Children was David Hill's heartbreaking account of the abuse that he and other 'orphans of empire' survived at the Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales. Part memoir, part oral history, the book became a best seller. It was also the catalyst in a subsequent battle for justice. In Reckoning, David recounts stories of the shocking systemic abuse at Fairbridge and how he led the fight against the powerful people and organisations.

Emma Jane has lived a thousand colourful lives. She escaped a small town and a traumatic childhood by moving to Sydney, where she made an indelible imprint on the oppressively blokey mediascape. She played in an all-girl band, married a rock star she hardly knew, had a baby, ditched journalism for academia and changed her name from Emma Tom to Emma Jane. But all the while, she was struggling with her mental health. Then, during the first Sydney lockdown she was accidentally sectioned in a psychiatric ward.

Why is it that children in a family can share the same gene pool, a similar socio-economic environment and experience similar parenting styles yet have fundamentally different personalities, interests and even different careers as adults? Birth order! The implications for parents, teachers and adults involved with children are many. First published in 2003 to great acclaim, this fully revised and updated edition seeks to increase the listener's understanding of birth order theory.

Kate Jones and Mandy Hose have experienced the highs and lows of parenting - and they wouldn't change a thing. The pair met a decade ago and bonded over their premature twins with additional needs and their remarkable capacity for love, laughter and swearing like a trooper. As the mothers grew closer, however, they confided that they felt 'on-the-floor lonely' sometimes because nobody was talking about what it was like for families like theirs. It was time to give their community a voice.

International businessman Peter Holmes à Court left the executive world and found himself living deep in rural France with only his seven-year-old twin girls for company. Peter was struggling as a single father in a foreign country, unsettled by the sudden move away from a traditional job, and completely baffled by the society around him. His only plan: to ride L 'Etape du Tour, the challenging amateur leg of the Tour de France. In an effort to find some new friends in the community - and a bike for the race - he discovered the region's small bicycle factory.

Change can turn our plans, our lives and our dreams upside down. Whether you have faced a redundancy, been in an accident, lost a loved one, had a health scare, or been impacted by an economic downturn, your ability to navigate through the change process and create an alternative plan will be the key to your future happiness. Shannah Kennedy, best-selling author of The Life Plan, has created a simple yet powerful four-part guide that is designed to give you the confidence to accept, heal, grow and adapt.

Each year, more and more emphasis is placed on achieving good results in the end-of-school exams. This can lead to students feeling extraordinary pressure and having unrealistic expectations. In this all-new and completely revised edition of the best-selling Surviving Year 12, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Australia's leading adolescent psychologist, gives advice to parents on how they can help their child cope with the pressure, work smarter and actually enjoy their final years of school.

The jump between primary and secondary school marks one of the biggest transitions in a student's life. It's the point at which a child leaves the relatively safe cocoon of childhood and enters the wide world of adolescence. For both parents and their children, it can be a huge shock, as they encounter a minefield of serious issues to deal with - everything from peer and study pressures to phones, parties and beyond.

Nothing forewarned Danny and Leila Abdallah of the tragedy they would face on 1 February 2020. In one of the most horrific road accidents in Australian memory, three of their children and their young cousin were killed by a drunk and drugged driver. Yet in the immediate aftermath of their loss, the Abdallahs did something remarkable and unexpected: they publicly forgave the driver. This gesture by the family - founded in their Christian faith and born out of a desire not to be shackled to what happened - has sustained them through all they have had to endure.