Life Without Limits: Clarify What You Want, Redefine Your Dreams, Become the Person You Want to Be

Lucinda Bassett is one of those self-help professionals who deserve admiration. Severely agoraphobic through her mid-20s, she gradually overcame this and other personal hurdles to become the founder and president of the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety, as well as a bestselling author (From Panic to Power). Envious? Good! In Life Without Limits, Bassett helps readers take a more objective look at their feelings of envy--and other "success sabotage syndromes" (like fear of failure or success), the goal being to discover the positive, motivational properties of such "negative" feelings and to tap these properties to reach personal and professional goals. Bassett also does a bang-up job of guiding her readers through a dream-clarification process, so as to provide a clear road map for the journey.

While many of her suggestions sound familiar (accept feelings of fear; ask whether the fear is just an excuse for avoiding something else; stop the thought process and use self-talk to feel empowered), steps for creating a life-changing action plan and plenty of sample dialogue for healthy self-talk make this book quite practical. Two final chapters swing the focus from pure psychology to spirituality. Bassett describes how intuition, divine signs, miracles, prayer, and faith can enhance the many other, more proactive steps outlined in the book. Never preachy and often a bit humbled by her life experiences (she feels past business failures were the result of her asking God to save her mother's life after a stroke), Bassett handles these final topics with the same insight and sensitivity that she demonstrates throughout the earlier chapters. --Liane Thomas