The self-help section

So it's now the middle of January. Have you changed your life yet? Have you at least cleaned off your desk?

In honor of the brave resolutions that this time of year breeds, Agent Life spotlights a series of inspirational books that go beyond business goals toward all-around self-improvement.

First up, the books of Barbara Sher.

A career counselor and therapist, Sher has a refreshingly jaded attitude about how to achieve success. "Can you persevere? I can't," she writes in her first book, "Wishcraft," calling herself "an ace procrastinator."

But Sher has managed to refine a set of common-sense techniques for achieving what she calls "the life you love": First, figure out your "touchstone," a dream that uses as many of your strengths and interests as possible. Then fine-tune the dream into a set of specific goals and build structure and support (such as a "success team" of colleagues who meet regularly to touch base) into your life to help you reach those goals.

Sounds simple, but Sher's down-to-earth approach can be just the kick in the pants to get you going. She's a big believer in "task therapy" -- taking action instead of analyzing things to death. She also provided some useful strategies for handling resistance and negativity, two factors that tend to trip up anybody trying to make changes.

In "Wishcraft," Sher suggested starting a "Hard Times" notebook to complain to as well as scheduling regular gripe time when reporting to your success team. "Start having fun with your negative feelings," she wrote. "Say anything as long as it's a mean, miserable complaint with some punch to it. Did you notice that your energy level went up? Does your goal suddenly look a little less impossible? Because you've dug down through all those heavy layers of 'I can't' and struck a defiant gusher of 'I don't want to and I won't ...'

"Negativity is energy -- pure, ornery, high-octave energy. It's just been so repressed and tabooed that we've forgotten something every 2-year-old knows: how good it is for us to throw a tantrum."

Self-help catalog

If you want to check out the books written by Barbara Sher, best-selling author and self-help guru (chronicled on Page 57), here's the list:

Resisting resistance

Maybe you have a long-range plan to change your life, or you've been taking steps toward a stalled dream, such as learning to play a musical instrument.

But suddenly you find yourself stuck, seemingly unable to do anything to further your goal. What happened? You've just come up against the classic self-help bugaboo: resistance.

How to handle it? First understand that resistance is "one of our natural defense mechanisms," according to Barbara Sher, author and developer of a tape series, "Dare to Live Your Dream."

"Remember, resistance isn't your enemy -- it's your friend," she wrote in the tape's guidebook. "Sometimes it's a misguided friend, but resistance is inside of you for a real purpose: to protect you from doing harm to yourself. The survival part of you has decided to make everything stress-free, familiar and predictable ... Resistance sees any kind of excitement as danger."

Sher recommended this three-part strategy to tackle the problem:

Mindfulness meditation

Meditation is one of those practices that has gone from being perceived as mysterious and "weird" to become a mainstream tool for stress reduction.

One book for beginning meditators is "Full Catastrophe Living," by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The author, who leads eight-week stress-reduction courses focusing on meditation at the University of Massa-chusetts Medical Center, basically provides a full version of the program in print, along with case histories of how meditation helped those who took the course.

Here's a meditation practice from the book to give you a sense of what the process is like:

Close your eyes, sit so that your back is straight but not stiff and become aware of your breathing. Don't try to control your breathing. Just let it happen and be aware of it, feeling how it feels, witnessing it as it flows in and out.

Try being with your breath in this way for three minutes. If, at some point, you think that it is foolish or boring to just sit here and watch your breath go in and out, note to yourself that this is just a thought, a judgment that your mind is creating. Then simply let go of it and bring your attention back to your breathing.

"Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice," wrote Kabat-Zinn. In fact, "there is nothing particularly unusual or mystical about meditating or being mindful. All it involves is paying attention to your experience from moment to moment.

"This leads directly to new ways of seeing and being in your life, because the present moment, whenever it is recognized and honored, reveals a very special, indeed magical power: it is the only time that any of us ever has."

Shifting time

Feel as if you don't have enough time? Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen, a holistic physician, has written a prescription for this most common ailment of life right now: the book "Timeshifting."

This concept has nothing to do with time management, but with creating more life within the time you do have.

Among the techniques Rechtschaffen suggested are these:

Net News

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, one of this week's sites focuses on places important in the civil rights movement. The other site concerns ecotourism.

We shall overcome

Subtitled Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement, this on-line travel itinerary includes data on 41 places associated with aspects of the movement, such as the F.W. Woolworth Building in Greensboro, N.C., where the first sit-in to end segregation was held. Go to www.nps.gov/crweb1/civilrights/ECoNETT

A joint initiative of the World Travel and Tourism Council and Directorate General 23 of the European Commission, ECoNETT aims to stimulate better environmental management in travel and tourism. One of the things you'll find here is a list of ecotourism credos from such entities as ASTA and the Africa Travel Association. Visit www.wttc.org

Compiled by Jennifer Dorsey. Send suggestions to [email protected]