Works by
Martha Beck
(AKA Martha Nibley Beck)
(Therapist, Writer)
[November 29, 1962 - ]

Non-fiction

• Changes of the Heart: Martha Beck Life Coaches Share Strategies for Facing Life Challenges (November 4, 2009) by Martha Beck Certified Life Coaches with Anna Paradox, ed.

• Finding Your Own North Star Journal: A Guide to Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live (Oct 6, 2009)
  A knowledge of your perfect life sits inside you, just as the North Star sits in its unalterable spot. Where will your North Star lead you?
  
  Discover the answer with this interactive journal, based on the bestselling book Finding Your Own North Star. Take the quizzes and fill out the prompts to figure out exactly what you want and how to use change to propel you toward your North Star—the life you were meant to live. You'll also learn how to:

  • Recognize what you love to do most and turn it into a sustainable career or lifestyle.

  • Listen to your intuition—learn how your body says yes and no to certain people, tasks and environments.

  • Employ techniques and language for empowering yourself, confronting fear, coping with grief, dealing with anger, and achieving joy.

• Steering by Starlight: The Science and Magic of Finding Your Destiny (Jun 9, 2009)
  Martha Beck’s remarkable success in helping people to change their lives has won her accolades everywhere from National Public Radio to USA TODAY. She made multiple appearances on Oprah and Good Morning America for the hardcover edition of Steering by Starlight, which now offers readers a powerful set of new tools—fresh coping strategies based on cutting-edge research in psychiatry and neurology—that will help them overcome obstacles and set their lives on course. Dr. Beck’s trademark humor and empathy are at the heart of her gift for helping people who feel disconnected from their true sense of purpose: to locate meaning in their lives. Utilizing the same methods that have proven most effective with her private clients, Dr. Beck reconnects readers with their authentic needs and desires. Whether a person is seeking better relationships, more focused career direction, or a more harmonious lifestyle, Steering by Starlight’s hilarious and touching anecdotes, case studies, and practical exercises will point the way.

• The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace (2008)

• Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life, No Matter What! (2008)
  In the tradition of her bestseller, Finding Your Own North Star, Oprah Magazine columnist Martha Beck reconnects readers with their best destinies. Described as one of the best-known life coaches in America in media such as Psychology Today, NPR, and USA Today, Martha Beck has demonstrated a rare gift for helping people whose lives have gone off course find their way back to authentic, rewarding lives. Now, in Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life, No Matter What!, Martha Beck describes the step-by-step process she uses with her private clients to help them navigate the terrain of their best lives. Bringing together cutting-edge research in psychiatry, neurology, and related fields in an accessible, substantive, original way, Dr. Beck offers powerful new methods for solving the problems that beset ordinary people. Using her trademark wisdom, empathy, and engaging style, she connects readers with fresh, never-before published strategies that have proven most effective and efficient for the hundreds of people she has coached. For readers who have found their North Stars, this book will be an invaluable tool to stay the course and overcome obstacles.  For those who still feel adrift, it will provide a way to find true North and follow the path of best destiny. Dr. Beck identifies three stages along the path to recapturing a satisfying life:-“the stargazer” helps readers understand why it’s so easy to lose themselves and offers strategies for sighting their North Star-“the mapmaker” uses this newly clarified perspective to evaluate one’s situation and plot a course for upcoming years-“the pathfinder” discusses the adventures that may be encountered as one travels along this new life course Whether it’s seeking better relationships, more focused career direction, the achievement of specific fitness goals, or a more harmonious lifestyle, Steering by Starlight’s colorful anecdotes, case studies, and exercises will point the way. 

• Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith (2006)
  As “Mormon royalty” within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Martha Beck was raised in a home frequented by the Church’s high elders in an existence framed by the strictest code of conduct. As an adult, she moved to the east coast, outside of her Mormon enclave for the first time in her life. When her son was born with Down syndrome, Martha and her husband left their graduate programs at Harvard to return to Utah, where they knew the supportive Mormon community would embrace them.
  
  But when she was hired to teach at Brigham Young University, Martha was troubled by the way the Church’s elders silenced dissidents and masked truths that contradicted its published beliefs. Most troubling of all, she was forced to face her history of sexual abuse by one of the Church’s most prominent authorities. The New York Times bestseller Leaving the Saints chronicles Martha’s decision to sever her relationship with the faith that had cradled her for so long and to confront and forgive the person who betrayed her so deeply.
  
  Leaving the Saints offers a rare glimpse inside one of the world’s most secretive religions while telling a profoundly moving story of personal courage, survival, and the transformative power of spirituality.

• Wisdom from Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live (2005)

• The Joy Diet: 10 Daily Practices for a Happier Life (2003)
  Welcome to The Joy Diet, a menu of ten behaviors you can add to your way of living and thinking to enhance every day’s journey through the unpredictable terrain of your existence. You can add these behaviors gradually and watch your life become steadily more vivid and satisfying. Or you can go on a “crash Joy Diet” to help you navigate life’s emergencies.
  The ten menu items are:

  • Nothing: Do nothing for fifteen minutes a day. Stop mindlessly chasing goals and figure out which goals are worth going after.

  • Truth: Create a moment of truth to help you unmask what you’re hiding—from others and from yourself.

  • Desire: Identify, articulate, and explore at least one of your heart’s desires—and learn how to let yourself want what you want.

  • Creativity: Learn six new ways to develop at least one new idea to help you obtain your heart’s desire.

  • Risk: Take one baby step toward reaching your goal. The only rule is it has to scare the pants off you.

  • Treats: Give yourself a treat for every risk you take and two treats just because you’re you. No exceptions. No excuses.

  • Play: Take a moment to remember your real life’s work and differentiate it from the games you play to achieve it. Then play wholeheartedly.

  • Laughter: Laugh at least thirty times a day. Props encouraged.

  • Connection: Use your Joy Diet skills to interact with someone who matters to you.

  • Feasting: Enjoy at least three square feasts a day, with or without food.

  No matter what your long-term goals are, The Joy Diet, written with Martha Beck’s inimitable blend of wisdom, practical guidance, and humor, will help you achieve the immediate gift of joyful living in the here and now. Begin your journey today.

• Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live (2002)
  Martha Beck has helped hundreds of clients find their own North Star, fulfill their potential, and live more joyfully. Now, she shares her step-by-step program that will help you take the exhilarating and frightening journey to your own ideal life. Finding Your Own North Star will teach you how to read your internal compasses, articulate your core desires, identify and repair the unconscious beliefs that may be blocking your progress, nurture your intuition, and cultivate your dreams from the first magical flicker of an idea through the planning and implementation of a more satisfying life. Martha Beck offers thoroughly tested case studies, questionnaires, exercises, and her own trademark wit and wisdom to guide you every step of the way.

• Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic (2000)
  "He says you'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been by remaining closed."
  
  The messenger is a school janitor with a master's in art history who claims to be channeling "from both sides of the veil." "He" is Adam, a three-year-old who has never spoken an intelligible word. And the message is intended for Martha Beck, Adam's mother, who doesn't know whether to make a mad dash for the door to escape a raving lunatic (after all, how many conversations like this one can you have before you stop getting dinner party invitations and start pushing a mop yourself?) or accept another in a series of life lessons from an impeccable but mysterious source.
  
  From the moment Martha and her husband, John, accidentally conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. They'd plotted out a future in the most vaunted ivory tower of academe. But the dream had begun to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them that if they decided to keep the baby, they would lose all hope of achieving their carefully crafted goals. Fortunately, that's exactly what happened.
  
  Expecting Adam is a poignant, challenging, and achingly funny chronicle of the extraordinary nine months of Martha's pregnancy. By the time Adam was born, Martha and John were propelled into a world in which they were forced to redefine everything of value to them, put all their faith in miracles, and trust that they could fly without a net. And it worked.
  
  Martha's riveting, beautifully written memoir captures the abject terror and exhilarating freedom of facing impending parentdom, being forced to question one's deepest beliefs, and rewriting life's rules. It is an unforgettable celebration of the everyday magic that connects human souls to each other.

• Breaking Point: Why Women Fall Apart and How They Can Re-create Their Lives (1997)
  Much as Gail Sheehy did in Passages, Dr. Beck articulates a common signpost in women's lives, explaining the five stages which characterize how women arrive at their breaking point, how their age defines their experience, and how they can transcend crisis and move on to redefine their lives.

• Breaking the Cycle of Compulsive Behavior (1990) by Martha Nibley Beck and John C. Beck

See also:

• Biography - Martha Nibley Beck
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML