Friendship Development

A speaker, teacher, and compelling storyteller, Lisa Whelchel writes from her heart and her head, sharing her story and helping women understand how to cope with the strengths and weaknesses of friendship, and basing all her advice on the foundation of our ultimate relationship with the Savior.

Dear White Woman, Please Come Home is Kimberlee Yolanda Williams's invitation to white women longing for authentic friendship with Black and brown women, the kind of friendship with no place for secrets, the kind of relationship where truth-telling is welcome, even when it hurts. The idea for the book was born after attending a workshop that left her shaken and angry. In it, Kimberlee listened as white woman after white woman didn't understand how this or that comment, custom, behavior, or norm so negatively impacted women of color.

Having faced personal struggles and triumphs, Cassandra McBride brings a unique blend of experience and professional expertise to guide you on your journey. She has helped countless individuals overcome similar hurdles, and now she’s here to help you. "The Better Relationship Guide for Work, Life, Friendships, and Intimacy" is your indispensable companion on the path to extraordinary relationships. In this audio, you'll find the keys to unlock a world of fulfillment, happiness, and success in all aspects of your life.

David Bradford and Carole Robin taught interpersonal skills to MBA candidates for a combined 75 years in their legendary Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics (affectionately known to generations of students as 'Touchy Feely') and have coached and consulted to hundreds of executives for decades. In Connect, they show listeners how to take their relationships from shallow to exceptional, along the way offering time-tested strategies for giving feedback, negotiating boundaries and working through disagreements.

Should we even expect to be fulfilled and happy at work? Yes, we should, says Annie McKee, coauthor of the best-selling Primal Leadership. In her new transformative book, she makes the most compelling case yet that happiness - and the full engagement that comes with it - is more important than ever in today's workplace, and she sheds new light on the powerful relationship of happiness to individual, team, and organizational success.

Since early 2020, Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written in to her Dear Dolly agony aunt column in The Sunday Times Style. Their questions range from the painfully—and sometimes hilariously—relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, friendships, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between.

Listening helps us be there for others, to support them in tough times and to strengthen our relationships with partners, family, friends and colleagues. From opening up a conversation with someone who might be struggling, to how to use gentle encouragement to help others share their stories, How to Listen demonstrates the power of listening without judgement and draws on the extensive experience of Samaritans in offering practical advice to apply to your own life.

In Walking into Walls, best-selling author, radio host, and counselor Stephen Arterburn identifies five prison walls, or blind spots, that will hold you captive and block the amazing things God wants to do in your life. Arterburn will help you learn how to overcome those life-blocking barriers and sprint into the future with renewed confidence and joy. This one audiobook is the breakthrough you need!

Many of us have been there. Because of life changes—kids are grown and gone, divorce, relocation, retirement, death, health issues—we ponder what’s next and try to determine a direction for our lives. We’re often stuck—wanting to do something but not knowing what that something is. And how do you figure it out? When she desired a purpose, a passion, friends, and a community, Pamela Lamp devised a project for herself. She took those first few steps—steps anyone can take —to find herself and begin the journey she wished to travel.

Skip the small talk and learn how to build a supportive community, engage with new people, and cultivate authentic, long-lasting friendships at every stage of life. It sometimes seems like everyone has a big, happy, fulfilling social life, full of lifelong friendships...except you. As we grow older and school friendships fade, it can be difficult to meet new people and cultivate meaningful friendships. How do you strike up a conversation with a stranger? How do you move from mutual acquaintances to real friends?

Whether at work, home or in our relationships, we all know how it feels to want people to like us. The problem comes when we give up our own needs along the way. In this life-changing book, psychotherapist Emma Reed Turrell explains the different ‘types’ of people-pleaser and provides practical, reassuring advice on how to better understand - and stop - people-pleasing behaviour when it starts to affect your own needs. Please Yourself will help you care for others in the right way - and ultimately, help you take better care of yourself.

A memoir of the author's decades-long friendship and spiritual journey with the late singer, songwriter, novelist, and poet Leonard Cohen. Funny, revealing, self-aware, and deeply moving, Matters of Vital Interest is an insightful memoir about Eric Lerner's relationship with his friend, whose idiosyncratic style and dignified life was deeply informed by his spiritual practices.

Every parent hopes their child will develop healthy and happy friendships. However, most parents don't know what to do that will encourage their child to be a friend and attract friends. The author offers clear-cut friendship-making guidelines for parents and their children. Some of the book's recommendations include: don't over-schedule a child's time; guide children to participate in "friend-attracting" activities; seek out friends in the neighborhood.

With humor, honesty and faith Becky Johnson and her daughter Rachel Randolph determine to tackle the stuff that is stressing them out, once and for all. From interviews with friends and lots of research they came up with The Ten Most Common Stressors That Mess with a Woman's Mind: daily challenges that routinely steal her sense of peace and joy. Together Becky and Rachel cook up a plan to live a less depleted and more nourished life.

Throughout her recent bout with breast cancer, Letty Cottin Pogrebin became fascinated by her friends’ and family’s diverse reactions to her and her illness: how awkwardly some of them behaved, how some misspoke or misinterpreted her needs, and how wonderful it was when people read her right. She began talking to her fellow patients and dozens of other veterans of serious illness, seeking to discover what sick people wished their friends knew about how best to comfort, help, and even simply talk to them.

Judy Gaman was so busy making a name for herself that she barely took the time to meet a stranger, enjoy life, or simply stop to breathe. Immersed in her job as the director of business development for a high-profile medical practice - a job that required her to write health and wellness books and host a nationally syndicated radio show - she spent every day going full speed ahead with no looking back. That is, until the day she met Lucille Fleming. What began as a quick meeting became a lasting friendship that transformed into an inseparable bond.

When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine — who had never met — began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on each side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis, Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another as necessary as breath.

Jesus’ pattern for church living was one of family - of brothers and sisters living in intimate, life-giving community with each other. With story, sensitivity, and hope, Beyond Awkward Side Hugs invites us to leave behind eroticized, fear-based patterns and move toward gendered, generous relationships between men and women of character as we love one another as Jesus did.

From behavioral scientists to besties, Kate draws upon the extraordinary research from academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, and stories from friends of friends, strangers from the Internet, and her “squad” to get to the bottom of these and other facets of friendship. For fans of Susan Cain’s Quiet and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, The Friendship Cure is a fascinating blend of accessible “smart thinking,” investigative journalism, pop culture, and memoir for anyone trying to navigate this lonely world, written with the wit, charm, and bite of a fresh voice.

In this complex and chaotic time, we need more than ever the particular skills and attributes women possess and can bring to the table. In order to create an environment where the full potentials of these women can be realized, men need to learn how to help ignite the immanent and distinct sparks within them, so these women can, in turn, warm the lives of those they touch. To move successfully into the future, men need to be able to live in relationships that are whole, genuine, and open. They need to understand how to be their best, most vulnerable selves.