NBtM Virtual Tour and Giveaway - Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully by David Amerland

Welcome to my stop on the NBtM virtual tour for Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully by David Amerland. This tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt from the book as well as an insightful guest post from the author. There's also the tour wide giveaway for a chance to win a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card. Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more content. Enjoy!

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Title: Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

Author: David Amerland

Publisher: New Line Books

Publication Date: June 23rd 2021

Print Length: 218 pages

Genre: Self-Help

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Live your life the way you want to. Manage stress better. Be more resilient and enjoy meaningful relationships and better health. We all want that. Such life leads to better choices, better jobs, loving romantic partners, more rewarding careers and decisions that are fully aligned with our aims.

What stops us from getting all that is the complexity of our brain and the complicated way in which the external world comes together. The misalignment between the internal states we experience and the external circumstances we encounter often leads to confusion, a lack of clarity in our thinking and actions that are not consistent with our professed values.

Intentional is a gameplan. It helps us connect the pieces of our mind to the pieces of our life. It shows us how to map what we feel to what has caused those feelings, understand what affects us and what effects it has on us and determine what we want, why we want it and what we need to do to get it.

When we know what to do, we know how to behave. When we know how to behave we know how to act. When we know how to act, we know how to live. Our actions, each day, become our lives. Drawn from the latest research from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral and social psychology and evolutionary anthropology, Intentional shows you how to add meaning to your actions and lead a meaningful, happier, more fulfilling life on your terms.

Goodreads * Purchase Links

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EXCERPT:

Because all this is serious I can afford to be flippant, though as you will see even my flippancy has a very serious intent. So, I will add here that the one ‘rule’ we all need to keep in mind is that favourite of William S. Burroughs’ from his Naked Lunch “Nothing is true; everything is permitted”. Burrough, of course, borrowed this from Vladimir Bartol, who used it in his novel Alamut. Bartol, himself borrowed it, and slightly changed it in the process, from the teachings of Hassan-i Sabbah who was the founder of the Order of the Assassins, historically known as the Nizari Assassins. The tale, writings and doctrine of the Order was incorporated in the storyline of the popular video game Assassin’s Creed which is where I first came across it and filed it away for future reference which brings us to here and now. You reading what I’ve written.

What do we, what can we learn from this? That life is circuitous but the circuit has polygonal junctures with cultural jumps and bends that require an open mind and a thirst for cultural learning in order for the metaphorical dots to connect? Or, that nothing is truly original, that everything is borrowed from somewhere else and made to fit the moment and its time?

Both, I’d argue. If you are truly living and if you truly feel alive you are aware of both context and history. Moment and time. Alamut was written as an implied rebuke to Mussolini’s fascism. Naked Lunch is a chronicle of the messiness of life and its often unplanned trajectory where the brain makes sense of basically senseless moments of existence. This book is about learning to behave in ways that help you get more out of your life.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Amerland is a Chemical Engineer with an MSc. in quantum dynamics in laminar flow processes. He converted his knowledge of science and understanding of mathematics into a business writing career that's helped him demystify, for his readers, the complexity of subjects such as search engine optimization (SEO), search marketing, social media, decision-making, communication and personal development. The diversity of the subjects is held together by the underlying fundamental of human behavior and the way this is expressed online and offline. Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is the latest addition to a thread that explores what to do in order to thrive. 

A lifelong martial arts practitioner, David Amerland is found punching and kicking sparring dummies and punch bags when he's not behind his keyboard.

Website * Amazon * Facebook *

Goodreads * Instagram * LinkedIn *

Medium * Twitter * YouTube

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GUEST POST:

- Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Each book, much like an idea or an action, has both its an origin and an intent. A book is the manifestation of both an idea and an action and to better understand it, sometimes, we need to get to the idea so we can grasp what led to the action of writing it.

I have frequently said, in interviews, in the past that each of my books can be summarized as an answer to a seemingly simple question. I say seemingly simple because, obviously, if it were simple it wouldn’t need at least three years of research and writing and 200-plus pages to answer.

The question itself though is easy enough to formulate and for Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully, it goes like this: “How do we behave in the many different situations we encounter in our life so that we get the best possible outcomes for our self?”

To answer that we need to understand where behavior comes from, what drives it, how identity, beliefs and values factor into that, what aims we create for ourselves and why. And, how the environment we are in actually affects us. You’re beginning to get the idea of the complexity involved there.

This question of human behavior has fascinated me for a very long time. I constantly wonder, for instance, why I am who I am. Why am I not different? I have two siblings who are younger than me. We all grew up in the same house, were exposed to very similar if not identical situations and had many similar experiences and yet they are very different from me in terms of ideas and beliefs and even values. These are then reflected in the different drive we have to each do what we do and it is reflected in the different outlook we have of the world and our place in it.

It is fascinating to me, personally, but it is also, as it turns out, a key question that now impacts the societies we are in, the communities we build and the relationships we create. At a business level it reflects values and beliefs that drive actions which impact the world at large.

Like most writers I’ve spent much of my life mining my own curiosity and interests for subjects I am passionate about that have a wider-audience appeal. The pandemic showed us that when it comes to knowing how to behave, most of us rely on the outside world to tell us. We need contact, for instance, with family members, friends and co-workers in an established and clearly understood environment whose boundaries are familiar to us.

Take all that away (and the pandemic did just that) and we suddenly are not sure. The uncertainty we experience increases our sense of anxiety, anxiety induces stress. Stress, in turn, creates all sorts of cognitive and physiological problems for us. In plain English, we begin to malfunction.

Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully is my contribution on how to fix this, how to achieve optimum behavior at virtually every moment. If we manage to do that, there is nothing we cannot achieve as a result.

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GIVEAWAY:

David Amerland will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter. Good luck!

(All the Ups and Downs is not responsible for this giveaway, its entries, or the prize. Goddess Fish Promotions assumes all responsibility with this giveaway.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway