Title: Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Good Life
Author: Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler, 2012; 240 pages

I’ve long thought that conceptualized real estate decision-making — the intention and strategy that underlie our choice of location, mortgage, price point and property type — is the ultimate exercise in lifestyle design.

The place we live is inextricably intertwined with our relationships, our work and how we spend our leisure time, both impacting and being impacted by all these areas of our lives in innumerable ways, some of which we can’t even anticipate until the web of impacts have begun to be spun.

I’ve seen homebuying impact adult children’s relationships with their parents, when the son or daughter accepts a down payment “gift” that is given with many, unspoken strings attached. And I’ve seen a previously fearful homebuyer grow more assertive than ever before in pursuing the lifestyle of her dreams, starting a new business and traveling the globe, emboldened by her success at this complex, daunting transaction.

This web is why I so often encourage homebuyers to write out, journal or otherwise lay out their holistic vision of the life they want to live after they move into the home they are about to hunt for, before drilling down into the minutiae of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet.

And this web is beautifully detailed in the new, third edition of the international best-seller “Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Good Life” by professors and coaches Richard Leider and David Shapiro.

This is by no means a book about real estate; it is a book about how to compose and recompose a fulfilling, inspired and plain old “good” life, as often as you need to, throughout your lifetime. In fact, part of what is unique about “Repacking” is that the authors have written three editions of it over 20 years, and comment transparently throughout about how the philosophies, tools and systems contained in “Repacking” have evolved as they have lived their own “good life” journeys.

But Leider and Shapiro provide a succinct definition of what the good life is, and home is an essential element: “living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work, on purpose (emphasis added).”

The whole of “Repacking” is devoted to helping readers unpack and repack these four elemental “bags” that we all carry through life with a framework that helps us to carry no more and no less than what makes us happy at the various transition points in our lives where we crave to figure out what’s not working and course-correct.

“Repacking” guides readers through assessing where they stand and where they want to stand vis-à-vis each of the four “bags” — place, relationships, work and purpose — then offers dozens of stories to inspire any repacking that needs to take place, and dozens more tools to execute it. Here are a few of those tools:

1. Reboot. First-gen repackers were often prompted to rethink things by a midlife crisis; now, say Leider and Shapiro, people repack early and often, throughout their lives.

But our busyness makes it difficult to stop, seek and find meaning while we’re on the treadmill the authors call “hurry sickness — always going somewhere, never being anywhere …” They encourage readers to reboot their lives by taking a 12-hour media fast, consuming no TV, radio, Internet — not even using the phone — for half a day, instead devoting that time to consider some key questions about our relationships, our lives and our purpose.

The next step, for those who dare take it, is a 24-hour vacation from speaking. For both steps of their “reboot,” Leider and Shapiro offer “purpose points,” “core questions” and “repacking reflections” that readers should examine to take full advantage of these self-imposed time-outs.

2. Resharpen your growth edge. Unique to this edition is Leider and Shapiro’s repeated call to readers to reinvent and repack their bags, not just out of ennui, but in order to keep up with the rapid changes in the workforce and marketplace. They write, “[i]f the rate at which you’re learning is not equal to or greater than the rate of change today, you’ll soon be obsolete.”

The authors encourage readers to conceive of their personal development as just as essential to thriving as a company sees its research & development initiatives. Ideally, “Repacking” involves constantly exploring new opportunities and building new skills, always looking to learn something new that excites you.

3. Reframe. Leider and Shapiro urge readers to reality-check themselves on how they are “spending two of (their) most valuable currencies: (their) time and (their) money” by sitting down with their actual calendars and checkbooks and asking themselves how satisfied they are with where these resources are going. If you find yourself spending either on things you wouldn’t deem priorities, then it might be time to repack in one or more area(s) of your life.

Title: Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations
Author: Chris Berdik
Publisher: Current, 2012; 288 pages; $26.95

For hundreds of years, the intersections of our visions and our realities, our beliefs for the future and what actually comes to pass, the things we say and our state of affairs have long fascinated theorists and researchers in a strange mix and wide range of fields, from medicine to religion to sports performance.

Neuropsychologists now know that our brains fill in the blanks of our senses to create our perceptions. But the power of our expectations to craft our reality has tended, through the generations, to be perceived with skepticism, distrust and the imprimatur of gullibility at best and occult or demonic influence at worst.

Journalist Chris Berdik, in his new book, “Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations,” surfaces the history, science and anecdotes around the power of imagination, expectations, placebos and anticipation to create powerful conclusions, in order to leverage this power for good and avoid the pitfalls to which they render us susceptible.

Here are a few fundamental truths about the power of expectations that Berdik surfaces in “Mind Over Mind”:

1. “The expectations of want are more powerful than the here and now of liking.” The objects of our desire and the experience of desire itself are not, as we might think, the same thing, according to Berdik. Wanting more powerfully activates the brain’s reward system, which motivates us to work hard to achieve our goals, but can also snowball into extremes like addiction and compulsive behaviors.

What Berdik calls “too much wanting” holds the destructive potential to “blind us to dangers, diminish our performance, and make us work doggedly for what we don’t even like.”

Fortunately, if we work at the level of expectations, we can actually harness the power of expectations to promote our behavior-change efforts. For example, consciously linking our thoughts of spinach to expectations of health rather than just wrestling against our taste expectations of a Snickers bar is one way to manage our brains’ reward centers to further the behaviors we want to promote.

2. “The future is rosier than the past.” The fact that the brain is the most engaged and attentive when imagining happy future events, Berdik argues, accounts for homeowners’ optimism despite past market crashes — and optimism is, in fact, a primary and necessary driver of the economy.

Even after learning their true statistical likelihood of experiencing various traumas, research subjects were much more likely to correct their earlier forecasts of their own probability of everything from developing Alzheimer’s to having their car stolen if the hard numbers suggested they should be more optimistic.

While it’s tempting to try to seek ways to correct for this overoptimism, it is precisely this element of human nature that, over a lifetime, “keeps us moving, doing and propagating even though we know nothing lasts.”

3. “Having the right expectations about failure can be crucial to ultimate success.” Berdik relates the lifelong research of psychologist Carol Dweck, who contrasts those individuals who have a fixed mindset (the belief that “people are born with a certain mix of strengths and weakness”) with those who possess a growth mindset (the belief that “people define their abilities and limitations through effort”).

Because the growth mindset focuses on learning and sees failure as an opportunity to improve, children who failed but were lauded for their effort were much more likely to try again than kids who failed but had been praised for being smart. (In conversations with researchers, the latter group was much more likely to lie about their scores and ask about how other kids scored than the kids who had been instilled with a growth mindset who were more likely to flat-out ask researchers for the tips to solve the problem they’d been given.)

Berdik cites this phenomenon as partially responsible for the failure of increases to self-esteem to create increased academic performance. In reality, he writes, “[h]igh self-esteem makes us overestimate the role our talents and intelligence play in our accomplishments [and can] disrupt the balance between our expectations for success and our ability to achieve it.” Rather, Berdik says, the beneficial sort of self-esteem we should be instilling in our children and promoting in ourselves “isn’t focused on who [we] are but on who [we] may become.”

Title: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
Author: Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney
Publisher: Penguin, 2012; 304 pages

When I sat down to read the latest book from research psychologist Roy Baumeister and New York Times science writer John Tierney, “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” I thought I’d read it in the context of what the rest of the world was thinking and saying on the subject.

In my own lifetime, I reflected, I had seen a vast spectrum of thought on the topic, from my dad’s U.S. Marine Corps-influenced tendency to set and reach goals with little more than willpower, to my generation’s Oprah-influenced tendency to believe that willpower might not even be a thing, so to speak.

So, as I’m wont to do with all essential and existential stalemates needing breaking, I Googled it. What is most telling is not so much what the research said, but what Google used to auto-fill my search. I typed the word “willpower” and Google suggested the following searches:

• willpower doesn’t exist (~191,000,000 results).
• willpower doesn’t work (~6,770,000 results).

Upon digging into “Willpower,” it became crystal clear that the book’s authors were also aware of this debate; the Introduction actually tracks the history of willpower — aka self-control in the face of desire — from the Middle Ages through the Information Age.

The authors also started their inquiries into willpower somewhat dubious about its existence, but ended up as champions of what they deem the most pivotal, controllable element for making our lives happy after years of original research and analysis of source material ranging from Henry Stanley’s diaries of self-discipline in the heart of the jungles of 19th-century Africa (while his colleagues gave into a bizarre array of human lusts, from food to violence and all points in between) to Drew Carey’s ongoing — victorious! — battles with his office clutter and daily to-do lists.

“Willpower” relates their findings and synthesizes them into entertaining, entirely usable insights we can all use to drive our own “productivity,” “fulfillment” and “happiness.” This book is uber-educational, serious, funny and fascinating all at once. Baumeister and Tierney cover everything from how and why to be an effective, efficient goal-setter, dieter and self-scientist to how and why to raise children who have self-control, versus self-esteem.

But one of the most actionable, powerful sections of “Willpower” is the chapter that focuses on dozens of studies that have found that the “power” ingredient of willpower is largely glucose, which appears to fuel our brains’ ability to control our impulses. The chapter then translates these findings into a set of action items for boosting our own willpower, whether we’re trying to save money, spend less, eat less or otherwise exercise more self-discipline. Here are a few of those steps:

1. “Feed the beast.” The upshot of this provocative-sounding mandate is this: Don’t make decisions, argue or try to solve major problems on an empty stomach. Calorie counting is also a setup for failure when you’re trying to change major habits, like quitting smoking. In fact, studies cited by the authors found that smokers trying to quit who took extra sugar along with other smoking cessation therapies had more success than their peers.

2. “Sugar works in the lab, not in your diet,” so “go for the slow burn.” In the lab, researchers give subjects actual tablets of sugar. In real life, though, eating junk foods and sugary things spikes your blood sugar and shortly leads to a feeling of depletion that actually make efforts to control yourself and your emotions much more difficult. Our bodies convert most foods into glucose, but things with a low glycemic index, like veggies, nuts, raw fruits, fish and olive oils, are very slow to be converted into glucose, so they fuel your body, your brain and your willpower for a longer, more sustained period of time than starchy carbohydrates and sweets.

3. “When you’re sick, save your glucose for your immune system.” Baumeister and Tierney point to this stunning truth: “Driving a car with a bad cold has been found to be even more dangerous than driving when mildly intoxicated.” Yikes! They then post this question: “[i]f you’re too glucose-deprived to do something as simple as driving a car, how much use are you going to be in the office (assuming you make it there safely)?”

In any event, the authors advise, when you’re under the weather, avoid making big decisions, trying to exert “peak performance” or putting your self-control to the test.

4. “When you’re tired, sleep.” When we rest, the authors teach, our body’s flucose demands decline and our ability to use our blood glucose ticks up; as well, when we’re deprived of sleep, our glucose processing power declines and our self-control can decline, immediately.

If you’re buying a home (or anything else, for that matter), it might be best to make your final offer price decision after dinner and a nap!