CAREER BREAK COMPASS

A game plan for slowing down and taking breaks in a busy world.

In her nonfiction debut, entrepreneur Nguyen urges her readers to stop, take stock, and give themselves a break now and then. “If you’ve been beating yourself up most of your life, ask yourself this: What if you approached it differently?” she asks. “What if you gave yourself permission to be where you are, right now?” In these pages, she lays out several approaches to building self-esteem and relaxing the constant pressure of our internal critics, advising her readers to identify their own strengths and weaknesses in order to create a “North Star statement” for their lives that will reflect their own core values. In the face of modern society’s increasing demand for nonstop productivity, she advocates self-care and career breaks to help reset. The author herself left a high-pressure corporate job, and she relates stories of others who’ve taken much-needed breaks. “I see you,” she writes to such people. “You laugh off the memes of corporate America, of exhaustion and the cats clicking away at their computers … and slowly it all erodes your spirit and your soul.” In a series of well-designed and fast-paced chapters (complete with bullet-pointed “bite-size breaks”), Nguyen lays out an array of tactics designed to reclaim inner peace. She’s unfailingly upbeat and realistic, particularly when it comes to her advocacy of meditation; the author approaches this subject with plenty of experience-born advice for newcomers to the practice, assuring them that “depending on what you need and how much time you have, there is a conscious breathwork technique that can work for you.” She also champions such common sense measures as getting plenty of good regular sleep, reading fun books, learning a musical instrument, and cooking healthy meals—a broad enough spectrum to win over a great many overworked readers.

A sweeping and empathetic call for people to teach themselves how to relax.