Having a Good Day in 2025

Many academics read constantly to keep up — or, at best — to lead in their fields. As important and invigorating as this reading can be, it comes with an opportunity cost: what aren’t you reading instead?

In this new year, with a new series of Faculty Advancement posts, I will introduce readers to a genre of literature that many academics never get exposed to in their educational or professional formation. Let’s refer to these as “personal and professional development books.” The best of these include a range of titles that are well-known to professional coaches and lay readers — typically outside academia — who take the notion of personal growth seriously, and who seek to develop their talents and strengths across all contexts — at work, within their respective communities, and even at home.

As a professional coach who spends hours each week helping people hone their unique talents and strengths, I’m obviously a personal development geek. Not everybody finds this stuff interesting. Some may be intrigued, but also wary of anything that smacks of a “self-help” book — you know, the stuff they sell in airport bookstores. Perhaps at one point, say during a layover on your way to a conference, you glanced through a few, only to be put off by corporate-sounding jargon (“building your personal brand!”), new-age fluff (“living your best life!”), unrelatable case studies (“Sara was a high-flying CEO”…) or simply cringe-worthy writing.

Yes, there’s a lot of dross out there. This little series, however, will highlight titles that are soundly-researched, produced by respectable publishers, and most importantly, written by extremely smart people, many of whom are academics in their own right. They are books that I frequently recommend, and ones that faculty tell me, time and again, that they find helpful. These books cover many different areas of professional growth, and the one I’ve chosen to lead this series presents a big-picture view of personal and professional flourishing, broken down into many small, intentional and evidence-based practices we might choose to adopt.

“How To Have a Good Day,” by executive coach Caroline Webb, reminds us of two things we tend to forget: 1) we have more control over “having a good day” than we think; and 2) small, gradual actions, taken consistently and over time, can lead to significant personal and professional transformations. These two themes unify seven thematic components of the book: priorities; productivity; relationships; thinking; influence; resilience; energy.

Even without picking up the book, you might find it valuable to reflect on these seven themes. Chances are that there’s an area or two you rarely, if ever, think about. For example, people may seek out someone like me to help them with their professional advancement, but it may have never occurred to them that inattention to relationship-building may be holding them back. Or perhaps they’re keen to be “more productive,” but haven’t taken the time to consider what all that productivity should be for (i.e., priorities”). Or, when do you do your best thinking? What are the conditions that help you to think your best? How can you create those conditions, intentionally and systematically? What would be possible if you could do that?

“How To Have a Good Day” weighs in at 360 pages, but it’s also the type of book that you don’t need to read from cover to cover. A section that I most often recommend is “Priorities,” on the value of setting clear intentions and goals for each day. How many of us wake up in reactivity mode, in thrall to the alarm clock, the whining dog, the kids, the lunchboxes and whatever we might have missed overnight in the 24/7 news cycle playing out on our phones? What would be different if you could spend even ten minutes each morning clarifying how you want to spend the day (intention), and what you most want to accomplish (goals)?

The other section I most often recommend addresses a question that gets increasingly vexing for academics as they advance in their careers: how to say no without harming your professional or personal relationships. In “Productivity,” Webb introduces us to an evidence-based strategy developed by William Ury, of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, called the “positive no.” What is a positive no? I’ll leave it to you to find out. The book is available, by the way, online and for free through Duke Libraries! Happy reading and let me know what you think.