By Abby Hardison
Rowan County Public Library

Starting this fall, Rowan Public Library is providing access to exciting and free author talks you can watch live or you can enjoy the recorded video afterwards at your convenience. This slate of author talks provides an incredible variety including bestselling and award-winning authors in fiction and nonfiction. The nonfiction author talks, specifically, provide a wealth of wisdom on topics ranging from productivity and stress-reduction, but also increasing your professional impact and parenting for the new and evolving world in which we live. To access the list of upcoming and past author talks, type bit.ly/RPLVirtualAuthorTalks into the address bar of any web browser.

Dr. Michele Borba is a renowned educational psychologist who has published several successful parenting guides, and her latest, “Raising Thrivers: Surprising Reasons Why Some Kids Struggle and Others Shine” is exceptionally thoughtful and comprehensive. By cultivating traits like confidence, empathy, self-control and curiosity, children can learn how to handle stress, minimize anxiety and build healthy and lasting relationships and careers. Borba focuses on evidence-based research and provides easy steps and tools to help children, from toddlers to teenagers, develop the traits that will support successful and happy adulthood in an ever-changing world.

For those adults out there interested in managing stress and maximizing productivity, New York Times best-selling author David Allen was featured on July 14 and discussed his book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity.” A popular consultant in management circles, Allen has spent decades analyzing the techniques and thought processes of productivity. With so many bits of information, questions, and distractions in today’s world, Allen’s system creates a process of organizing life’s demands into actionable steps that encourage movement of this mental clutter into an organized system. The key is to place this system outside of people’s overwhelmed brains and into a to do list, a planner, a digital calendar, or whatever external resource works best.  One of Allen’s signature concepts is “the 2-minute rule” which dictates that when you realize you need to do something and you can complete it right then and there in less then 2 minutes, then just go ahead and do it. This is more beneficial than adding another item to the ever-growing To Do list.

For anyone interested in accessing these archived author talks or attending ones coming up this fall, be sure to check out the list of past and future events. Library cardholders can also reserve many of these authors’ books at any RPL branch or access the ebooks and eAudiobooks though the Libby app. On Oct. 13 at 4 p.m., clinical psychologist Dr. Aziz Gazipura will be discussing his book “Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty.” Just visit bit.ly/RPLVirtualAuthorTalks and add self-improvement to your “completed” to do list!

Abby Hardison is adult services supervisor at Rowan Public Library.