Description: How do you start and run a successful business despite the odds? This unique business guide teaches you practical - alongside emotional - intelligence and coping-skills that you need in order to overcome internal barriers to success no matter what type of business you are in.

Joe Biel draws on 26 years of business ownership and management experience to walk you through how to think like a business owner and keep your focus on what’s most important.

Dr. Faith G. Harper provides vital skills that aren’t often lauded in business books, such as communicating your boundaries, overcoming imposter syndrome, and more.

Verdict: Our brains are doing our best to help us out, but they can be real assholes sometimes. Sometimes it seems like your own brain is out to get you — melting down in the middle of the grocery store, picking fights with your date, getting you addicted to something, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments.

You already told your brain firmly that it isn’t good to do these things, but, of course, your brain has a mind of its own! That’s where this book comes in.

With humor, patience, and lots of swearing, both authors Joe Biel and Dr. Faith G. Harper shows you the science behind what’s going on in your skull and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately to the non-emergencies of everyday life.

If you’re working to deal with old traumas, depression, anxiety, anger, grief, or addiction, or if you just want to have a more measured and chill response to situations you face all the time, this book can help you put the pieces of the puzzle together and get your life and brain back.

Knowing what’s going on up in your brain is HUGE. So much of how we interact with the world around us is a completely normal response when we take into account our past experiences and how our brains work.

• Freaking the f*ck out
• Avoiding important shit we need to take care of
• Feeling pissed off all the time
• Being a dick to people we care about
• Putting shit in our bodies that we know isn’t good for us
• Doing shit we know is dumb or pointless

None of these things are f*cking helpful, but they all make sense. Your brain has adapted to the circumstances in your life and started doing things to protect you, bless it. It’s not TRYING to f*ck you over (even though it totally is, at times).

As we navigate the world, nasty shit happens. The brain stores info about the nasty shit to try to avoid it in the future. Sometimes these responses are helpful. Sometimes the responses become a bigger problem than the actual problem was. It’s called a trauma reaction.

And even if you aren’t dealing with a specific trauma? Adaptive coping strategies, bad habits, and funky behaviors all wire in similar ways. And research is showing that these issues are actually some of the easier ones to treat in therapy … if we address what’s really going on, rather than just the symptoms.

• Then we learn more about How to Make a Decision:

• What is my desired outcome?
• What is the simplest solution to achieve it? Is there an easier way?
• Does my idea work for everybody involved?
• Are the costs & consequences acceptable?
• What are the worst, best and likely outcomes? Can I manage them all?
• Does this decision cause harm to anyone I care about and/or our relationship?
• Does this decision take too much time and energy from the things I want and need to do?
• Could this decision cost more money than I can afford? Is there a cheaper way?
• DO IT!

In short, what this books does is take a deep dive into how to retrain your brain (and your sanity) to respond in ways that are much more helpful, calming, relaxing, understanding and soon thereafter responsively, and positively intuitive to not be so damn problematic in your day to day decision making.

Whether you be tip-toeing, at your own pace in these headachey waters, or have been diagnosed as a sufferer from mental health issues - or anything in-between - creating understanding and confidence within you is the first step to not only feeling better, but is a solid rock from which you then learn to combat such things as anxiety, depression, and trauma on your very own terms.

About the Authors - Joe Biel is a self-made autistic publisher and filmmaker who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock. He is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing and co-founder of the Portland Zine Symposium. He has been featured in Time Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Art of Autism, Utne Reader, Oregonian, Broken Pencil, Punk Planet, Bulletproof Radio, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), and Maximum Rocknroll. He is the author of People’s Guide to Publishing: Building a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business, Good Trouble: Building a Successful Life & Business on the Spectrum, Manspressions: Decoding Men’s Behavior, Make a Zine, The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting, Proud to be Retarded, Bicycle Culture Rising, and more.

He is the director of five feature films and hundreds of short films, including Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland, $100 & A T-Shirt, and the Groundswell film series. The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy described Biel as not trained in pedagogy. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Faith G. Harper, PhD, LPC-S, ACS, ACN is a bad-ass, funny lady with a PhD. She’s a licensed professional counselor, board supervisor, certified sexologist, and applied clinical nutritionist with a private practice and consulting business in San Antonio, TX. She has been an adjunct professor and a TEDx presenter, and proudly identifies as a woman of color and uppity intersectional feminist.

She is the author of the book Unf*ck Your Brain and many other popular zines and books on subjects such as anxiety, depression, and grief. She is available as a public speaker and for corporate and clinical trainings.

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