GR Publishing - Karen Gedig Burnett

Welcome to a book that can change your life. Choose Your Life: A Travel Guide for Living contains tips on how to view life, ways to handle difficulties, and tools to help increase your happiness. Ideas are presented in a simple and graphic manner easily understood by those who are young, yet the ideas are valuable to people of all ages.

So who am I and how did this book originate?

My name is Karen Gedig Burnett. I was an elementary school counselor for over 20 years. Fairly early in my career I started telling stories to help students learn about themselves and how to handle difficulties. I realized I had a talent for taking complex ideas and making them ‘seeable,’ and therefore easier to understand. Some of my stories became children’s books, and as of this date I have four published books dealing with life skills.

As my books were published I began speaking at other schools, sharing the messages contained in the stories. Although my primary audience was often elementary students, adults would invariably come forward with comments such as: “This helped me more than it helped my students (or child).” Or, “I needed to hear that. It will help me deal with....” Or, “I wish I had learned this when I was younger.” Or, “You should do something like this for adults.” One person even said, “I’ve been in therapy for six years, but you helped me more in one hour than [therapy did] in all that time.” So although I was often speaking to children, adults benefited from my messages as well. That’s when I realized that I needed to write this book.

Choose Your Life: A Travel Guide for Living is a compilation of ideas and approaches to life that I have learned, created, or revised to help make life easier. Some ideas were gleaned from others, some were developed when I first started creating programs at schools almost 30 years ago, and some of them were developed as this book evolved.

Choose Your Life will help in all phases and facets of life.

It’s for teens as they begin choosing their directions in life, but it’s also for adults as they continue making life-changing choices.

Although the book can help people facing major decisions, it’s primarily for everyone as we make daily choices that influence our life, as these small, daily decisions may lead to major decisions.

It can help parents as they guide their young children, or even as they deal with their grown-up children.

It can be used by families to read and discuss together.

Choose Your Life will help you better understand relationships with family, friends, co-workers, and even casual acquaintances. But mainly it will help you with the most important relationship of all—your relationship with yourself.

So read to help yourself. Read to help others. Read to guide the next generation.

Start at the beginning and read to the end, or just flip through until something catches your eye.

Write in the margins and date it. (Later you will be glad you did.) You will change through the years. Whether you go from 16 to 19 or 51 to 54, you will change. That’s what life is about: changing, learning, and growing.

This multi-generational book provides guidance for a lifetime.

You will embrace some ideas right away and see them as useful. Other ideas you will just skim over. Every time you read this book you will take something different from the suggestions. And you will find that the ideas you passed over at one time will provide much-needed guidance at another point in your life.

Throughout, you will learn to develop thoughts and attitudes that will help you choose the life you want and love the life you choose. I hope you have a wonderful journey.

Karen Gedig Burnett

Introduction