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Rise in Courage
In Aimed & Ready, you emphasize that the seasons of delay, silence, loss, and backward movement can actually be forms of divine preparation. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wrote this book to address a need I kept seeing in people’s lives. Many Christians know how to celebrate seasons of success, blessing, and prosperity, but often lack a framework for navigating hardship, uncertainty, delay, and disappointment. Over the past six months, this burden grew strongly in my heart, and I felt compelled to put into words the hope and perspective people need during difficult seasons.
The core message of the book is that when life doesn’t make sense, there is still purpose, hope, and destiny available when we choose to trust God and surrender our struggles to Him. Rather than seeing trials as endings, I want readers to recognize that something beautiful may be forming just beyond the present challenge.
I also wanted to provide prophetic encouragement by exploring the emotions people experience in seasons of stretching, waiting, discomfort, and shaking. The book not only acknowledges those feelings but also offers insight into why we experience them and how we can respond in faith.
One of the key metaphors I use is that of an archer pulling back an arrow. The Archer’s aim is never careless. Although the pressure of being pulled back can feel intense, it is actually preparation for forward movement. In the same way, I believe God often uses seasons of tension to position us for growth, blessing, and His greater purpose.
Ultimately, the book challenges readers to rise in courage, break limiting mindsets, and step confidently into God’s calling. I want people to understand that their trials can transform them and become a powerful testimony of God’s faithfulness.
When did the bow-and-arrow metaphor first come to you, and why did it feel central?
The book really began with one simple thought: your pullback is a setup for your comeback. That idea immediately gave me the picture of an archer with a bow fully drawn back. What feels like strain is often actually alignment, and what looks like a setback may be God positioning you for greater impact.
In a world where many people feel like targets, I wanted to remind readers that God didn’t create them to be victims of circumstance—He crafted them to be the arrow. Sometimes the pullback isn’t the end of the story; it’s the beginning of something greater. That’s why the bow-and-arrow metaphor felt so powerful and fitting for this message.
A major theme in the book is surrender. In God’s Kingdom, surrender is never defeat. In His hands, surrender becomes strength, stability, and precision. It allows your life to go farther than human effort alone ever could. Many people think surrender means losing control or identity, but I believe the opposite is true—it places your life in the hands of Someone who knows you completely and sees further than you can see.
Just as an archer never draws back an arrow without intention, God never allows seasons of waiting, silence, or tension without purpose. He sees the obstacles, opportunities, and timing that we often cannot. Sometimes what feels like delay is really a divine reset to align our trajectory with His greater vision.
Ultimately, the message of the book is that every arrow finds its meaning when it yields to the Archer. When we surrender to God, our lives can move with greater clarity, purpose, and precision toward the calling He has set before us. This book, along with its devotional workbook, is designed to help readers grow stronger in the tension, realign with Heaven’s purpose, and step confidently into their God-given destiny.
How can readers tell the difference between spiritual stillness and spiritual distance?
One of the key messages I wanted to communicate is that trust in God must always be the foundation of faith. There are seasons when God can feel distant, but often that sense of distance comes because something is clouding our perspective, or because the answer we’re looking for is not yet visible. It doesn’t mean God has moved away.
I also talk about stillness, because stillness is not the absence of God. I describe it as a holy hush—an intentional choice to silence the noise around us so we can hear, see, and discern what God is doing in that moment. Rather than being empty, stillness can become a place of deep intimacy with Him.
When people feel distance from God, they often assume He is far away or hard to reach. But that is never His heart. God desires closeness and a relationship with His people. Scripture asks, What can separate us from the love of God? and the answer is clear: nothing.
So any feeling of separation is not a truth we should accept, but often a perception shaped by fear, disappointment, or misunderstanding. The reality is that God remains near, loving, and fully present—even in the quiet seasons. My hope is that readers come to see silence not as abandonment, but as an invitation into deeper trust and intimacy with Him.
How do you respond to readers who feel that their pain has no visible outcome?
One of the important truths I explore in the book is that while difficult seasons can feel confusing and unclear, we must be careful not to let that drift into fatalism or hopelessness. Just because we cannot see the outcome doesn’t mean there is no purpose or direction. Often, it simply means the perspective belongs to Someone greater than us. As I say in the book, the archer sees what the arrow cannot yet perceive.
That perspective changes how we view our battles. What looks like an obstacle may actually be the very thing God uses to launch us into what He has already prepared. Your Goliath may not be there to destroy you—it may be the catapult into your next season of purpose and victory. That’s why I encourage readers not to be afraid, but to trust God completely, because true breakthrough happens when His power is behind what He has placed in your hand.
My prayer is that this book would saturate people with faith and hope, bring their hearts into alignment with God, and strengthen their confidence in His purpose. If someone is in a season of waiting, stretching, or feeling hidden, I believe this message can be a real lifeline. It is designed to help readers rest again, realign with God’s perspective, and trust His heart in a fresh way.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Nico Smit | Amazon
With prophetic insight and pastoral clarity, Nico Smit reframes seasons of tension, delay, and apparent retreat-not as disqualification, but as divine preparation. Drawing from a powerful vision of a bow drawn tight and an arrow held under pressure, ‘Aimed & Ready’ reveals a profound truth: what feels like strain is often alignment, and what looks like setback may be God positioning you for greater impact.
This powerful cutting-edge prophetic book speaks to those who feel buried, forgotten, or off-track, reminding them that God does not waste His arrows. The pullback is not punishment-it is precision. The pressure is not abandonment-it is proof of purpose.
With prophetic revelation, biblical insight, and hope-filled exhortation, these pages restore faith for the waiting, courage for the weary, and vision for those standing between promise and fulfillment.
You are not retreating. You are being aligned, sharpened, and prepared. ‘Aimed & Ready’ will restore your perspective and strengthen your faith.
Will you let God aim you?
If your answer is yes, your comeback has already begun.
FOREWORD by Stacey Campbell
This book also has a Devotional Workbook available on Amazon.
Professional Endorsements by: Gary Heyes, Ryan Laubscher, Chelsea Hagen, Elaine Tavolacci, Joshua Sawiris, Ada Boland and Melvain Donyes
Boost Mental Health
Healthy Relationships presents a thoughtful and approachable exploration of what helps relationships thrive, walking readers through the core ingredients of healthy connection, communication, boundaries, empathy, responsibility, and self-awareness. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Mental health is an important subject for me especially because I work as an inpatient psychiatric nurse. We all could use more help with our journey to stable mental well-being, including myself. I learn things from every Nurse Dorothea® book I write. We plan to produce about 80 Nurse Dorothea® books (currently there are 15 as of April 2026), so it was time to cover this topic.
Relationships are complex, and I appreciate that you covered friendships, family ties, romantic partnerships, and online relationships. How did you approach writing about such a diverse topic, but still presenting meaningful information without being overwhelming?
I practice the skill of synthesis of reading a lot of research-based information and combining it all to create a thorough product. The Nurse Dorothea® books are much harder for me to write than the Nurse Florence® series since I am combining information from many different source documents.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
There were many, but one important one discussed by Harvard Health was how a variety of relationships can help boost mental health.
What is the next book in the Nurse Dorothea series that you are working on?
One of the next books to be published is Schizophrenia. We need to play our part to destigmatize mental illness just as Dorothea Dix did in the 1800s.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
If society wants something we have never had, we’re going to have to do something that has never been done.
Mindfulness Is For Everyone
Nurse Dorothea Presents Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Why Mindfulness Is a Key Coping Skill guides readers through the basics of mental health, the meaning of mindfulness, and the many ways it can improve daily life. Why is mindfulness important?
Mindfulness is something everyone can do, and its effects are large on mental health. Research has proven its ability to reduce stress and anxiety. In today’s world, we all need simple ways to reduce stress.
With a mix of friendly explanations, real research, and simple activities, your book also covers Jon Kabat-Zinn’s nine pillars of mindfulness and the three main practices: meditation, body scanning, and mindful yoga. What are the nine pillars of mindfulness, and how do they help improve mental health?
Non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, gratitude, and generosity. Practicing each one by itself can improve mental health, but when practiced many at one time, the synergistic effects are large and can result in more mental peace.
What should readers do to start incorporating mindfulness practices into their daily lives?
The easiest exercise is to focus on your breathing and let everything else in your mind go so that your breathe is the only thing at your attention.
What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Nurse Dorothea Presents Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Why Mindfulness Is a Key Coping Skill?
I hope people become convinced of the usefulness of the practice of mindfulness and actually incorporate into their daily life.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Video Contest | Animated Video Book 11 | Other Projects | Interview about Project | LinkedIn
We are starting the process of removing stigma about mental health issues. Let’s share ideas of the journey to well-being and seek to understand others as they are instead of how we wish them to be. By learning to know ourselves and trying different coping skills that are specific to the situation that we find ourselves in, we can achieve balance and peace. As we deepen our self-awareness and harness tailored coping mechanisms for diverse situations, we pave the path to equilibrium and serenity. Let’s foster an environment conducive to both individual and collective growth within our society. By doing this, we unlock potentials previously unattainable, empowering us to fully cultivate our knowledge, skills, and abilities. With gratitude in our heart, peace in our mind, and confidence in our capabilities, we can face the future with bravery, courage, and determination to help make the best lives for ourselves and others that we possibly can. If society wants something we have never had, we’re going to have to do something that has never been done. Dow Creative Enterprises® Help Civilization Reach Its Potential® Ages: Puberty to 99+
Finding Our Voice: A Story of Leadership in Crisis and the American Spirit Abroad
Finding Our Voice is part memoir, part leadership manifesto, part archive of speeches delivered while Adam Castillo led AMCHAM Myanmar through coup, sanctions, economic collapse, and disaster. What gives it shape is his “Three Acts of Leadership” model, moving from proving competence, to enduring pressure, to offering people a reason to believe, but what gives it pulse is the lived texture around that framework: the ex-Marine who washes up in Myanmar half-broken, builds a company from a couch he still keeps, stays when others evacuate, and tries to turn a frightened business community into something like a moral community. The book’s range is wider than its premise suggests. It moves from Marine Corps formation and post-service disillusionment to chamber politics, hotel ballroom speeches, a refugee’s testimony, and earthquake relief work, always circling the same core conviction that jobs, dignity, and belief matter most when history gets ugly.
What I admired most is that Castillo writes with the urgency of someone who feels he has earned the right to be emphatic. The book has a driving, spoken quality. You can hear the podium in it. But even when it swells toward rhetoric, it rarely feels bloodless. I kept thinking about the small, disarming details that save it from abstraction: that battered couch doubling as bed, desk, and command post, the local hires he treats not as placeholders but as future leaders, the image of him in the black Ford Ranger navigating Yangon during the coup, and later the surreal electricity of a July Fourth event where children wave little American flags, “Wild Thing” blasts, and the room tilts from ceremony into something like collective release. Those moments give the book warmth and grain. They make the ideas legible because they show what belief looked like on the ground.
I also found the book more interesting and more affecting when it let its certainty crack a little. Castillo is plainly a man of strong opinions, especially about sanctions, American power, the failures of institutions, and the obligations of leadership. At times, that forcefulness veers into self-mythologizing, and there are stretches where the prose presses so hard on its own importance that I wanted more room for complexity. Still, the book earns much of its moral intensity.
The inclusion of the Burmese refugee’s testimony deepens the narrative by shifting the lens away from Castillo’s own heroism and toward the human consequences of policy and abandonment. Likewise, the later sections on the earthquake and the Rebuild Fund, with their focus on water points, latrines, health workers, blocked transfers, and practical relief, pull the book back from grand theory into the stubborn world of actual need. I didn’t agree with every conclusion, but I never felt the ideas were merely posed. They’ve been lived in, argued through, and paid for.
I found Finding Our Voice uneven in the way many deeply personal books are, but never inert, never timid, and often genuinely stirring. Its best passages carry real heat, and its best insight is a simple one: leadership in crisis is less about charisma than stamina, witness, and the ability to make people feel they still count. I’d recommend it to readers interested in memoirs of service after military life, leadership under pressure, Myanmar, or the uneasy border where commerce, politics, and conscience meet. I finished it feeling that Castillo’s conviction gives the book its force.
Pages: 300 | ISBN : 978-1544551630
The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust
Michael Oana’s The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust is a book about replacing transaction with relationship. Its argument is plain but surprisingly elastic: advisors grow not chiefly by proving they’re clever with money, but by becoming memorable, reassuring, and human in the lives of their clients. Oana builds that case through a stream of stories and operating principles, moving from the broad claim that “you don’t sell money, you sell clarity” into a hands-on system of client events, follow-up rhythms, branded touchpoints like his “Toucan 180° Review,” and practical recovery plans for when things go sideways. The book keeps circling one conviction with real persistence: people remember how you made them feel, and that feeling, if tended well, becomes trust, loyalty, referrals, and eventually business.
This is a field manual written by someone who’s spent decades watching rooms, moods, timing, and human nerves. I found that directness refreshing. Oana is best when he’s concrete: the failed Christmas party that drew four people, the rebound chocolate tasting that packed the room, the zoo event that worked because it was thoughtful rather than lavish, the absurdly specific and oddly charming “529 College Night” with its 5:29 timing and ramen bar. Those examples give the book texture. They also save it from the bloodless professionalism that often drains books in this category. The book’s central insight arrives early and then echoes, in slightly different keys, for much of the read. Because the voice is earnest and the examples are authentic, I found myself staying with it.
I think Oana is absolutely right that trust is built socially and emotionally, not just analytically. His best pages understand that money conversations are freighted with shame, fear, pride, grief, and hope, and that an advisor often functions less like a technician than a guide through vulnerable seasons of life. I was especially struck by the way the book treats follow-up not as admin but as moral evidence. The eclipse event at the ballpark, the golf simulator evening that became meaningful only in the days after, even the movie screening interrupted by a family death all reinforce the same point: the real test is not whether an event sparkles, but whether care continues after the room empties.
The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Building Trust is a sincere, useful, and more emotionally intelligent book than its niche premise first suggests. It understands something many business books miss: trust is atmospheric before it is procedural. I wouldn’t recommend it to every reader, but I would recommend it to financial advisors, relationship-driven professionals, and small business owners who want to think more deeply about how care is expressed in practice, not just promised in branding. It’s a practical book with a surprisingly human pulse.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0GGTKC8TX
M.B.A. Discover The Truth About Leadership
D.M. Christensen’s MBA: Discover the Truth About Leadership is a satirical broadside against the credential economy, the mystique of leadership language, and the institutional habit of confusing polish with substance. Beneath the provocation and the barbed humor, the book argues something fairly simple and fairly serious: degrees don’t guarantee competence, leadership isn’t a title or a seminar, and most organizations limp along by rewarding visibility, confidence, and bureaucracy instead of clarity, judgment, and responsibility. The book moves from lampooning MBA prestige and the absurd theater of higher education to a more forceful case for self-education, systems thinking, and the hard, unglamorous discipline of actually getting better.
I found the book unexpectedly effective because it doesn’t just sneer from a distance. The funniest passages are often the ones with real irritation underneath them, and that gives the book a pulse. The early MBA classroom anecdote, where Christensen punctures the room’s reverence for the degree by calling it a checkbox, sets the tone beautifully. So does the ridiculous, self-incriminating toilet paper chapter, which should be a throwaway gag and somehow becomes a warped little mission statement about honesty, bloat, and educational fraud. I laughed quite a bit, but I also felt the author’s exhaustion with systems that charge enormous sums for status, then hand back jargon, debt, and a professionally laminated illusion. That emotional current keeps the book from feeling glib. It feels annoyed in a way I recognized.
What I liked most were the ideas that survive after the jokes. Christensen is strongest when he writes about competence, clarity, and systems: the claim that schools teach compliance more readily than independent thought, that organizations promote confidence over ability, that teams often diffuse responsibility instead of sharpening it, and that broken systems can exhaust even good people while heroics merely hide structural failure. Some arguments are deliberately overstated, and the repeated contempt for institutional language can become blunt. Still, I admired the book’s nerve. It has the courage to say simple things that many management books spend 250 polite pages avoiding. When Christensen writes that clarity is dangerous because it exposes competence, or that leadership is proven rather than granted, the book stops being merely funny and becomes bracingly clear.
I came away thinking this is a messy, funny, sharp-edged book with more substance than its gleefully unserious surface first suggests. It’s not elegant in the polished, buttoned-up sense. But it’s lively, candid, and often piercingly right about the emptiness of modern leadership posturing and the cost of mistaking credentials for capability. I’d recommend it to readers who are skeptical of business-school mythology, weary of corporate theater, or hungry for a management book that sounds like a human being rather than a committee.
Pages: 271 | ASIN : B0GDQJDDRM
Aimed & Ready
I found Aimed & Ready to be a spiritually focused book about how seasons of delay, silence, loss, and apparent backward movement can actually be forms of divine preparation. Author Nico Smit’s central image is the bow and arrow: the life that feels pulled back is not abandoned, but being aimed. From there, he builds a sustained meditation on surrender, waiting, spiritual alignment, and eventual release, moving through ideas like the “holy hush,” the reset that becomes a re-aim, David’s devastation at Ziklag, and the insistence that hope is not sentimental optimism but evidence that God is still at work. It’s a book written for readers who feel stalled and bruised, and it keeps returning to the same steady conviction that what looks like burial may be the first stage of resurrection.
What stayed with me most was the emotional steadiness of the book. Smit writes with the urgency of a preacher, but also with a pastoral tenderness that keeps the message from feeling harsh or abstract. I liked the way he lingers over images until they start to feel lived in. The bare fruit tree, the buried seed, the rowers facing one way while still moving forward, the ruined city of Ziklag, all of it feeds the same argument from slightly different angles, and that repetition gives the book a kind of devotional pulse. At its best, the writing has real lift. There are passages that feel genuinely bracing, especially when he reframes pressure as alignment and refuses the easy language of defeat. I also appreciated that he opens by reminding readers that this book is not Scripture and shouldn’t replace Scripture. That note of humility matters, and it gives the book a better spiritual proportion than it might otherwise have had.
Smit is so committed to the pullback/comeback framework that nearly everything gets absorbed into it. For readers already attuned to prophetic Christian language, that will probably feel clarifying and consoling. I admired the conviction. The prose can also swell into exhortation. Still, even when I felt the book pressing too insistently on one note, I couldn’t deny the sincerity behind it. Smit clearly believes these ideas down to the bone, and that kind of belief gives the book warmth, gravity, and a persuasive emotional center.
The book gives discouragement a shape people can actually work with. Smit turns spiritual exhaustion into something legible through the bow-and-arrow metaphor, the “holy hush,” and the Ziklag section, so a reader in a hard season can feel less lost inside their own experience. A lot of encouraging books tell you to hold on, but this one tries to explain what holding on feels like from the inside. I think that interpretive quality is one of its real strengths.
I found Aimed & Ready earnest, vivid, and often moving. It’s a book that wants to steady the heart, reframe suffering, and call the reader back into trust. I’d especially recommend it to Christians who are living through a season of disappointment, transition, spiritual fatigue, or long waiting, and to readers who respond to devotional writing that leans on metaphor, exhortation, and hope. For the right reader, this will feel less like a lecture than a hand at the shoulder, firm, warm, and convinced that the story isn’t over yet.
Pages: 168 | ASIN : B0GK9NMGRY
Emotional & Intuitive
Sacred Geometry for Healing presents a collection of mandalas devoted to the deeply renewing experience of meditation. Why was this an important book for you to write?
The intention of Sacred Geometry for Healing began as the expression of myself as an artist. My goal as an artist was to find my essence, my true nature, and I began to discover myself as a mandala artist. My spirit would move me, and I would create mandalas with the synchronicity of numbers, 4 – 6 – 8 – 12 – 24 (sacred geometry), and so on. As my artwork manifested, I began to hand tool the mandalas in copper. A process known as copper repoussé. Copper is a healer and spiritual conductor. I presented my work in galleries and art shows and co-founded an art gallery collective.
Many, many beautiful mandalas were too intricate to tool in copper as 18 or 24 intricacies in the circle. And that emotionally pained me that they were being left behind. In 2019, when the gallery I was managing was closed temporarily due to the pandemic, the mandalas left behind began to call to me! I realized they were destined to be compiled into a book & Sacred Geometry for Healing: Art on a Mission was born and published!
My mission was to help healing through the observation of art. To create my book to facilitate the practice of deeply viewing and concentrating (meditating) on each of my artworks and their deep collective subconscious and consciously titled meaning. And thus instigating a way for the viewer to receive healing. This was a concept I evolved in sympathy with the tradition that relates mandalas with meditation in different aspects. From 2019 to 2025, a little knock in my solar plexus would keep telling me my book was unfinished. In 2025, after expanding the narrative and republishing my memoir, I had a revelation. Mantras! Mantras were speaking inside me to be written as corresponding healers in synchronicity with the visual and title meanings of each mandala in the original edition. 51 mantras flowed from me next to each mandala, and I knew the entire truth of my artist’s healing mission had come to fruition – Sacred Geometry for Healing: MANTRAS AND MANDALAS FOR MEDITATION.
How do you hope readers engage with the imagery—analytically, emotionally, or intuitively?
My approach to the creation of sacred geometry mandalas was natural, emotional & intuitive. The artworks manifested from me and spoke to me. After I created them, I felt their meaning as if they were communicating to me, and titled each work as I discovered its embodied meaning. They came from a deep connection with nature and creation. I feel the natural connection for the viewer is personal, and I hope each mandala conveys a universally accessible experience, whether by emotion, intuition, or analysis.
Do you see sacred geometry as something rooted in belief, or as something that can be experienced regardless of belief?
I see sacred geometry as something we experience every day naturally in nature, as a seashell or a snowflake. My mandalas, I hope, feel natural and accessible to everyone as nature is to all humanity, regardless of our individuality, beliefs, etcetera.
If a reader takes just one thing from this book, what do you hope it is?
I hope each reader receives something personal, as an artist feels when their art is viewed at an exhibit. I hope they are moved and receive from experiencing my artworks, deep meanings, and personal mantra expressions. And can relate them for themselves in any way they choose.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
Mantras and Mandalas Guide for Meditations – Each mandala in this book has a universal and personal meaning. Each title and aura blue print image embodies the spirit of what has been experienced in the collective consciousness of human experience, connecting to the divine. As god experiences, we experience.
Choose your mandala for the moment by either concentrating and opening the book and finding your spirit guided selection or browse the titles and choose what resonates with your heart at the moment. Remember you are not alone, what you are facing and experiencing from joy to despair has been faced by those who came before you and by those that are here with you now. Focus your meditation on your selected mandala and read the corresponding mantra. You can repeat it out loud during you meditation or remain silent.
“The artworks are resonating as a blueprint of human – god emotions and you
can feel the unseen universal – the sacred geometry blueprint of life experience.”
Bio- Originally upon graduation with a BFA in dance and choreography—I was a member of two contemporary dance companies and a producer for a cable tv station, before I was isolated from the world. Upon my return a decade ago, I am now an accomplished artist in galleries and shows. I am a member of an artists association and am the co-founder of an art gallery collective.
Adria: The Artist.
