“Rewire your brain for happiness and success. It can take just 5 minutes a day, according to neuroscience. Think about driving a car, where you look- is where you go. Like the car our mind goes where we focus, visualizing is essentially steering our brain. If you are driving down the road and your focus is off to the side for too long, you will crash! In fact, research shows that our brain can’t tell the difference between a memory or a vision of the future… remember when you visualize what you do want you spend less time focusing on what you don’t want. This should build mental muscle memory and strengthen neural pathways. It’s like building a road that makes it easier to travel each time you need to go that way. You’re essentially telling your brain which way to go and it gets comfortable thinking of positive possibilities. Give yourself a positive direction, your brain will love it! And you will be co-creating (you and God) a more positive amazing life.”
– an excerpt from the book
ARPress is honored to publish Thrive! (In Your Relationship with Yourself and Others) by Janet Zitting Broadbent, illustrated by Maeve Miesner. This book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARPress website.
In a world that constantly pushes us to hustle harder, smile wider, and pretend everything’s fine, Thrive! by Janet Zitting Broadbent presents a radical alternative: honesty, healing, and real human connection. This isn’t your typical self-help manual, it’s a deeply relatable, refreshingly unfiltered guide for navigating the emotional chaos of modern life. From trauma and anxiety to boundaries, self-worth, and the awkwardness of saying “no,” Janet tackles the stuff we all deal with but rarely talk about. With humor, heart, and straight-up truth, Thrive! helps us unpack the emotional baggage we carry and gives us the tools to live with more courage, clarity, and authenticity in a culture obsessed with appearances. If you’re ready to stop performing and start truly living, this book is your permission slip.
With a deep passion for emotional wellness and relationship-building, Janet Zitting Broadbent is a holistic emotional resilience coach dedicated to empowering individuals of all ages, especially youth, to cultivate healthier connections with themselves, others, and God. Her work is rooted in personal experience: navigating the challenges of adolescence, overcoming the pain of a difficult divorce, and raising six talented daughters who continue to inspire her journey.
Drawing on her background in psychology and communication, as well as her years of service as a school principal, she recognized a critical gap in education around emotional resilience and relational skills. This realization led her to create a curriculum that is practical, inclusive, and deeply impactful for families, individuals, and group settings alike.
A pivotal turning point came when she participated in an online relationship course led by instructor Marinna Siri, whose insights helped her understand how core beliefs and internal narratives shape one’s relationships and overall well-being. This sparked the foundation for the curriculum, an offering that blends personal insight, educational tools, and creative collaboration.
She is especially grateful to the supportive family members who contributed their ideas weekly, Maeve, Cora, Ellie, Andrew, and Lola, and to Elise, whose steadfast encouragement helped bring the vision to life. Maeve’s vibrant graphic design adds a unique and youthful touch to the workbook, with more young voices set to join future editions to keep the material relatable and real.
While not a licensed therapist, the author brings lived experience, empathy, and practical coaching strategies that complement any medical or therapeutic regimen. Her goal is to offer tools that inspire healing, resilience, and authentic connection, lifelong skills for navigating the emotional journey of being human.
A relatable, honest, and empowering guide to living fully. Sometimes a book doesn’t just speak to you, it sits down beside you like an old friend, nudges you gently, and says, “Hey, let’s work through this together.” That’s exactly what reading Thrive! by Janet Zitting Broadbent feels like.
Janet, with her conversational and often witty voice, guides readers through the emotional chaos, social challenges, and deeply personal growth that comes with being human. The book is structured around 20 refreshingly honest chapters, each diving into the often messy, awkward, and even humorous parts of life, topics like forgiveness, trauma, fear, boundaries, self-worth, drama, and difficult conversations. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “Why am I like this?”, this book has something for you.
Each chapter title feels like a chat with your most brutally honest best friend:
- “I am screaming! And you’re still not listening.”
- “Apparently, I’m dramatic!”
- “If you don’t know when to say no, stay in your closet.”
- “Keep the change, you filthy animal. lol.”
It’s not just the humor that grabs you, it’s Janet’s realness. She doesn’t shy away from hard truths, but she delivers them with empathy and lived experience. You feel seen, understood, and maybe even a little called out, in the best way.
What makes Thrive! stand out is its accessibility. There’s no preaching here. Janet isn’t trying to fix you, she’s inviting you into a conversation, encouraging you to look inward and do the work, while still leaving room for grace (and laughter). Her approach to topics like “Faith vs. Fear” and “Self-Love” is raw and rooted in the everyday struggles we all face. She breaks down the emotional walls we build and asks us to meet ourselves with curiosity and courage.
And Janet herself? She’s not your typical self-help author. Her style is warm, sassy, and disarmingly honest. It’s clear she’s walked through the fire and come out with her humor intact. She doesn’t just want you to survive, she wants you to thrive, and she’s walking beside you every step of the way.
In a world full of toxic positivity and surface-level affirmations, Thrive! is the real deal. Whether you’re healing from trauma, trying to communicate better, or just tired of feeling stuck, this book is both a mirror and a map.
If you’re ready to unpack your “crap,” challenge your inner dialogue, and laugh a little along the way, pick up Thrive! It might just be the most honest conversation you’ve had in a while.
Thrive! (In Your Relationship with Yourself and Others) by Janet Zitting Broadbent is now available for purchase via the ARPress Bookstore.