Being happy doesn't have to be hard, says prominent personal coach Laura Berman Fortgang. We each possess an internal compass that expresses our individual wisdom and points to the things that would most fulfill us. Personal and professional satisfaction, Fortgang believes, comes from tapping into this wisdom.

In Living Your Best Life, she offers ten tried-and-true strategies that help us to access our own inner knowledge to achieve what she calls a "best life"-a life that awaits all of us, in which gains come more easily because we've learned to honor our true desires and work with our individual talents rather than exhausting our energy on a traditional model of achievement. Her techniques focus on asking ourselves what we really want instead of frenetically trying to "have it all." We learn to ask questions that move us forward, not backward, to discover our own unique "lucrative purpose," and to design a "magnet" life plan that draws to us the more rewarding existence we deserve.