Africa is a paradox. It is a land of opportunities brimming with potential. It is also a land of wasted opportunities. This paradox is reflected in African lives, whether at home (Africa) or in the Diaspora. The wasted opportunities are reasons people from the continent are hungry, the reason they live in squalor and want, a reason they are treated badly by other peoples of the world.

They are the reason we want to give up, slide into depression or want to end it all. But the same Africa is a land of hope, giving all her children – indigenes and visitors – a shade from life’s scorching sun and an assurance of a better future. It is a land that adorns its children with all the beauty that other peoples are attracted to.

This is the plot of the very first nugget of the book, Growing! published in 2022, by Ngozi Zoe Adebiyi. A sequel to Grow!, her maiden publication, Growing! is a new transformational personal development book that utilises ‘receptive music therapy’, which involves listening to music to change your mood or for relaxation.

“It is a music book with multi-dimensional intent of inspiring career people across cadres, entrepreneurs at any stage of their journey and everyone in between! Young or old, Growing! is for you. The book serves its reader a brain and soul sandwich, with a musical nourishment twist and empowers growth as it brings with it a latent potency that causes one to pause, take it in, think, leap and be inspired,” the author states.

Growing! is a collection of 15 super-sized nuggets that individually inspire from outside in. Each of the nuggets is delivered alongside a musical track carefully selected to help the reader in arriving at the destination the author has intended for him or her.

The musical collection is boundless – classic, contemporary, religious, local, foreign etc – by many notable musicians, including, Cobhams Asuquo, Mike Okri, Tuface Idibia, Leeann Womack, Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul Simon.

All the nuggets speak to a particular aspect of life and living, whether it is the ‘Under the African Stars’ that speaks to the richness that abound in Africa and how it could inspire us to appreciate our potential, or the ‘Find Your Happy’ that tries to conceptualise happiness and how we could find true happiness or ‘The Land is Greener’ that speaks to the use of positivism to deal with the feelings of hopelessness when they want to overcome you.

Some of the things that readers will learn from the book include, how to be more intentional, ways to leverage strength despite challenging situations, how to build belief in your qualities, and how to tap into the breadth and depth of African resources from an individual standpoint.

The challenge with Growing! is that it is so unique that it is difficult to be plugged into a particular pigeonhole. Like an inspirational book, it has nuggets that will help lift the spirit, and like a motivational book; it also has the ones to prop up as well as give them wings to fly. It also has nuggets that bring nostalgia, fun feeling and lots more.

It is a book that comes with a flat sound box (using batteries), which contains 12 full songs and one spoken word (affirmation) to complement the wisdom in its 15 chapters. An on-the-go companion that inspires your work and life, Growing! is a collection of musings that cause its readers to reflect, draw strength from and to keep growing! The icing on the cake of its uniqueness is that it brings the reader all these in just 24 pages.

What else could anyone expect from such a book authored by Ngozi Zoe Adebiyi, a human resources leader, executive coach and founder and Lead Consultant of Outsideln HR, who notes that the nuggets are largely inspired by her personal and professional experience of over 24 years in human resources and consulting.

She was listed in 2019 as a New Wealth Creator (female entrepreneurs, who have created significant impact in their respective sectors by pioneering their organisations in generating new untapped streams of income) by Forbes Woman Africa. She was also named the ‘HR Person of the Year 2020’ by the HR People magazine.

The book is published in colourful hard cover and engages the reader, who is called upon, from time to time, to make entries into the book to customise his or her reading and listening experience.