An upbeat but provisional-feeling manual for becoming a life coach.
Sanderfur offers a concise guide for aspiring life coaches.
In this short overview of life coaching, the author adapts the basic principles of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), an action-oriented approach that aims “to help clients identify skills, resources, strengths, and other qualities already possessed by the client which can be tapped and used to reach the goals which are set” and is much more concerned with solving problems than dissecting their origins. He transforms SFBT into Solution Focused Coaching, which is equally results driven and designed to enhance resilience in clients facing all kinds of obstacles. In these pages, Sanderfur encourages would-be life coaches to adopt the Solution Focused Coaching method: “Any coach who can think quickly, relying on experience and knowledge to communicate,” he writes, “is well on the way to becoming an effective life coach.” The author’s own experience is working with “legends” in the arena of professional sports, and many of the examples he draws upon and quotations he cites are from that field. A life coach, he explains, is someone who helps people achieve their greatest dreams by overcoming whatever barriers are in the way; to facilitate this process, Sanderfur proposes a series of clarifying questions. There are “Empowerment” questions: “If money was not an issue, what would you like to be doing right now?”; a “Discovery” question asks, “What is the most important thing for you to accomplish right now?” Readers may be distracted by occasional style and usage problems in the text (“mambo jumbo,” for instance, or a reference to Helen Keller as “muted”). More troubling is the fact that Sanderfur’s vision of life coaching involves on-the-job training requiring the patronage of the needy and credulous: “You will not have to look far for clients willing to submit themselves to a life coach for little or no fee, for you to gain experience.” The enthusiasm here is uplifting, but the infrastructure feels a bit wobbly.
An upbeat but provisional-feeling manual for becoming a life coach.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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