Enthusiastic, embracing guide to self-actualization.
A dairy farmer–turned–certified coach discusses how to realize your unique potential in this debut self-help guide.
Nyland, with her husband, owned and operated a dairy farm for more than 28 years, and they lived first in the Netherlands, now in Canada. She tees up her particular experience by noting that she has “lived with four generations on one farm” and that “Nothing fascinates me more than human interaction.” Now also a certified coach, having completed the “Co-Active” leadership program offered by California-based Coaches Training Institute, Nyland asserts that “we all are magnificent,” each with a special “toolbox/I am status,” yet “most of us don’t even know we have this great toolbox, let alone know that we need to cultivate it to experience a great life.” She believes that blockage occurs due to insecurities that arise from what she calls the five-point system “We have all been taught” via family, society, and media: “how to trust, how to handle conflict, how to be accountable, how to be committed, and what the results of these things are.” Nyland spends most of her book exploring these themes and offering several suggestions to help readers get a better picture of who they really are and what they really want in life. For instance, she says, journal and take her brief survey to assess your current views related to her five-point system. Nyland offers simple yet effective and thought-provoking tools to develop a cleareyed and affirmative approach to life. Her guide can get a bit off course, however, with too much discussion of autobiographical detail, including an odd aside about “stray voltage” causing problems on her farm. Still, Nyland generally presents a positive, uplifting tone in an encouraging guide. “You see, we all encounter difficult challenges in life, and yes, that sucks,” she says. “The thing is, though, with all those challenges we have the opportunity to cultivate and strengthen our toolbox, and how cool is that?”
Enthusiastic, embracing guide to self-actualization.Pub Date: April 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1503552678
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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