A compassionate and energizing guide full of confidence-building ideas.
In this self-help guide for women, an executive coach shares her strategies for building and maintaining confidence.
If anyone’s confidence should have been shattered, it was that of McGuinness (Terminal Ambition, 2012): She was terminated from her position as general counsel of a large company, had a near-fatal accident, got divorced, and was forced to sell her ranch at a loss. To regain her confidence, she writes, “I had to build new neural networks.…I needed to become mindful of my self-criticism and perfectionism and have compassion for myself.” In a book that is both inspirational and practical, McGuinness provides a playbook of the techniques she employed to rebuild her lost confidence. The book’s first section squarely addresses the intriguing reasons why she believes many women are less confident than men, including that “women have more estrogen which discourages risk taking” and familial and societal influences that encourage women to be less aggressive if not demure. The author posits, however, that women can overcome such barriers by focusing on mindfulness and well-being. Toward that end, she offers confidence-building strategies and tactics that involve a formula she describes as: “Intention + Repeated Attention = Confidence.” The book rather sweepingly covers many aspects of confidence, including such topics as authenticity, self-compassion, resilience, and assertiveness. It also defines barriers to greater self-confidence, including perfectionism, self-criticism, and “negative rumination.” In a work-related chapter, the book pointedly discusses such topics as interviewing, performance reviews, and public speaking. The final section features helpful advice about facing setbacks and recommends 52 confidence-boosting exercises or “workouts” to perform every week. Each chapter is brimming with motivational exhortations delivered in punchy paragraphs with engaging subheads; the strategies for overcoming perfectionism include “Adjust Your Standards,” “Limit Meticulousness,” “Re-characterize Mistakes,” and “Minimize Comparisons.” McGuinness is unfailingly positive, dishing out encouragement every chance she gets, as she draws on her experience and relates it to other women’s challenges. The author backs up her insightful strategies with notes that reference a multitude of articles and books, which makes for an even stronger presentation.
A compassionate and energizing guide full of confidence-building ideas.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9849901-2-2
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Two XX Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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