An earnest and straightforward, if familiar, guide to transforming one’s routines.
Better habits are the way to a happier, healthier lifestyle according to Antonenko’s debut self-help book.
Many people feel stuck when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight, remaining fit, and achieving other life goals. They want to change but lack the motivation to do so. The author, a professional health coach, reassures readers that transformation is possible, no matter how bleak things may seem at the present moment. She knows this from experience, having faced many challenges on her journey to happiness, including the suicide of her first husband and chronic health problems of her own, such as ulcerative colitis. The author draws on this personal experience as well as her career as she outlines a multistep process for eliminating “patterns of destructive thinking” and developing healthy habits that she promises will lead to lasting, consistent improvements in one’s life. It begins, she says, with focusing on one’s momentum and “harnessing energy” so that one can get unstuck from old habits. Subsequent steps address one’s diet, mindset, and physical movement. The final step is “mastery,” in which repetition leads to “uncovering new patterns [that] can release us from lousy past behaviours and stop us from being tainted by our past mistakes, failures, and setbacks.” Throughout, Antonenko offers a supportive voice that enthusiastically urges the reader to “design the life of your dreams.” The advice is largely a mix of generic tips for healthy living (such as getting enough sleep, embracing mindfulness, eating a balanced diet, including minimizing consumption of sugars and processed food) and common self-help bromides about visualizing success and ignoring what other people think. However, Antonenko wisely focuses on permanently changing behaviors rather than promoting expedient solutions that may be harder to stick with in the long term. The book includes links to supplemental material on the author’s website, such as printable affirmation cards, a meal planner, and a separate exercise guide. This work stands well enough on its own, but it’s also intended as an introduction to Antonenko’s life-coaching offerings, which include follow-up courses, fitness accessories, and nutritional supplements.
An earnest and straightforward, if familiar, guide to transforming one’s routines.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5043-2079-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: BalboaPressAU
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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