A succinct approach to better living through better relationships.
Psychotherapist Bathory presents a guide to success with a focus on community building as a vehicle for self-improvement.
The stated objective of the book is to help the reader to identify their life’s purpose and build relationships that help them achieve their goals. Each chapter explores the various aspects of this task and provides applicable strategies for building a healthy community. Specifically, the book explores topics such as communication tactics, goal setting, attachment styles, and self-assessment; at one point, for instance, the author asks, “Did you play the unofficial role of mediator or peacekeeper in your family? If so, your purpose might be to play this role in your community.” It incorporates anecdotes and testimonials from the author’s clients, executives such as Ronaldo Pereira of Brazilian toy sales company Ri Happy, as well as studies and other self-help books. Exercises aim to aid readers in reframing their mindset or managing their expectations with affirmations, questionnaires, and suggestions for cultivating one’s curiosity. Generally, the process involves identifying a goal, exploring how relationships could contribute to that goal, and employing six standards by which to evaluate those relationships, including “Authenticity,” “Positive Influence,” and “Care and Compassion.” Following this, there are tips for navigating relationships with people who may not share the same values or worldview. The last chapter reviews approaches to a variety of relationships, whether they’re with parents, children, coworkers, friends, one’s spouse, or even oneself. Bathory’s work is easy to digest and well-organized. The pacing is quick, breaking down each concept into smaller pieces to ease comprehension and offering chapter summaries. Overall, the book is refreshingly conversational in style, rather than academic, while also acknowledging that each person’s situation may contain unresolved issues: “I’m not suggesting you sweep those things under the rug….I’m recommending that you process these events to start your healing.” Those seeking to take new action in their life may find many helpful tactics and insights to do so here.
A succinct approach to better living through better relationships.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798891380417
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2024
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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