A wide-ranging and impressively holistic approach to achieving personal and professional success.
Leadership and executive coach Arnold offers heart-centered advice for creating a purposeful life.
The author recounts a career journey that included earning a law doctorate from Northeastern University in 2004, working with the U.S. Department of Education as a presidential management fellow, and choosing to be a full-time, stay-at-home parent. This depth of her experience shows in her self-help book, which relates her approach to building a life of meaning. Arnold aims to help her own clients realize their potential and offers some insights into her process. The concept of peace is at the core of her method: “internal peace,” situated in the body; “existential peace,” defined by one’s gifts, values, and purpose; and “relational peace,” which is attained through creating connections with oneself and others. She addresses each category in separate sections, further broken down into chapters, each including exercises and synopses of salient points. (Arnold suggests that the best way to use her book is to move mindfully from start to finish, but the summaries suggest that she probably knows that at least a few readers won’t follow that advice.) The first third of the book is dedicated to paying attention to one’s body, developing somatic techniques for learning from physical unease, and using movement to avoid experiencing self-defeating emotional states. In the section on cultivating existential peace, Arnold effectively encourages readers to let their knowledge of their own mortality help to clarify what they want for themselves, to learn from failure, and to make confident decisions in challenging situations—all of which are essential to developing good relationships with others. While aficionados of self-help literature will understand that Arnold is building on the work of other writers, her lessons on the usefulness of reflecting on one’s impending death are unusual in a book directed at leaders (and would-be leaders). The author also acknowledges that achieving success isn’t a purely personal matter but, rather, one that’s circumscribed by systemic barriers like sexism, racism, and antigay sentiment, which is also a notable approach.
A wide-ranging and impressively holistic approach to achieving personal and professional success.Pub Date: June 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798886451856
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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