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
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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