A lively personality-driven plan for reshaping one’s priorities.
A certified life coach provides a blueprint for life-changing thought.
Before 2019, Woodward approached her professional life the same way many other people do in the 21st century: She let work consume her and shape every aspect of her life. She hollowed out her existence in order to fit it into the business world: “A blend of people pleasing, a need for external validation, conditioning, and fear had me dressing up in what felt like a costume, participating in meetings that felt cold and formal, and whizzing through my days powered by adrenaline,” she writes. It brought her professional success but not personal satisfaction, she writes, and she eventually realized that many of the givens in her life were “limiting beliefs.” Eventually she decided to make a “big scale back” and fundamentally change her behaviors. The tool she used, and continues to use, is the well-known Enneagram of Personality—a model of nine personality archetypes, from Principled Reformer to Modest Mediator, which focuses on “external needs and demands over their own”; Woodward falls into the latter category, and learning this, she says, helped her recognize patterns in her life and change them. Woodward is a highly personable narrative presence over the course of this self-help book, and she lays out the guide’s concepts clearly. She spends the bulk of the work discussing and explaining the Enneagram, and although it’s a famously dense and unyielding subject, she manages to skillfully combine her own deeply personal stories with insights into the minutiae of the Enneagram’s workings to make them easy to understand. Along with her insights, she offers readers reflective questions to analyze their own behaviors. Readers looking to make a change in their hectic life will find plenty to consider in these pages.
A lively personality-driven plan for reshaping one’s priorities.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9781989716939
Page Count: 296
Publisher: YGTMEdia Co.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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