THE BIG SCALE BACK

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.