UNCONDITIONAL POWER

Business consultant Gaffney writes that one should always avoid the ideas that one can do nothing to change a situation or that one’s own success depends solely on outside circumstances. Instead, he asserts, one should strive for a state of feeling “Powerful,” convinced that one can take effective measures to overcome obstacles and succeed no matter the conditions. One can achieve this, he says, through the practice of “Mood Discipline,” which “lets you shift from a Powerless state to a Powerful one instantaneously.” Gaffney lays out strategies and exercises for cultivating this state, which include noticing one’s passing moods (he recommends categorizing them and writing them down—“Powerless,” “Conditional,” or “Powerful”—every hour); analyzing one’s self-defeating beliefs to debunk and dispel them; visualizing success; disrupting negative trains of thought by taking exercise breaks or replacing them with more constructive notions; and reframing scary words, such as change, with more appealing ones, such as evolve. He also recommends that readers “Be the Part” by imagining themselves in a challenging role and then acting as they would in that scenario—a technique that he likens to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s principles of Method acting. Gaffney discusses ways to apply these ideas to oneself and one’s workplace team based on an analysis of office personality types: Decliners and Doomers naysay every plan, he says, and Builders or Boosters steadily come up with ways to solve problems and embrace opportunities.

Gaffney’s emphasis on replacing demoralizing moods with healthier ones feels like a mix of cognitive behavioral therapy and positive thinking, with a little neurobiology and a lot of optimism thrown in. It’s aimed at floundering managers and professionals focusing on concrete business problems—such as supervising a product launch or firing an underperforming employee—and draws lessons from corporate case studies and Gaffney’s own experiences grappling with serious illness and business reversals during the Great Recession. His thesis can sometimes sound glib and even magical (“By imagining that you are actually a Powerful person, you will naturally do what a Powerful person does”), but he grounds it in down-to-earth practical advice. Rather than plaintively asking when a behind-schedule project will be done, for example, he suggests that managers ask, “what do you need to do to get this project done in a month?” Gaffney conveys all this in elegant, evocative prose that mixes shrewd aphorisms—powerlessness, he says, is “like sitting in the back seat of the car of life…forced to accept whatever choices the driver makes”—with Technicolor panache: “Visualize how it will look, sound, and feel when you close the deal. Don’t just picture the steps you’ll take on the big day—the handshakes, the papers being signed, the congratulations of your colleagues….What emotions come up when you allow yourself to fully visualize this victory?” The result is an often captivating motivational primer that blends useful how-to with persuasive here’s-why.