A dynamic and actionable self-help book for those seeking transformation.
McStravick presents a modern motivational guide to personal growth.
This self-help book contains 40 lessons from the author’s own online M. E. School, a place where, McStravick asserts, “everything that’s stuck in your life starts moving again, where everything unhealed gets healed, and new choices and opportunities take shape and begin to blossom.” The transformation process begins with identifying “Weasels in the Road,” or obstacles to evolution. The author urges readers to get out of the “Known Zone” and into the “Grow Zone” and explains why “The Queen” (the emotionally intuitive force that wants to expand one’s world) must trump “The King” (the protective, rational force that keeps one’s world small and safe). Readers learn techniques like “Flowdreaming,” a daydream meditation that inspires positive feelings. McStravick warns of the “Dead Zone,” where “your snap-back ability has been spent” and cautions against becoming a “Backward-Looking Girl,” who has “pinned the Moment of Perfection onto her past, and now nothing in her future is going to match that.” The author directs the reader to identify energy-draining “Power Leaks,” reclaim their agency, and confront resistance. She also encourages brave and inspired action and prompts readers to journal at the end of each chapter (accompanying worksheets and a podcast are also available online). The author’s voice is that of a foul-mouthed cheerleader, down-to-earth yet still authoritative. McStravick makes the idea of transformation fun, using a strength-based approach while acknowledging that there is no one-size-fits-all destination to this journey. She is reassuring in her advice, such as when she shares that “feelings are your mile markers, and it means there’s a turn up ahead,” or insists, “You’ll fix it when you’re ready to fix it.” While some of the concepts are familiar (getting outside one’s comfort zone, prosperity thinking), many more are novel and memorable, like the “Trifecta of Trust” (trust of self, trust of others, and trust in the universe).
A dynamic and actionable self-help book for those seeking transformation.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780757324680
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HCI Books
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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