Enthusiastic, embracing guide to self-actualization.
A dairy farmer–turned–certified coach discusses how to realize your unique potential in this debut self-help guide.
Nyland, with her husband, owned and operated a dairy farm for more than 28 years, and they lived first in the Netherlands, now in Canada. She tees up her particular experience by noting that she has “lived with four generations on one farm” and that “Nothing fascinates me more than human interaction.” Now also a certified coach, having completed the “Co-Active” leadership program offered by California-based Coaches Training Institute, Nyland asserts that “we all are magnificent,” each with a special “toolbox/I am status,” yet “most of us don’t even know we have this great toolbox, let alone know that we need to cultivate it to experience a great life.” She believes that blockage occurs due to insecurities that arise from what she calls the five-point system “We have all been taught” via family, society, and media: “how to trust, how to handle conflict, how to be accountable, how to be committed, and what the results of these things are.” Nyland spends most of her book exploring these themes and offering several suggestions to help readers get a better picture of who they really are and what they really want in life. For instance, she says, journal and take her brief survey to assess your current views related to her five-point system. Nyland offers simple yet effective and thought-provoking tools to develop a cleareyed and affirmative approach to life. Her guide can get a bit off course, however, with too much discussion of autobiographical detail, including an odd aside about “stray voltage” causing problems on her farm. Still, Nyland generally presents a positive, uplifting tone in an encouraging guide. “You see, we all encounter difficult challenges in life, and yes, that sucks,” she says. “The thing is, though, with all those challenges we have the opportunity to cultivate and strengthen our toolbox, and how cool is that?”
Enthusiastic, embracing guide to self-actualization.Pub Date: April 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1503552678
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2015
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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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