Delight in the Limelight
Overcome Your Fear of Being Seen and Realize Your Dreams
Delight in the Limelight is an inspiring self-help book that recommends methods for transforming one’s fear into confidence.
Public speaker and speaking coach Linda Ugelow’s self-help text Delight in the Limelight is about overcoming stage fright by pursuing personal healing.
Here, public speaking is about more than standing in front of a crowd; its variations include sitting in front of a camera, leading meetings, and hosting podcasts. Such communication methods make people anxious. Thus, Delight in the Limelight‘s three parts include tips for improving on past performances—tips that involve revealing and healing, restoring one’s sense of safety, and repatterning one’s habits.
The book is direct and logical about its prospective chronology for improvement. The assessment of one’s past experiences is presented as essential to the process, which involves multiple methods of getting comfortable with public speaking, including positive self-talk, visualization, and speech therapies. Pragmatic subsections break the suggested methods into approachable segments, and the book extrapolates on its techniques, explaining how and why they work.
The tone is friendly and compassionate––a sensibility bolstered by the book’s use of empathetic personal stories from other anxious speakers. Ugelow includes her own stories alongside those of her clients, too, showing how certain experiences shape people’s beliefs and feelings about themselves. People are seen using her methods, including tapping and speech therapy, to excel; Ugelow used these techniques in starting her own business, and in becoming comfortable with recorded posts on social media, as well. However, notes about Ugelow’s sisters bullying her during their childhoods repeat, with several explanations for their behavior named.
The book does an able job of treating its often sensitive subjects with both care and logic. Ugelow’s analyses of the psychological underpinnings of fear, and of the purposes of positive affirmations, are thorough and compelling. Her analogies are keen: for example, she compares influential negative past experiences to applications that run in a computer’s background, operating the system and draining it of its energy. Themes of forgiveness, for others and oneself, elevate the discussion above its anxiety-relieving techniques, resulting in a text that stands to ably support those who hope to heal from past traumas. The diverse methodologies and experiences included, which also represent people with various levels of anxiety, also contribute to the sense that this book will be applicable to those with a wide range of personal goals and career paths.
Delight in the Limelight is an inspiring self-help book that recommends methods for transforming one’s fear into confidence.
Reviewed by
Aimee Jodoin
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
