How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be
A Simple Guide for Those Who Are Ready to Take Charge and Redirect Their Lives
How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be is an insightful self-help book that encourages taking small steps, and making courageous decisions, to lead to a happy, fulfilled life.
Pam Grewall’s self-help guide How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be suggests easy means of shaping one’s personality, character, and destiny.
Built on the belief that all choices, responses, and actions have consequences, this direct, sometimes confrontational book suggests against looking to others for help in achieving personal satisfaction. Instead, it encourages taking personal responsibility. It emphasizes the values of humility and vulnerability, both of which are illustrated with personal experiences, and makes cogent arguments for talking about the issues that hinder personal growth and development, showing how repressing such discussions leads to greater problems later on. The book warns about the consequences of failing to make choices, too, as well as about what follows from inappropriate responses to challenges.
This text emphasizes the power of words to lead to either empowerment or enslavement, juxtaposing terms like “caution” and “fear” and “privacy” and “secrecy” to show the consequences of each. Here, whether a person in an abusive relationship is called a “victim” or a “facilitator” is of great importance: both are said to affect a person’s self-perception, and the ultimate outcome of the situation, differently. This blunt framing is made convincing via explorations of the meanings of terms, and of how each contributes to both self-understanding and to honest communication with others.
Throughout, the book’s suggestions are short and to the point, incorporating fables, poems, stories, and quotes to bolster their appeal. At the end of each chapter, brief summaries of salient points enable quick reviews, appearing alongside probing questions designed to provoke inner exploration. Some of the topics addressed in the text may require the investigation and release of long-held personal beliefs: among these are a discussion of reincarnation, and a potent argument for the healing power of death.
While the book is conversational, thoughtful, and touched with humor, it also contains numerous grammatical and syntactical errors, as well as several misused words. It is cluttered with excess examples that slow its pace. But its pithy quotes help to make its concepts memorable, and its simple, repeating illustration, which appears on the first page of each chapter, is a pleasant addition.
How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be is an insightful self-help book that encourages taking small steps, and making courageous decisions, to lead to a happy, fulfilled life.
Reviewed by
Kristine Morris
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.
