[.ca] Life Makeovers (ISBN 0553813714)

From Amazon.co.uk:
What do you need to change to make your life work better and make you happier? Top-level personal coach Cheryl Richardson, author of the popular Take Time for Your Life, shows you how to make your life over, one week at a time, using her philosophy of "extreme self-care". The result: you'll re-evaluate your life and connect to what matters most to you, improving the quality of your life. Life Makeovers is organised into 52 chapters, one for each week of the year. (Procrastinators: don't wait until January 1 to start--just call this week "week 1" and get going.) Each chapter has a specific theme with a "Take Action Challenge": a practical strategy to put a change into action immediately. For example, week 1 encourages you to reflect on what you've done right by writing down your five greatest accomplishments and three ways you've grown in the past year. Week 5 helps you manage your time by creating an "Absolute Yes" list of your five top priorities for the next 3 to 6 months. Week 20 helps identify behaviours that trigger feelings of irritability or frustration with a "I know I'm headed for trouble when..." list and three things you'll put in place to support your self-care when these happen. Additional topics range widely, such as exploring your internal rules and standards, asking for support, improving your sleep, shaking up your daily routine, and sharing with those in need. Each chapter also includes several well-chosen resources for exploring the topic further. If you use Life Makeovers as it's designed, you'll have the wisdom and inspiration of one of the best personal coaches in the business for a whole year. You'll have to work with her--no instant magic here--but it will be worth it. --Joan Price

not bad:
While she usually comes off great on Oprah, the author's writing style tends to be a little too syrupy at times. The books is short and nice, full of some good ideas, but tends to run towards religion and faith a lot (annoying to those of us who are not christian) and be a little too corny.

Paid money for this????:
Read this book cover to cover while my wife was taking a shower. That should give an idea of how little there is here. How the author turned this into 52 ways to improve I'll never know. Mostly this book seems designed for those looking for a simple answer to complex problems and who are in jobs where you can get away with crazy solutions. She mentions often about putting yourself first by ignoring phone, email, etc. How many of us can actually get away with not returning phone calls for a week? We'd all be looking for jobs. Then there's the suggestion of telling someone they have two minutes to complain. How do you know it's a whine until you listen? My boss actually implemented this policy. It kept people from bringing problems to him, but it did NOT keep the problems from occuring. She presents a lot of pretty solutions with no real data to back them up. Sounds good, feels good, means little. Pretty much anyone who thinks this lightweight title can change their life needs more help than this book can give. If you're already beyond grade school answers, other books are better. Start with Stephanie Winston -- a classic.

Nothing new:
There is nothing new in this book and most of the exercises were shallow and not likely to have any great impact on lives - certainly could have made better use of my money. I also didn't like the over-emphasis on the need to have lots and lots of friends to support you through the exercises - a nice way to make some of us who don't have wads of friends or are more self sufficient feel totally inadequate.

Decent book for beginners:
Depending on how many self-help books you've already read, this book could be a huge disappointment, or heaven. I think it'd be great for someone just entering the world of self-help. It compiles everything I've read in other books in short, easy-to-read paragraphs with a Take Action section at the end of each week. Most self-help books could care less if you take action or not. This one at least gets you to start. However I think anyone who needs the reason why to do anything or how it would affect your life to get motivated on taking action will be disappointed, and thats why I gave the book only 3 stars, because it lacks the substance and reasoning to get moving.

A Good Place to Start Your Journey:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. If you're interested in taking a journey toward life-improvement, this (older) title is still one of the most helpful, easy to follow "guides" around. The book works, I think, because Richardson keeps the weekly steps easy and "do-able", so you're more likely to take a stab at actually doing the work, not JUST reading her suggestions. Give it a shot. Even if you only get halfway through the weekly assignments, your life will improve my half!