How To Take Charge of Your Life

I had got this book in Singapore sometime around Jan2007 from one of the visit to either China Town or near Singapore National Library where shops sell old books at low prices. Thanks to GuekHar(an avid bibliophile) for showing around the place. Got this for $2. The book dates back to 1977, though being a psychology one still holds a lot of relevance. The authors ( Mildred Newman & Bernard Berkowitz) were leading American phychologists in that period. It was strange to find no entry on any of the author's in Wikipedia.

The book tells about how one can transform anxiety into energy and how one's capacity for decisiveness can be strengthened. The book is written in a plain and easy to read language devoid of jargon. Short and simple. Authors give many practical advices on how to know yourself better. Book is filled with lot of short stories of people whom authors had helped in their professional career.

After reading I feel I have some home work to do for better knowing myself. Other thing I liked specially of this book is the odour of the old light brown pages. So it added up as a pleasant factor. I guess I have some strange liking ;).

Some Notes :

1. The wonderful thing to understand is that you do not have to take yourself as a pre packaged product coming off the assembly line. There are certain things you have inherited- your coloring, your sex, your bone structure, your height- but what you do with your biological inheritance is up to you. Much of what you are you have made, and it is your right, if not also your obligation, to remake yourself exactly as you see fit.

2.Developing a habit of being decisive, an important part of being in charge of your life.

3.Try making small decisions

4.It is not self indulgent to entertain your own thoughts, because only then do you really have enough of yourself to give to others. Otherwise you are simply reflecting what you admire in others back to them.

5.You cannot please everyone around you.

6.Have the courage to confront and deal with your negative feelings. It's not easy but don't let the difficulty of all this deter you from the real job of filling in the picture of who you are and what you want for yourself.

7. An object at rests takes a much greater amount of energy to move than when it is already rolling. For this reason you often hear this advice to someone who is stuck ."Make any decision, any move, even if it's the wrong one. It's better than just sitting there." But action which is based on knowing who you are is of course much better than just striking out randomly for the sake of getting going. Then you have a sense of direction, you know where you are going.