This is a review of The New 10 – 40 days to creating a boldly beautiful life from the inside out by Dawn McIntyre. The publicists were kind enough to send me a free copy to see if I wanted to review it. As you can see I thought it was worth reviewing.
This is a book about beauty directed to women which raises the question of . . .
Me Being of the Male Persuasion . . .
. . . what does it have to do with me? Well, being a straight male I would like more beautiful women in the world. More seriously – it is the agenda of working from the inside out that chimes in with my emphasis on authenticity.
The Main Idea . . .
. . . of the book is that women need to move from the idea of the old 10 (taken from the Bo Derek and Dudley Moore movie of that name – where it is exterior beauty that is judged on a scale of 1 to 10 – Bo Derek scoring 10) to the new 10 (being beautiful from the inside out). This I entirely agree with – a person who accepts all of who they are has a presence. For a woman to radiate beauty the path is acceptance in my experience.
In Detail
The book is divided in 4 parts.
The four parts are: My thoughts are ugly, my thoughts are beautiful; I hate my body, I love my body; I ignore my spirit, I embrace my spirit; my life is ordinary, my life is extraordinary.
Each part has 10 sections (of 3-4 pages each).One section per day makes up the 40 days. Each of the sections ends with a practical part called What Really Works for Me. These practical parts are all down to earth and do-able exercises. You aren’t left up in the air and wondering, “But what can I do about this?”
I don’t think the one day per section is meant to be taken too seriously. For instance Day 1 is about facing your fears. This will likely take more than a day to deal with I would think. The practical parts at the end of the sections all give an exercise that can be done that day – but the theme of the days are often big ones. Dawn deals with things like: knowing you can survive if rejected, giving your body what it needs, trusting the universe, living in the now, and much else. Each one of the 40 topics has entire books devoted to it. The best way to approach this might be to go through the book, doing one section a day, and then go back to work on the sections that you want to go into greater depth with.
The Writing
Dawn writes in the often recommended conversational style – “write as you speak”. This advice is given to avoid stuffy formality. The result: concision and brevity are not valued. Instead, there is a relaxed and usually quite accessible tone that makes for easy reading. This is an accessible book. Occasionally I think Dawn takes too long to say things. However what she is saying is always clear and the way she says it is always readable.
This is not an academic book. It is one woman speaking about her own and others’ experience. The tone of the writing suits the purpose very well.
This isn’t a book you will read for the writing style – but then it doesn’t want to be that kind of book. It is a book designed to be accessible and useful, and it is.
Who is it for?
This is a book that has come out of Dawn’s experience and so is probably best suited to those with similar experiences. Unfortunately, I think there are many women with similar experiences to Dawn’s. Here are some excerpts from the Introduction where she talks about her upbringing.
As a child and teen, I was considered plump. I was not popular in school; I was a good student, but not one of the pretty ones. . . . I also had it beaten into me as a child and teen that I was ugly and fat – even stupid, although my grades proved otherwise. . . . As a young adult I attracted men who reflected back to me my complete lack of self-esteem and my inability to love myself. (p.ix)
From what I can gather there are a great number of women who can relate to this kind of treatment.
Dawn wants to build a movement around the New 10 – and she also has a radio show and website so that there are ways to connect with her and others. You are not left on your own when you close the book. This is of course essential for someone who wishes to build a movement. I think it should also have benefits to the readers – having a sense of support or being part of a group can be helpful when making the kinds of changes suggested in this book.
If you are a conservative Christian or committed to a materialist philosophy you will probably find Dawn to be way too new age for you. Some of the things that Dawn recommends have to do with meditation and affirmations and so on. She doesn’t try to evangelise for these things but she does make it clear that she thinks they are right.
In Summary
This could be a very worthwhile book to work through if you had the same kind of experiences as Dawn did when she was young. If you have difficulty knowing you are beautiful; if you have hassles with body image, then this book should help you to work through these issues.
The writing isn’t going to earn Dawn a Pulitzer, but I don’t think this really matters. The topic is important, and Dawn says what she has to say in a straightforward and accessible way. I think this is more important than great writing.
The exercises Dawn gives are practical and should help you develop a sense of your own beauty from the inside out.
I’m glad that this book has been written.
Tags: beauty, beauty from the inside out
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog called Changing Our (Relationship to Our) Past.
It came from a conversation with a friend about how they couldn’t go back and get what they wanted then. This got me thinking about how our past is present with us and how we can change how we relate to this past (the one that is with us in the here and now). I hope you like it, Evan.
Post of note: This is the first in a series of posts, called Finding My Voice by Marie at Coming Out of the Trees. The posts are a script that she read to her therapist about what she needed from him and what he did that wasn’t helpful. It is passionate, clear and wonderful to read. I think therapy would be improved if more clients did this. It is also a very useful indication of the kinds of issues that are dealt with in the therapeutic relationship.
Tags: here and now, the past
In this part I want to write about how we think about things. The last part was about our perceptions (what we think about) and how to change them. This part is the difference we can make in how we think about things.
In our western culture it seems to me that thinking it extraordinarily overvalued. Our schooling systems are based on the delusion that if people are given the correct information then all will be right with the individual and the world. [If it were this easy we’d be living in paradise by now.]
This has often lead, in self development and other places, to an attack on thinking about (linear rationality). I think it is possible to agree with most of these attacks. Thinking is not feeling – and someone who can’t feel is a sad person likely to have rotten relationships. Thinking about is not experiencing – it does not have the vividness and succulence of our primary experience. Someone who thinks about instead of experiencing will be half-dead. Thinking about is without values – we can analyse and efficiently construct a nuclear bomb just as easily as a way of living sustainably on our planet. For me these criticisms are important and true.
And I want to say that thinking is a valuable part of human possibility. Our ability to analyse, experiment and solve problems means we can live lives of greater ease. Our ability to anticipate means that we can anticipate difficulties and prepare for them. (We can purchase in advance the ingredients for a meal.)
The Use of Thinking About Our Experience: short cuts and feelings
One big advantage of thinking about our experience is that it can save us time and energy. People who are good at engineering and mathematics tell me that the biggest part of solving the problems in their field is recognising what kind of problem it is. Once the kind of problem is recognised then there is a wealth of wisdom already available that can be applied in a fairly routine way. Once the type of problem is recognised there is no need to come up with an entirely custom-made solution – there are all kinds of ready-made solutions that may need to be adapted but that are there to be drawn on.
Self-development, like mathematics and engineering, has its wisdom to be drawn – depending on the kind of problem that is to be solved.
And sometimes this isn’t obvious. Imagine a tennis player coming to a life coach wanting to win at tennis. The coach teaches them to visualise their tennis strokes and the player goes on to win many a match. Later it emerges that this player actually hated playing tennis. There are fairly routine ways to help someone figure out what they don’t like and do like (imagining perfect days, finding where they lose a sense of time, analysis of past experience and so on) as well as improve their performance (visualisation, habituation and so on).
In self development, there are hundreds of methods and routines that have been developed. Whatever part of your life you wish to address, there are ways that have been developed to do this. But this requires you, from thinking about your experience, coming up with some kind of formulation of what your problem is or the area you wish to be addressed. This is the first advantage of thinking about our experience – accessing available wisdom and so saving ourselves unnecessary time and effort.
The second advantage of thinking about our experience is changing our satisfaction with what we have done. Imagine this therapy session between a therapist and client:
Therapist: You look a bit sad or something.
Client: Um, yeah.
T: Why’s that?
C: Yesterday I really just wasted my time. I didn’t really achieve anything – you know?
T: What did you do?
C: Oh. Read a book, went for a swim, chatted to friends, that kind of stuff. Stuff that I like, but not achieving a whole lot.
T: So, yesterday you organised your life in a way that you did what you enjoyed all day?
C: Hey, that’s right. Thank you! (smiles)
This client’s satisfaction changed because they changed the way they thought about their day: from using achievement to enjoyment as the measure.
The way we think about our experience can contribute in important ways to how much we enjoy our lives.
Tags: thinking
There was an article in the New York Times about ‘good’ parents raising children who were just ‘bad seeds’. I found this quite objectionable (to put it politely).
Which caused me to right about Parenting and Children as a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog.
Parenting is an awfully fraught topic I know. And I have no desire to add more fuel to the parent-guilt industry. I did want to take apart this idea of ‘bad seeds’ and have something useful to say about the parent-child relationship. I hope you like it, Evan
Often when people ask, “Who is responsible?” they mean, “Who is to blame?”
But responsibility is not the same as blame. And so in some psychotherapies (the one’s I like best) people speak of responsibility being ‘response-ability’ – your responsibility is your ability to respond. (If you can’t respond then you aren’t responsible).
This can lead to a life-time’s exploration of what it is that we can do – to improve our own lives and the world around us. I have called this, on my latest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog The Adventure of Response-ability, I hope you like it, Evan.
Tags: response-ability, responsibility
Changing Our Perceptions
In the last post in this series I wrote about the role of our perceptions (and thinking about them) in our experience. In this post I want to write about changing our perceptions.
But Why?
Our perceptions are obvious to us. I don’t think ‘computer screen’ before I see this rectangle before me – what it is comes to me immediately. I don’t think ‘Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ before I experience the goosebumps from that piece of music, or ‘tree’ before I see that tree out the window.
Our perceptions seem obvious – the stuff is just there. But the situation isn’t quite that simple. Sometimes our perceptions are uncertain. Is that a piece of paper blowing across the road or an animal running? Sometimes we are mistaken – we are sure we left our car in this parking spot but then we remember we actually left it somewhere else. Our perceptions can change. After getting to know someone a facial expression we interpreted on first meeting as hostile we now interpret as friendly. We haven’t always been adults. We forget that it took us years for words to be obvious or for us to develop our musical taste.
So our perceptions change and this is partly the result of our intentional efforts. Learning an art or craft means expanding what is obvious to us – enriching our perceptions. A skilled musician may perceive much more in a piece of music than an unskilled one. An architect may well perceive more about a building than someone who knows nothing about architecture. But for the musician or architect these things can be obvious – they don’t need to think about them: they are just ‘there’ in the music or building. But they aren’t just ‘there’ for those whose perceptions haven’t been trained.
My point is that our perceptions shape how we experience life. Changing our perceptions change how we experience life. And our prior experiences and training shape what we perceive.
For instance. Imagine a party in a relatively large lounge room, with music playing, people socialising and so on. There are various people at this party and they all will probably experience it slightly differently – their perceptions will be slightly different, even though each of them will feel that their perceptions are obvious. The musician may well notice the music, while the interior decorator may notice the furnishings and be barely aware of the music, a psychotherapist may be attentive to the conversation they are having, the host/ess may perceive whether people are generally looking happy.
Our pereceptions are not only shaped by our prior experience and training, they are also shaped by our needs and desires.
For instance. At our party the musician discovers they are thirsty, they look around for the drinks table and move toward it. The interior decorator spots a previous client they had a bad time with and forgets about the rooms decor in their haste to hide from the previous client. The psychotherapist hears their name in another conversation even though they weren’t consciously listening for it.
This is why we would want to change our perceptions – because our perceptions affect our experience.
But How?
In some ways all the different traditions and tools in self-development are different answers to this question. Which is what this series is about. But there are some practical and simple things we can do immediately.
1. Pay close attention. Experiencing this one particular thing is different to being able to label it. This applies to a plant, a philosophy, a relationship – or anything else. To challenge or enrich our perception means paying close attention.
In any domain with a history there is usually a fairly extensive list of what to pay attention to. In writing there are the kinds of words and how they relate to each other. There is the development of a style and the mastery of different kinds of writing. In relationships there are the diverse needs and ways to communicate. In planning a holiday there are needs, budget, travel modes and so on to consider. To pay close attention means seeing the parts of something and how they fit together and influence each other to make up the whole.
2. Learn from others. Others perceptions will be different to others’ – and this is an opportunity to widen our own perception. We can learn from others directly or indirectly (such as through books). It is quite possible that they will see things differently to us. An engineer constructing a bridge over a river may come across a boat builder, who tells them that it would be easier to convey people across the river by boat. Someone who builds boats out of wood may learn that fibreglass is better in some situations. We can learn from others how they resolve arguments (or how to have arguments). We may discover that it is possible to feel good about ourselves, even knowing that we are imperfect.
3. Imagine things different. For the thing you are perceiving – how could it be different? What if one note of that tune were different? What if it were played fast or slow? What if this room were painted a different colour – how would that affect how it felt? What if I made sure to listen in this relationship? What if I had been bought up by loving parents – or abusive ones?
Our self-development is affected by how we perceive our world to be and how we perceive ourselves to be. As our perceptions widen and deepen we expand our options – for how we treat ourselves and how we act in our world.
A Post of Note. A Journey Through Darkness. A glimpse of what it is like to experience depression. Very well written.
A Beaut Blog. Well, actually a directory. It is called Counselling Directory and is a way to find a counsellor close to you in the UK. You can search by postcode or locality. It contains information on the different issues people have as well as lots of other information. If you or someone you know is looking for a counsellor in the UK it is a great resource.
Our western culture emphasises linear rationality (such things as analysis, logic, sequence, prioritising and planning). So I’ll start our tour of the world of self-development here: it is a place that we are all familiar with – even if we don’t like it terribly much. The emphasis on linear rationality has lead to a reaction (at the social level this is the argument between the ‘Modernists’ and the ‘Romantics’) – some people rejecting it and blaming it for most modern ills.
I want to start with our perception. What we perceive is what we talk about when we talk about something, it is what we think or feel or decide about when we think or feel or decide about something. There is our perception(s) and then there is our processing of them. It seems to me that there is something primary and secondary.
This distinction between our experience and processing of it is important I think, and so I want to give an example or two to make it clear if I can. If I take a bite of a sandwich I have purchased and recoil and spit out what was in my mouth I might tell my friend what happened by using some words. I might say, “It’s bad” or “Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with it but something is” or “I don’t know what they put on that but it was weird”. Without words I could wrinkle my nose, shake my head or something else. I would have perceived something wrong and responded to this and then processed (to myself as well as my friend perhaps) by using words or other actions that aren’t the experience but are about the experience.
I want to make the distinction between our perceptions and our processing of them because we often ‘rush to judgement’. We tend to deal with the end of our processing instead of sticking with our experience. We may have decided (as a result of rotten teaching at school perhaps) that we don’t understand poetry; we may have discovered (as I did) that I can’t even read one page of Kant and concluded that we can’t read philosophy. (Fortunately before I was shown the page of Kant I had come across readable philosophy. In case you’re wondering I think Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the best philosophy book (about metaphysics) ever written.)
We use these conclusions to our processing as short-cuts in navigating life. (I don’t have to read every novel that comes my way before I know what kind of novels I like,) This is hugely useful, and has a cost. The cost is losing the richness of our experience.
Our conclusions are cerebral – they lose sensuality. Knowing something is different to knowing about something. Being taught about something is quite different to learning that something. This is put in an extreme way by the slogan, “Lose your mind and come to your senses”.
It’s valuable to distinguish our perception from our processing of it so that we can get back in touch with the richness of sensual experiencing. This can add much pleasure to our lives. The main way that this is achieved (in general) is slowing down. It is taking time to: chew a mouthful of food, distinguish the different colours of a sunset or a leaf, hear the different sounds in a piece of music or a birds song . . . the list is as long as our experience.
The problem with slowing down is those short-cuts that are such a big part of our lives. We find that instead of experiencing we are thinking about our experience. Our thinking gets in the way of our experience – and so our lives are impoverished. This happens remarkably quickly in my experience. To go for even a few seconds without thinking, a few minutes is extremely rare.
There are various “mindfulness” practices that alert us to how much we tend to think instead of experience. The most common are connected with watching our breathing. Breathing can happen without our conscious intention and is always with us, so it is a very good thing to show us how much we think. The easiest way is to just count your breaths. And note how soon you are thinking about this or something else instead of just counting. If this sounds simple, it is; if it sounds easy – then you have likely not tried to do it. Just being with your breath for twenty minutes a day can have huge benefits in staying calm and being less reactive. It can also become a lifetime study – and there is an extraordinary array of meditations that can guide you.
The forms of mindfulness practise can be pretty much as many as our experience. Betty Edward’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has elements of mindfulness, as does the Feldenkrais method of bodywork, as can Tai Chi or qi gong (depending on how they’re taught) . . . just about whatever we do can be done mindfully. (Though we may need to start by doing it slowly.)
[I think it is a bit of a shame that these practices have been called “mindfulness” as this can be confused with thinking about something. But I think it is too late to change this now.]
Staying with our experience before we think about it awakens us to the richness of our experience and the ways in which our thinking can interrupt and impoverish our experience.
The World of Ojod
If we were to imagine a place where people lived in the world of their experience I think it would be something like this. I have labelled this place “Ojod”.
The people in Ojod awake in tune with their natural rhythm to the sights and sounds and smells around them. They feel their clothes as they dress and the floor beneath their feet.
In Ojod the crafts are valued and people are taught usually taught a craft – so they learn the value of taking their time and staying with one activity. In this way they experience the results of being mindful.
The people of Ojod have a vocabulary rich in adjectives – they are alive to their experience and the experience of describing their experience to others. They live with a vividness that comes from being in touch with themselves and the world around them.
It is a place where ‘teaching’ is interacting with what is being studied – not being told about it by someone else.
You can visit the land of Ojod anytime – it is as easy as just paying attention to your breathing or slowing down whatever it is you are doing. I think you will find that your visit will be refreshing and add richness to your life.
A Beaut Blog (squarely in the mindfulness approach) is Takuin’s Life Beyond the Image. It is also beautifully written.
Tags: mindfulness, perception, self development, thinking
On the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog I have a guest post on honour.
Despite its old-world feel I think that examining honour can be relevant to our current social predicament(s). This is because honour is a social code, and our world’s big problems are about collective problems. We need to sort out how we can act with others in mind – and not be so crushed by this responsibility that we end up immobilised – like a rabbit in the headlights.
So I think honour can be a good and important thing to think about and I hope you find it so too, Evan.
Tags: honour
If you have come from my old blog welcome to my new site. If you have just found my blog for the first time, welcome to you too. I have decided to make one major change to my posts on this blog: at the end of each post you will usually find a link to another post or blog (or both); the links to the posts will be called “Posts of Note” and the links to blogs will be called “Beaut Blogs”. This is to get over the problem I had of knowing when and how much to link to other blogs and posts. I hope you find that it adds value for you.
This is the first post in a series on self-development, so I’ll be talking about what the series will be about and starting with initial ideas.
My plan is to cover different approaches to self-development – starting with our thoughts and perceptions and moving on to feelings and intuitions and followed by different ‘paths’ (at the moment I am thinking about the artist and the hero/ine). It will be about these ways of approach rather than dealing with all the different authors or specific modalities. For each approach I will talk about the way I think it is valuable and useful and how you may find it useful in living a more satisfactory and enjoyable life.
I’m not sure how long the series will be, so if you would like to see anything included let me know and I’ll see whether I can include it.
Introduction to Self-Development
Definitions and Diversity
What I’m calling here ‘self-development’ is a vast field of diverse approaches whose purpose is to give people ways to live better lives.
This field goes by various names. I have chosen “self-development” because it is relatively well understood and I don’t find it objectionable. I do find ‘self-improvement’ objectionable because it suggests that there is something wrong with us that we or others should fix. This slips all too easily into a guru and follower way of doing things and I value agency (I am interested in people being more in touch with themselves and making their own choices), so ‘self-improvement’ isn’t an option for me. “Self-realisation” often has an eastern flavour and my approach is mostly western based, so it would be mildly misleading for me to use it. I also feel that quite close to my core lies teaching – I find people are very much ‘learning animals’ and ‘self-realisation’ tends not to take account of this. My favourite term is probably ‘human potential’ but this isn’t much used anymore and so doesn’t have much meaning for people. So I’m sticking with the term ‘self-development’ and hope I’ve explained enough to say why and roughly what I mean by it.
Integrity and Usefulness.
Writers on self-development have often made their own breakthroughs and they speak to others from this basis. This has integrity and I think it is valuable. When someone can say that, “I know this works because it worked for me”, this is very valuable. In my experiences the people I have met in the self-development field – personally and through their books – are, almost without exception, people of integrity.
However, this doesn’t mean that what they have to say will be of use to you. People work on their own problems and their breakthroughs are answers to their problems. The elation of the breakthrough is exhilarating and heady indeed. When someone finds that their way works for others too this is delightful. All this is positive – however it can lead to thinking that everyone is the same: having the same problems and needing the same answers. The extraordinarily rich diversity of the self-development field I think is largely due to the fact that people are different – they have different problems and so find solutions to their problems.
Thus people who were demeaned may promote self-esteem; people abused as children may emphasise the need to care for the child inside us; those who were excessively cerebral may champion emotional expression; those who were only allowed to be emotional may be very aware of the value of rationality. This list could be extended indefinitely. My point is that none of these are wrong and that all are potentially useful.
What about me and my approach? I grew up in Evangelical Christianity. This emphasised the verbal and the rational. We were told that discipline was good and encouraged to watch ourselves rather than be spontaneous. Our models were those who fought themselves and there was language about self-conquest. So my own self-development has been a path of learning to value my emotions and physicality, it has emphasised unity and wholeness and to discover that there are other ways of knowing than through words. My approach has been about discovering ease rather than being unkind to ourselves (which is usually what people mean by discipline). (I believe that this is entirely compatible with a Biblical Christianity.)
Beaut Blog: Chris Edgar’s DevInContext (ie. self development in context). A great exploration of self-development and a defense of it against common criticisms. Chris’s background is in law and it shows in his penetration, analysis and clarity. He also writes accessibly and readably. I think it is one of the great blogs in the field of self-development.
My partner and I are processing some disappointments in our lives. Not life and death stuff (more about where we live and so on) but significant to us. We also have some friends who are handling major health problems. Which has lead me to think about the process of grieving – and how it applies to more than just someone we are close to dying.
I have done a post about grieving on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called Good Grieving: finding a new normal. I take the perspective that grieving is about a loss of what was normal for us and the process of finding a new normal. I hope you like it, Evan.
Tags: grieving
