book reviews

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is one of those books that pretty much everyone on the planet would benefit from reading. The basic premise is that a great deal of our unhappiness and insecurity is caused by us wallowing in regret about the past, or worrying about the future. Many of us spend relatively little time actually being connected to the present moment, which is ironic because the present moment is the only one we have available to us. The past has already happened and cannot be changed, and the future hasn’t happened yet; we have relatively little real control over it either. So all we really have to work with is the present moment.

This book gives the clearest description I’ve come across of why it’s important to remain connected to the present moment. It’s particularly important when it comes to relationships with other people, since we’re difficult to connect with when our minds are somewhere else.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner

The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.

Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people

Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.

This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re the only one on the planet with feelings? Does it sometimes seem as though your life is at the mercy of your moods? Does everyone around you seem to be cruising along just fine with their emotional barrier up, making it difficult for you to connect with them, and leaving you feeling like there’s something wrong with you? Do you feel out of place because you’re a man, and men aren’t supposed to have feelings; or do you feel that because you’re a woman with feelings, you’re playing second fiddle to the cold, hard men that rule the planet?

Emotional Intelligence is a vital skill we often don’t learn at school

I can relate to these feelings sometimes, and with this in mind I recently tackled Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence. It seemed to me that the message I’d received from my family, my all-boys high school and my society at large while growing up was that emotions were a sign of weakness to be eliminated at all costs. I wasn’t supposed to have feelings when I was a boy; and yet I still have them even now as a man. I’ve often felt deep down that there was something wrong with me as a result. Men were supposed to be emotionally invulnerable, but I’m not. I’d like to be. Other people seem to be; or are they just faking it? I often get hijacked by my own feelings preventing me from doing what I really want. Surely by now I was supposed to be past all that; I’m not a kid any more, after all. Perhaps a little EQ would bring an answer to the quandary.

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By Graham Stoney, ago