Reviews: Learn To Power Think

These days, the shelves at bookstores are filled with self-help books. It seems that everybody who's ever overcome a personal obstacle is writing a book that promises the reader answers to all of life's ills. “If you only do what I have done,” these writers say, “you too can become healthy and whole.” A few of these books are very good, offering workable solutions to a host of problems that people may face. Some are downright bad, offering solutions that not only won't work, but might be dangerous to boot. Most, however, are simply ineffective, incomplete and unnecessary.

A good self-help book must, first and foremost, be motivational. The author has the rather difficult task to both help the reader see that change is necessary and to move the reader to do the difficult work needed to bring about that change. Of course, motivation alone is not enough, so the author must also be knowledgeable, and have tools to give the reader to help effect personal change. These tools must be spiritual as well as psychological. It's no accident that the most enduring self-help manuals have been written by people like Norman Vincent Peale who have a great deal of spiritual training and experience.

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Most modern self-help manuals, however, seem to be written by people with no mind toward motivation and use tools that don't appear to be very well understood by their writers. An example of this approach would be the recently published Learn To Power Think: A Practical Guide to Positive and Effective Decision Making by Caterina Rando. Like most offerings in this genre, it's not really a bad book, it just has very little to recommend it. One could do much better with a tried and true workhorse like Dr. Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking or local writer Gloria Karpinski's Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage.

Like many up-to-the-minute and guaranteed-to-please-the-New-Agers tomes of this type, Learn To Power Think is a beautiful presentation. It's printed on expensive and thick slick paper, with wonderful color illustrations adorning literally every page. Unfortunately, the same attention to detail that's evident in the physical presentation is lacking in the text. Rando doesn't even attempt to motivate her readers, and the advice that she offers is merely okay, being sophomoric and much too obvious. Likewise, the exercises at the end of each chapter are serviceable, but incomplete. Also, nowhere in the book does she stress the undeniable fact that self-improvement is an extremely difficult task requiring much work. Read her book like you would take a pill, she implies. Wash down the words with an exercise or two, and you'll be well on your way to mental and spiritual health and wholeness.

The sad thing is that it's obvious Ms. Rando really wants to be of help, that she's written this book out of a spirit of altruism rather than to seek profit. In the “Introduction” she speaks of a chance encounter with a woman that had once sought her advice, and how that had been a catalyst for writing this book: “She explained that, at our previous meeting, I had told her to believe in her capabilities, to figure out what she needed to do to achieve her ambitions, and to go ahead and achieve them! Most of all, she told me, she was thanking me because I had told her to know that she could be successful and that she could create the life she wanted for herself.”

This rather pedestrian encounter, which pretty much sums-up the tone of the entire text, turned out to be a case of the patient healing the healer. “I never saw her again;” Rando writes, “I do not remember her name – and yet she sent my life in a whole new direction. My right direction.”

Probably the most disappointing part of this book are the “Exercises” included at the end of each chapter. Disappointing because they would be very good if they came with complete instructions. Exercises that should be done daily for several weeks or months are presented in a manner that leaves the reader to believe that it's an instant panacea – do it once and move on to the next chapter.

Caterina Rando obviously has some of the tools needed to write books that can truly be of help. She also has an overwhelming desire to be of service. She's just not ready yet – but her day will come.

Learn To Power Think: A Practical Guide to Positive and Effective Decision Making is published by Chronicle Books. Copies can be be ordered through the publisher's web site at http://www.chroniclebooks.com or from Amazon.com.

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