Title: How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be: A Simple Guide for Those Who Are Ready to Take Charge and Redirect Their Lives
Author: Pam Grewall
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 978-1-5320-9402-6
Pages: 157
Genre: Self-Improvement
Reviewed by: Allison Walker

Read Book Review

It’s easy to want something better for yourself, but knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. A person can be so mired into their current situation that getting out feels like an impossible task. In her book, “How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be: A Simple Guide for Those Who Are Ready to Take charge and Redirect Their Lives, author Pam Grewall shows readers just how attainable those goals actually are.

Grewall’s book can be summarized almost perfectly in an analogy she makes; How do you eat an elephant? The answer: One bite at a time. Feelings of fear and anger can overwhelm a person and make it difficult to find the way to become who you want to be. How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be takes the reader through – one bite at a time. One “bite,” in this case, is a collection of essays, fables, stories, quotes and art held together by Grewall’s gentle guidance.

How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be is an interactive self-help book that encourages the reader to recognize their own anger and fear in order to begin the journey to casting aside self-doubt. Mindfulness and gratitude are only two of the tools readers are exposed to under Grewall’s guidance. Once readers understand the power of choices, Grewall introduces more meaningful interactions between others and yourself. A particularly powerful analogy Grewall uses is the experiment with the cup of mud and cup of sand. Pour mud into a cup and allow it to dry and harden, Grewall instructs. Then, pour sand into a cup. Place both cups under running water and see which one flows out of their respective cup first. The mud takes much longer to rinse from the cup. This is how long it takes the negative beliefs, hard packed into your mind, to clear house, Grewall explains.

How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be is a good choice for anyone looking to improve or change themselves but who don’t know where to start. It’s a simple, interactive guide which will get readers over the starting line of setting goals for self- improvement. Asking for help can be difficult, since it can be very uncomfortable to admit you aren’t perfect, even to people you trust. Grewall’s book focuses on self- reflection, staying within a certain comfort zone. How to Help Yourself to Be Who You Want to Be is everything the author promises it to be.