By Emily De Vogele and Cameron Phillips
The new year often is a time of reflection, planning and promises to do better. Resolutions are made, goals are set and overall we try to get our lives together a bit more. Self-help and motivational books are great places to start if you’re struggling to set a resolution, or just want a bit more guidance going into 2022. We wanted to share some of our top picks with you today, so you can start your new year off right!
Emily’s Pick:
I’ve always been a little apprehensive of self-help books. It took me years to finally find one that was more than a few happy quotes and pretty drawings. But I recently found one that spoke to me as a person and called me out on my actions, leaving me feeling understood and wanting to be better. Please Yourself: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Transform the Way You Live by Emma Reed Turrell was that book.
As someone who used to be a chronic people-pleaser, this book called me out on uncomfortable truths I didn’t want to admit to myself and gives real solutions to human struggles. Turrell speaks from experience as a psychotherapist, she knows what she’s talking about when she’s dishing out this advice and information. Given that she narrates the audiobook herself, there’s this feeling of care and compassion in her voice and she presents herself as the kind of therapist everyone wants.
Not only does she talk about people-pleasing on a personal level, but she goes into detail about pleasing as a woman, which was incredibly eye opening. Women are often conditioned to act a certain way in society, to be the gracious ones or the polite ones, putting ourselves last to please others. Turrell directly challenges this and realistically gives us ways to avoid this.
If you find that you’re a bit of a people-pleaser and want to focus more on yourself this year, I highly recommend you pick this one up. Entertaining as well as informative, this was a quick read that I found myself wanting to return to and reread almost immediately. Short, to the point and honest, you’ll find yourself wishing you had read it sooner; I know I did.
Cameron’s Pick:
I received a fantastic, very touching present from a friend of mine over Christmas – a book entitled Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices. Our picks for this week continue on from our article concerning mental health, and in that article, I said that I had finally managed to start grappling with my unhappiness. One of those ways was rediscovering my passion for my hobbies, mainly drawing. I drew all the time when I was at university, but fell out of love with it, as you often do with your hobbies when you have a massive mental slump. Having recently revitalised my illustrative streak, I fortified this with a few audiobooks, namely The Art of Creative Thinking, written by Rod Judkins and narrated by Phil Fox.
Rod Judkins is a lecturer and researcher at St. Martin's College of Art, and in this book outlines the many ways in which creativity can transform our lives outside of the creative arts. I have always been a creative person, whether it be facing an empty word document, notebook, or with a pencil in my hand, but I wanted to find methods of using my creative abilities in more practical, real life ways. How can I use it in my job hunt, how can I use it during problem solving situations, in interpersonal situations, how can I use this to manage my mental health? All of these and many more are touched upon in this book, and whilst I’m only at the beginning of this process, I feel far more confident and happier in making my creative side more flexible and useful, to make progress beyond the page. It’s the small things, like being proud of your work and not worrying what people think of the end product. One of the most useful messages I have taken from the book and one that inspired me to set up my first ever public platform for my illustrations, was that rather than being concerned by whether or not people like the end product, concern yourself with whether they like the process itself. I don’t mind if people don’t like my work, but it does warm me that people are interested in the process, and that it makes me happy.
If you are a practically creative person, with skills such as writing, drawing and composition, then this book could potentially help you in making those facets multi-dimensional and flexible. I think creative people can often be unsure of themselves and their work, but this book has shown me that it doesn’t have to be that way.