It’s no secret that I love Brene Brown and her work on vulnerability and shame. Her books — and TedTalks, and Netflix show, etc. — have helped me realize I’m not alone in a lot of what I feel and struggle with. One of her “catchphrases,” if you will, has turned into a life hack for me. When I notice my thoughts are headed in a direction that I don’t like, I stop, pause, and ask myself, “what is the story I’m telling myself right now?” Wait, you might be wondering: Isn’t this is a book review of Neil Pasricha’s new personal development book, “You are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure, and Live an Intentional Life”?
Yes, yes it is. I bring up Brene Brown first though, because when I first opened Pasricha’s book, I felt like he took off where Brown left off. He helps readers answer the question of: “what is the story I’m telling myself right now?” In particular his book focuses on moments of failure, the stories we tell ourselves surrounding those moments, and how to navigate failure and build resilience.
(I was provided an advanced reading copy for a review. Affiliate links included. Read my full disclosure here).
Neil Pasricha’s Book Teaches Us How to Get Back Up
As Pasricha shares early on, “Every skyrocketing pleasure or stomach-churning defeat defines not who he is but simply where he is.” Every moment of our lives, in other words, doesn’t define us. Our stories change over time — something that we often forget in the heat or pressure of a moment.
This book by Pasricha is about falling down, but teaching ourselves how to get back up. It’s about adding a “dot dot dot” to help us move forward in our life and how to reframe our negative self talk. Using examples from his family’s lives, as well as his own — including a divorce, being fired from his first full-time job, and why he felt like “half a man” — he shares what failure can teach us, how to handle it, and how to be intentional with where we place our attention. And fortunately he does it all with a sense of humor.
His goal, as he writes, is for readers “to see the failure you’re going through as a step up an invisible staircase toward a Future You in a Future Life you can’t even imagine yet.” While the book can be quite personal, it’s backed by research studies, including one particularly eye opening study about how everyone has a hard time picturing their lives any different than they are in any given moment, which is, as Pasricha says, “a dangerous psychological tendency.”
How Do We Rewrite Our Stories?
So how do we start making changes and rewrite our stories according to Pasricha? Throughout “You Are Awesome,” he provides a set of steps, but it all starts with this: zooming out and sharing our failures. As he writes, “One thing we can do is this: we can talk about it more, share our failures, ask for help, and scrub the sheen of perfection right off us.” We can be, in short, vulnerable.
But dang, vulnerability and putting ourselves out there can be hard can’t it?
Pasricha recognizes that in “You Are Awesome” and provides some tools, including questions to ask ourselves (one of my favorites being: “Will this matter on my deathbed?”, journal prompts to help start the day off right, and tips on finding positives even amidst failure. By building resilience, by rewriting our shame stories, he teaches us how to be gentler in a society where it’s really hard to be kind to ourselves.
“You Are Awesome” is largely about mindset and teaching ourselves how to shift the way we think so that when we do fail — as failure is inevitable no matter what choices we make — we know how to get right back up again. Failure means you tried. Failure means you stepped out of your comfort zone and fumbled along the way. But failure is not the end of your story.
Have you read Neil Pasricha’s books? I’d love to hear your thoughts below!
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