Personality Books

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Martin E. Seligman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent Start 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I thought this book gave one a great understanding to where we have been and where we could go. Here the author explained how through our experiences and relationships we are pessimistic. He reinforces that most people are negative in their thoughts and teaches us to be optimistic. I have also reviewed Living The Secret Everyday: My Secret Workbook which is a wonderful book proposing this same theory of positive thinking through The Law of Attraction. Read this to learn about the principles of The Law of Attraction and apply it through the exercises given to live this optimistic and happy life.

Editorial Review:

Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P. Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enchances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an “I—give-up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier..

With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound and practical–and valuable for every phase of life.

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

Lundy Bancroft

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 187 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Light Bulb Moment 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I have spent years with a man who is mostly great, but when we fight, verbally and emotionally abusive. We have spent hours, maybe days, trying to figure out why he "loses control" -- what in his past or history causes that level of anger and hatred to rise up. This book was the break-through. It forced both of us to look at it from a different perspective -- it isn't about a bad history or default emotional reactions, it's about control. Luckily, he is in a place in his life where he wants to change, so he was able to look at this with an open mind. But regardless, for me, this book was life-altering and possibly life-saving.

Editorial Review:

"He doesn't mean to hurt me-he just loses control."
"He can be sweet and gentle."
"He's scared me a few times, but he never hurts the children-he's a great father."
"He's had a really hard life..."

Women in abusive relationships tell themselves these things every day. Now they can see inside the minds of angry and controlling men-and change their own lives. In this groundbreaking book, a counselor shows how to improve, survive, or leave an abusive relationship, with:

€ The early warning signs
€ Nine abusive personality types
€ How to tell if an abuser can change, is changing, or ever will
€ The role of drugs and alcohol
€ What can be fixed, and what can't
€ How to leave a relationship safely

What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People

Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

He says that's his best offer. Is it?

She says she agrees. Does she?

The interview went great—or did it?

He said he'd never do it again. But he did.

Read this book and send your nonverbal intelligence soaring. Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer and a recognized expert on nonverbal behavior, explains how to "speed-read" people: decode sentiments and behaviors, avoid hidden pitfalls, and look for deceptive behaviors. You'll also learn how your body language can influence what your boss, family, friends, and strangers think of you. You will discover:

• The ancient survival instincts that drive body language
• Why the face is the least likely place to gauge a person's true feelings
• What thumbs, feet, and eyelids reveal about moods and motives
• The most powerful behaviors that reveal our confidence and true sentiments
• Simple nonverbals that instantly establish trust
• Simple nonverbals that instantly communicate authority

Filled with examples from Navarro's professional experience, this definitive book offers a powerful new way to navigate your world.

Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence

David Keirsey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 118 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This is the WRONG EDITION to buy! 1 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

The second edition is so bad, the name should be changed to "Pretty Please Understand Me, Despite My Poor Writing."

Mark Twain once wrote "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead." A good editor cuts down. Unfortunately, Kiersey's originally brilliant book took the opposite direction. The first edition of Please Understand Me was lucid, and at the same time enigmatic. The second edition, almost twice the page count, was so diffuse, it appeared to have been written by committee.

I didn't understand it.

It appeared that Kiersey was not so interested in persuading the reader of the book's thesis, but more interested in paying homage to the great-great-great-grandfathers of typing theory. Kiersey tediously attempted to stretch and squeeze the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Paracelsus, Adickes, Spranger, Kretschmer, Fromm and Myers to match each other, and boiled them all down to the same thing: that there are four broad categories of personality types. It was a little like hearing an argument that the Spanish word for crocodile and the Filipino word for alligator are referring to the same animal. It left me unconvinced.

The book then diverged into one chapter for each of the four temperaments. Here, instead of four coherent chapters, I felt like I was leafing through four drawers of a filing cabinet where a researcher had thrown scraps of trivia about each temperament, and then just belched them out. The treatment of each temperament was therefore illogical and unbelievably long. And of course I had to endure not one description of a temperament, but about five names for the same temperament from Paracelsus to Jung to Myers, blah, blah, blah. I lost interest even when I was reading about my own personality type. (Maybe the chapter should have mentioned, "You are the type who falls asleep when reading a chapter about yourself full of things that are not true."

RAY OF LIGHT

So I tried the first edition. The first edition was a collaboration of Kiersey and Bates. Perhaps Bates was the copy editing half of the duo. At less than 200 pages, the first edition is a perfect example of a book that can sell millions of copies.

Understandable, concise, and lucid. The first edition takes a complicated theory (and any typing theory would have to be complicated to do humans justice) and makes it usable. Because it makes the system workable, Kiersey & Bates and Myers & Briggs are indispensible to each other. The second chapter of the first edition is the most useful 30 pages ever written in the field.


SO WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
Personality typing is an old idea, but strangely, I believe that it is in its infancy. In my view, the problems with the second edition illustrate the reasons why this fascinating field is only barely on the verge of finding its legs.

Personality typing is a field where too many people are selling the theory and too few are developing it.

You can't prove a theory by showing that the theory is old. To seriously convince anyone, you prove the theory through social scientific methods.

To those who would argue that these theories are not scientifically provable, I would argue that personality typing should be more available to scientific investigation than almost any other field of social science, because it is based on the simple concept: "By knowing a person's type we can anticipate rather accurately what he will do most of the time." (First Edition, p. 27.) If you can predict what a particular person will do, then you can create experiments to test whether the prediction is true. That's the foundation of scientific theory. And without that, Myers-Briggs is no different from astrology or palm reading. But I believe it is.

My readings have always vaguely suggested that Myers and Briggs established their theory through experimentation, but I have seen no real description of the experiments or their findings. So maybe this data does exist, but it's just not frequently discussed. (Please comment to this review and give me the sources so I can educate myself.)

If the data is out there, I have two criticisms. First, I believe that Myers Briggs suffers from inadequate P.R., because many people would be more likely to believe it if they understood the clinical work behind it. That Aristotle allegedly thought about it first doesn't make the theory true. Second, if Myers-Briggs is a scientific theory, then it should be developed like all scientific theories -- with more experimentation on an ongoing basis. And I don't think that ongoing experimentation is going on, which is a shame.

I suspect that people are not developing this worthy theory because personality typing is an easy sell on the seminar circuit, similar to many types of pseudo-science that corporate management types seem to gobble up. And something tells me that this theory holds more for the human race than the promise of consulting fees.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Sam Gosling

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Does what’s on your desk reveal what’s on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell true tales about you? And is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected-and unplanned-ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it others, and interpret the world around us. Gosling, one of the field’s most innovative researchers, dispatches teams of scientific snoops to poke around dorm rooms and offices, to see what can be learned about people simply from looking at their stuff. What he has discovered is astonishing: when it comes to the most essential components of our personalities-from friendliness to flexibility-the things we own and the way we arrange them often say more about us than even our most intimate conversations. If you know what to look for, you can figure out how reliable a new boyfriend is by peeking into his medicine cabinet or whether an employee is committed to her job by analyzing her cubicle. Bottom line: The insights we gain can boost our understanding of ourselves and sharpen our perceptions of others. Packed with original research and fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guidebook to our not-so-secret lives.

Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

Edward M. Md Hallowell, John J. Md Ratey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 66 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Medication? Maybe. Marry the right person and find the right job? A must if you are an adult suffering from ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). So say psychiatrists Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey, authors of the influential Driven to Distraction, published in 1994. In their new book, Delivered from Distraction, Hallowell and Ratey survey the current medical landscape concerning ADD, combining their own clinical observations with the latest research to paint a much more complex and, in many ways, positive picture of the condition than has generally been presented.

Hallowell and Ratey embrace the idea that success in life comes more from playing to your strengths than overcoming your weaknesses. In the case of a person with ADD (child or adult), these strengths often include unusually high levels of creativity, charisma, intelligence, and energy. The authors insist that, while medication and other treatments can sometimes work wonders in reducing limitations, surrounding yourself with people who promote these positive traits, be they in your personal or professional life, is the single most important element to living well with ADD. As both Hallowell and Ratey are not only experts in the field, but "ADDers" themselves, the tips and stories they share for how to do so are fresh, funny, and far more helpful than tired arguments over drugs verse no drugs or whether there's even such a thing as ADD at all.--Patrick Jennings

The Female Brain

Louann Brizendine

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Total reviews: 110 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why are women more verbal than men? Why do women remember details of fights that men can’t remember at all? Why do women tend to form deeper bonds with their female friends than men do with their male counterparts? These and other questions have stumped both sexes throughout the ages.

Now, pioneering neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, M.D., brings together the latest findings to show how the unique structure of the female brain determines how women think, what they value, how they communicate, and who they love. While doing research as a medical student at Yale and then as a resident and faculty member at Harvard, Louann Brizendine discovered that almost all of the clinical data in existence on neurology, psychology, and neurobiology focused exclusively on males. In response to the overwhelming need for information on the female mind, Brizendine established the first clinic in the country to study and treat women’s brain function.

In The Female Brain, Dr. Brizendine distills all her findings and the latest information from the scientific community in a highly accessible book that educates women about their unique brain/body/behavior.

The result: women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean, communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy.