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Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want (Paperback)
by Barbara Sher
| Category:
Personal success, Success |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Through this useful and enlightening book, the author should be given credit for making hope accessible and practical. |
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Author: Barbara Sher
Publisher: Ballantine Books; 2nd Ballat edition
Pub. in: December, 2003
ISBN: 0345465180
Pages: 272
Measurements: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00065
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- MSL Picks -
This book has very interesting and unconventional ideas for getting you to think about how you are going to realize your hopes and dreams.
Her own career trek started back in the late 60's (my book has a copyright date of 1979, and in the introduction as well as the chapter entitled "Brainstorming", she says she started over in New York city "11 years ago") where she essentially talked her way into a job as a counselor in a drug program, and things got better from there.
Now, 'way back then, that sort of job was likely not licensed or overseen in any way, so she could get away with that sort of thing. You might have gotten a few hours of "training", but mostly you learned on the job. It is a similar career path for those who volunteer their way into full-time employment (another tactic she also mentions in the same chapter). Current analogies are probably "weight loss counselor", "career counselor" or "life coach", none of which require any credentials to speak of. Just put out your shingle, and go for it.
The other situation where credentials don't matter so much is if you are a pioneer in your field (think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc.). In that case YOU are the one setting the standards.
Even though her book's dust jacket calls her one, I would never consider the author a "therapist" in the way people generally think of the word, which is usually in conjunction with "licensed", since she says she's never taken any other classes than those required for her BA in Anthropology. It does refer to her as a "career counselor", which is much more accurate.
The other thing I found odd was that her book seemed to be just chock full of people who had these great connections to people and things. Well, that is a lot more likely in some large cosmopolitan city like New York than it is in your typical small town. Something to think about when you have the get-togethers she recommends in order to generate ideas. Today, you would be better off going online.
Bottom line, it is a good book with creative ideas, but take what she says with a grain of salt. If your chosen path requires a degree or some sort of certification by law, you'd better get one, or you will get in trouble at some point when it catches up with you. On the other hand, if you want to be an artist, or do something new and groundbreaking, you have a lot more latitude as to how you go about attaining your goal. (From quoting an American reader)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government officials, heads of non-profit organizations, MBAs and professionals. And anyone else.
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BARBARA SHER is a speaker, career/lifestyle coach, and the best-selling author of eight books on goal achievement. Her books have sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages. She has appeared on Oprah, Today, 60 Minutes, CNN, and Good Morning America, and her popular public television specials air nationally throughout the year. Barbara Sher lives in New York City.
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From the Publisher:
Fox was a waitress. Now she's a pilot. Peter Johnson was a truck driver. Now he's a dairy farmer. Tina Forbes was a struggling artist. Now she's a successful one. Alan Rizzo was an editor. Now he's a bookstore owner.
What they have in common–and what you can share–are Barbara Sher's effective strategies for making real changes in your life. This human, practical program puts your vague yearnings and dreams to work for you–with concrete results. You’ll learn how to
- Discover your strengths and skills
- Turn your fears and negative feelings into positive tools
- Diagram the path to your goal–and map out target dates for meeting it
- Chart your progress–day by day
- Create a support network of contacts and sources
- Use a buddy system to keep you on track
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Who Do You Think You Are?
Who do you think you are?
That's a very interesting question. Or it would be, if the people who asked it when we were young had really wanted a thoughtful answer. Unfortunately, they weren't looking for an answer at all. They already had the answers. This is what they were saying:
'Who do you think you are, Sarah Bernhardt? Take that shawl off for a minute and finish the dishes." Or:
'Who do you think you are, Charles Darwin? Get that disgusting turtle off my dining room table and do your arithmetic." Or:
'You – an astronaut? A scientist like Madame Curie? A movie star? Who do you think you are?"
Does that sound familiar? Most of us heard that question at some time during our growing up – usually at the vulnerable moment when we ventured some dream, ambition, or opinion close to our hearts. But imagine those words were spoken in a curious, open, wondering tone of voice, for once – not in that scalding tone of scorn we’ve all had burned in our brains.
I'd like to invite you to a try simple experiment. I'm going to ask you that question again, only this time try hearing it as a real question. Who do you think you are?
EXERCISE 1: Who Do You Think You Are?
Take a blank sheet of paper (we're going to be using a lot of blank paper in this book – it's the staff of life) and, in a few sentences to half a page, answer the question: What do you consider the 4 or 5 most important characteristics that define your identity? There are no right or wrong answers, and there's only one rule: don't think too long or hard. Put down the first and surest things that come to mind: "That is me."
Now take a look at your answer. There a better than 50% chance that you said something like this:
"I'm 28, Catholic, single, a secretary in an electronics firm, live in Buffalo."
Or:
"I'm 5'10", 175 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, Italian, former running back, vote Democratic, Vietnam veteran, appliance salesman."
Or:
"I'm a former teacher, married to a man I love, an M.D. in internal medicine, and I’m the mother of 3 terrific kids: Marty 13, Jimmy, 8, and Elise, 5 1/2." Or,
"I'm black, born in Detroit, oldest of 5 kids. My father worked for GM. B.A. from Wayne State. Computer Programmer. Marrying to my high school sweetheart next summer."
All variants of "This is what I do for a living, here's where I live, I'm married, not married, I make money, I don't, I'm so-and-so's mother, I'm Episcopalian, I'm in school" – the kinds of things we usually tell each other when we meet. When we've exchanged these vital statistics, geographical and occupational details, we feel we've declared our identities and begun to get to know each other.
Well, we're wrong.
There's no question that these things have been important in our lives. In fact, they have usually shaped our lives. They are experience, history, role, relationship, livelihood, skill, survival. Some of them are choices. Some, including many we’d call choices, are compromises. Some are accidents.
None of them is your identity.
This may surprise you, but if I were sitting down with you to help you choose a goal and design a life individually tailored for you, I would not ask you for any of this information. I would not want to want to know what you do for a living, unless you were really excited by your job. I would not want to want to know any of the things you put in a resume – your background, your experience, your skills. All too often we are skilled in things we never really chose, things we have had to do – like typing or scrubbing floors (those were my skills) – not things we love.
When it comes to picking out what you'll do with energy and joy, what you can be a smashing success at, your skills are not only unimportant – they can get in the way, unless you assign them to a strictly secondary role. For the moment, I’d like you just to forget about them.
What?
That's right. And just for now, I'd like you to forget your job (unless you love it), your family (even though you love them), your responsibilities, your education, all the things that make up your "reality" and your "identity." Don't worry. They won't go away. I know they are important to you. Some of them are necessary and dear to you. But they are not you. And right now the focus is on you.
What I'm interested is what you love.
You may or may not be able to say what that is. If you can, it may be your work, or a hobby, or a sport, or a pastime like going to the movies, or something you’ve always loved reading about, or a subject you wish you had studied in school, or just something that gives off a special whiff of fascination for you wherever it goes by, even though you know very little about it.
There may very well be several things you feel that way about. Whatever they are – guitar music, bridges, bird-watching, sewing, the stock market, the history of India – there is a very, very good reason why you love them. Each one is a clue to something inside you – a talent, an ability, a way of seeing the world that is uniquely yours. You may not know you have it. You may have a case of amnesia about it. That amnesia can be so total that you’re not even sure what you love. And yet, that is you!
That is your identity, your core.
It is something more. Because "who you are" isn't passive or static or unchanging. It is a vital design, as one philosopher put it, that needs to unfold and express itself through the medium of your whole life. And so that unique pattern of talents and gifts that lie hidden in the things you love is also the map to your own life path.
Did you even go on a treasure hunt when you were a child, or read Poe's "The Golden Bug"? Then you know that the first thing you have to do before you can find the treasure is find the map. It may be hidden, it may be torn in half, or in a million pieces, but your first job is to find it and put the fragments back together, like a jigsaw puzzle. That's what we're going to be doing for you in the first section of this book.
The clues to your life path are not lost. They are just scattered and hidden – some of them right under your nose, in plain sight. They need to be gathered together and examined carefully before you can begin to know how to design a life that truly fits you, a life that will make you feel like jumping out of bed in the morning to meet the world, a little scared at times, maybe, but fully alive.
If you are low on energy, if you need a lot of sleep and feel like you're always dragging yourself around at half throttle, it may not be because you need vitamins or have low blood sugar. It may be because you have not found your purpose in life. You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.
This is part of the secret of all genuinely successful people: they have found their paths. They also happen to have some very special skills for making their visions come true in reality. That is very important, and it's the purpose of the second part of this book to teach you those skills. But first you must liberate your own ingenuity and drive, and the only way to do that is to discover your own path. It is the only path that will ever truly absorb you. And the treasure at the end is success.
Right now I'd like to do something symbolic. Take that piece of paper on which you answered the question, "Who do you think you are?" Glance through it one more time. Now crumple it up and throw it in the wastebasket.
This is the only piece of paper I'm going to ask you to do that with, and as I said, you'll have occasion to write on quite a few sheets of paper as we go along. Alternatively, you might want to save this one as a souvenir. It will serve nicely as the first in a pair of "Before and After" pictures. Call it the souvenir of a misconception. Because if you're like most of us, you are not who think you are.
Who are you really?
You've forgotten – but you knew once – when you were a very small child. So that's the place to start our search for the lost treasure map of your talents: in the first five precious and mysterious years of your life – the greatest learning period you ever had.
I'll tell you one thing about who you were then.
You were a genius.
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San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-29 00:00>
What makes Sher's philosophy strikingly different from other authors is her compelling belief that 'There is no strategic problem that cannot be solved' … Comprehensive and inviting… Eminently practical. |
Richard Nelson Bolles (Author of What Color Is Your Parachute?) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-29 00:00>
One of the saddest lines in the world is, "Oh come now–be realistic." The best parts of this world were not fashioned by those who were realistic. They were fashioned by those who dared to look hard at their wishes and gave them horses to ride… I've got about four copies of Wishcraft. It has been very popular… I have now included it in Parachute! |
New Age Magazine (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-29 00:00>
The most irreverent and refreshing self-help manual now on the market . . . Feisty, funny, and down-to-earth, this book is bound to benefit all those who sense they may have temporarily lost track of their true goals |
A. Peacock (MSL quote), UK
<2006-12-29 00:00>
Over the years, I've read many a book on goal-setting and achievement. I started many years ago with the obligatory Think and Grow Rich, avoided Anthony Robbin's Unlimited Power because it looked "too American," floundered around some more in the Positive Mental Attitude books, and came back to Anthony Robbins in desperation. I was seeking something practical and effective, to help me manage my life, as I was having problems due to giving up a well-paid job to study full-time. At that point, I was hooked on NLP. However, if I had read Wishcraft, I might have bypassed Anthony Robbins altogether, and would not be where I am today (such at it is). Why? Because this book provides everything I was looking for in a book at that time.
It is split into two broad sections: the first helps you to answer the question "What are my goals?" the second, "How do I achieve them?" The first section contains a number of fairly standard exercises to help you brainstorm your goals. If you are new to the idea of goal-setting, this is a great place to start; however, if you have done many exercises in goal-setting, then most of these exercises will be familiar. However, I suspect that most people will find something of use here, no matter how well- read they are.
The second section is where the book comes into its own. The authors outline a number of tools and methods to help you be successful once you know what your goals are. Some of them are to do with planning, some to do with emotions and managing your state, some are to do with getting the help of others.
The planning model is the best I've come across, and I've done some formal training on planning in a corporate environment. It doesn't cover complex ideas like GANT charts, critical-path analysis, and so on, but it does provide a simple, workable, and effective method of setting out what you'll actually need to do to reach your goal. And it all boils down to two simple questions…
Can I do this tomorrow? If not, what do I need to do first?
Keep going through those two questions, and you'll end up with a plan consisting of achievable steps that you can do in a day, rather than huge steps which take days or weeks to accomplish. One of the difficulties that many people experience with tasks of this size is due to lack of specificity; breaking the task down into smaller ones helps to make it more `real' and hence easier to get started on and to accomplish.
However, in any planning model, particularly where you are venturing out into uncharted territory, there will be some points in your plan where you simply do not know what steps are required - if you are familiar with the idea of unconscious incompetence, then you'll know what I mean. (If not, take a quick look at the article below). Again, using one simple idea, the authors can help you to overcome those problems, based on the idea that if you can't do something, then you know someone who can, or you know someone who knows someone who can, or you know someone who knows someone who...
They call the idea "barnraising," from the idea in certain communities where each person helps the others build their barn, and then receive help from each person in building their own barn. They suggest getting all your friends, family, and colleagues together; tell them explicitly what you want; and see how they can help. At the same time, help them with their goals or plans. Whilst not a new idea, the authors go out of their way to tell you that you don't have to do everything by yourself, and then give you a framework in which to work with others to achieve your mutual goals. Anyone familiar with Stephen Covey's Seven Habits will immediately recognize the win/win situation.
Where this ties in nicely with NLP is the 'explicit' part: the meta-model is the ideal tool here for: A) defining what you need B) clarifying exactly what help others can provide C) helping others define what they need.
The authors also provide two questions that will help if you encounter a problem in the form of "I can't do/have X until I have/do Y" The two questions are:
How can I get X without having/doing Y? How can I get/do Y?
Later, the book covers some basic time management skills, and some general strategies for dealing with fear, including one called "Lower Your Standards - at First." The latter goes against many positive thinking-type books by saying if your goals are too far beyond your current beliefs about what you can do, you will most likely be afraid. The way to reduce your fear is to aim to do things badly, then there is no problem if you do actually do them badly. Then, when you've got some experience under your belt, you will be in a position to set realistic, challenging, and achievable goals.
The comments I've written here sound fairly mundane - I'm not one to rant and rave over a book. One of the biggest complements that I can give a book is to say that I will never throw it away, and I will read it at least once per year without fail. I've had this book for about 4 years now, and I've read it 5-6 times, and I will never throw it away (at least, I might, but only to replace it with a less dog-eared copy). Its simplicity, elegance, and plain- talking, combined with sold, practical advice, make it one of my favorite books. |
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