Excellent Insights! | Embracing Fear and Finding the Courage to Live Your Life

A BOOK WITH A SPECIAL MESSAGE | Embracing Fear and Finding the Courage to Live Your Life | Thom Rutledge

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	• Embracing Fear and Finding the Courage to Live Your Life Thom Rutledge HarperCollins Publishers, 2002 - 206 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Gives different perspective

I found this a book insightful although very simplistic in writing style. It was helpful in giving other counselors a different way of looking at difficulties they have in some therapy sessions. Especially those clients that are stuck in one perspective and can not move off the safety square.

Excellent Insights!

This book will challenge you to look fear in the face and walk right though it! On the other side of fear is Love. If you want more love in your life. . . read this book!

A BOOK WITH A SPECIAL MESSAGE

Written with sincere compassion, and a warm, direct tone, Thom Rutledge gives us permission to be human, and helps the reader see that having fears, or tendencies to avoid those situations which create fear, is not a basis for shame. Embracing Fear teaches the reader to transform maladaptive responses, into winning situations, and the importance of finding the gift, lesson or opportunity in challenges we face. With his honest style, he helps us find the reason and rational messages we can listen to within our being when facing difficult or frightening situations. This is a man who knows of what he writes. His knowledge, personal experience, and ability to convey that he truly cares makes him a uniquley therapeutic and helpful writer. The reader is left feeling nurtured all along the way, and yet skillfully challenged as well. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, MD author: Fed Up! The Breakthrough Ten Step No-Diet Fitness Plan.

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Not an ordinary self-help book

*****
This book is a great read all about fear. Specifically, it is about embracing fear---facing fear---rather than running from it, stuffing it, etc. Unlike most self-help books, the author does not presume to be an authority with easy answers; instead, he is a fellow human being who struggles with his own fear and that of his clients. He shares very practical techniques to approach your fears so that you can still have the life you want, regardless of your fears.

Fear underlies most if all negative emotions. I found this book to be very helpful. The author asks many helpful questions such as "What would I do today if I were brave?"...leading me to see where my fears stopped me.

Another technique he uses is splitting our self-talk into the negative voices of unhealthy unnecessary fear (which he calls The Bully) and the positive voices of what we know with our heads and hearts (which he calls The Ally). This has been really helpful to me, too. He makes the point that we will never rid ourselves of fear, but we will be less and less bothered by it as we learn how to face it.

This book differs from an ordinary self-help book in that it is amazingly useful, plus the author is practical, transparent, realistic, and humble. I loved reading it, highlighted it all over the place, and will read it again.

It is an excellent value and worth hours of therapy. I would even suggest it in lieu of therapy! I immediately bought two copies to send to two of my closest friends.
*****

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Not the Ultimate, but Good

Thom Rutledge quotes an attendee at one of his seminars shaking his hand and saying, "Thanks for being so messed up."

Rutledge, a recovering alcoholic, knows about fear from firsthand experience and not from reading psychology textbooks about it (he's a therapist). That's the best aspect of Embracing Fear. He never talks down to the reader, as if he, Rutledge, has all the answers.

How odd it is that we go through 12 years of public school and learn useless facts about the speed of light and how to measure the area of a triangle, but we're never taught how to deal with fear. That is one of life's most vital skills.

Rutledge points out that fear is universal. Everybody suffers from fear of something. It helps to know that.

I liked Rutledge's wife's naming of the two voices inside us as "The Ally" and "The Bully." Most of us go through life being cowed by The Bully. Rutledge shows how to stand up to him.

The author admits this book is not the cure, but I say it's a big help. When we face our fears as he explains how to, we discover they don't have as much power over us as we imagined. The tragedy is that most of us go through our entire life before we learn this. Some folks never learn it.

This is a worthwhile book. Your money will be well spent. You'll learn important, useful things from it. Read it, think about it, then put his suggestions into practice in your life.

You won't become fearless, but you'll be much less afraid of fear.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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