I recently read a book by Alicia Castillo Holley, called “Falling In Love With Your Life.” Actually, I intended to review this last month but I couldn’t find it. It seems my teenage daughter saw it and took possession of it for a while without telling me. That’s never happened before with any of my nonfiction books – and that, in itself, intrigued me.
When I initially read the title, I was interested but a little hesitant – is this a business book, or a relationship book? After digging in, I have to say it is really both of those things in one.
This book is an interactive book designed to help you analyze the assumptions and hypotheses that drive how you interact with the world. As the author says, “You create your own life, the belief system, and the life you live.”
Through this book, you’ll discover techniques to help you:
- Recognize and reframe your hypotheses
- Create new perspective
- Understand why you might beat yourself up about things in your life.
Thoughts on the exercises
The exercises in this book are challenging ones – make sure you approach them when you have plenty of time and energy, and the right mindset. Many of them require deep reflection and candor (with yourself) to get the most out of them.
For example, the exercise where you name your existing hypothesis about life and write a new one was hard for me the first time I tried to do it – I was tired and crabby and I got fed up and quit.
I came back to the same exercise another day when I was fresh and in a good mood and it was much easier.
I also found that it was helpful to write my responses to the exercises out on a yellow legal pad – I felt constrained by the amount of space in the book for some exercises, and I also found the yellow legal pad more forgiving when I wanted to have a “redo” on some of the exercises.
Be open to the process
Another aspect of the exercises was that some of them felt a bit “not meant for me” – but I did them anyway. I found that even the ones that didn’t feel natural to me added value to some of the other exercises I did later. It would have been easy to just jump over a couple of them (in fact I did, then went back and did them anyway). I urge you to resist that temptation.
I now have a lot of things to think about and a new set of hypotheses to help me change how I see and interact with the world. I don’t yet know the impact of this shift but I already feel less guilty about some of the things that have been bothering me.
If you are irritated or unhappy with things in your life, or you just want to feel more in control of your destiny I recommend you check out a copy of “Falling In Love With Your Life,” and spend some quality time working on the exercises.
Now, I’m giving my copy back to my daughter. I think she’ll like it.