Positively Teenage by Nicola Morgan, reviewed by Dawn Finch

First the blurb…

Full of practical, proven strategies for physical and mental health, Positively Teenage will show you lots of ways to flourish physically and mentally - from doing things you enjoy to learning new skills; looking after your diet, exercise and attitude to being healthy online; getting great sleep to understanding your personality - allowing you to take control of many areas of your life. With these new strengths and skills, you can survive any storms and thrive on the challenges of your exciting life.

I’m going to cut to the quick on this one. If I had been given this book when I was a young teen, I would have definitely (positively!) had happier teenage years. Nicola Morgan (author - NOT former politician, that's a different one) is one of the very finest writers on matters of mental health and well-being for teens and young people, and this book is a perfect example of the very best kind of self-help guide. No, not self-help, this book is more like a survival guide to help young people navigate their teens. Frankly, I found it made me feel a lot more positive about life too!

Inside this book you’ll find wise (but never patronising or cringeworthy) advice on staying positive. Positive attitudes to health and friendship abound, and there is so much good advice in these pages that it is hard to put down. Advice like how to notice what went well, how to improve the quality of your sleep, and how to appreciate yourself and boost your own self esteem...and loads more.

The book is uplifting and supportive in language that is approachable and direct. It never veers towards those glib soundbites that drip in a honeyed and sticky mess from the pages of other books of this type. Instead, Morgan speaks clearly, honestly and directly to the young reader, and comes up with practical and solid advice on how to feel..well.. positive about stuff. It is elegant in its simplicity, and heartwarming in its honesty. The advice is truly brilliant, and all of it is totally doable, and none of it makes you want to vomit. No sickly and hackneyed platitudes here!

This is a book that should be on the shelves of every public and school library (in multiple copies!), but more than that – this should be quietly slipped under the pillows of every young teen in the world. If that happened, the end result would be a more positive world all round.

Positively Teenage: A positively brilliant guide to teenage well-being, is out now and is published by Franklin Watts

ISBN - 978-1445158143

Find out more about Nicola Morgan's books, and her excellent classroom and learning materials, and her public speaking events and services on her website - www.nicolamorgan.com 

Dawn Finch is a children’s author and librarian.

@dawnafinch

www.dawnfinch.com

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THE TEENAGE GUIDE TO FRIENDS by NICOLA MORGAN. Reviewed by Penny Dolan.

“This book is for anyone who wants to know how friendships work and what to do when they don’t,” says the blurb.

 And who wouldn’t want to know about all that?

Few things are as important as friends and friendship groups to teenager, or as complicated. Beyond one’s own family circle, how does one learn about the art of friendship? I feel that the media isn’t always helpful. Films and tv series show idealised - if not ideal - social groups where, for obvious storytelling reasons, episodes must be full of heightened interactions and continually “dramatic” relationships. Real life is more boring and more complicated.

This book, THE TEENAGE GUIDE TO FRIENDS by Nicola Morgan, is a welcome guide, containing a wide range of clearly explained information as well as plenty of those simple “get to know yourself” quizzes beloved by many readers.

The author, Nicola Morgan, is already well known for self-help books for young people: see other titles below. Conversations with pupils and staff in those many schools must surely have led to this latest publication.  

In THE TEENAGE GUIDE TO FRIENDS, she suggests there are many different types of friends. Rather than focusing on the wish for “one best friend”, she looks at the range of opportunities for friendship existing within one’s social groups and beyond. 

Chapters introduce the importance of empathy, the psychology of personality types, as well as peer pressure, group behaviour and the effect of family position. Nicola Morgan writes about the problems that come from the need for friends including the impact of “negative” friendships to managing friends online. She introduces the differing needs of introverts and extroverts, whether in school or out in the wider world, and talks about the management of stress and anxiety.

Wisely, Nicola Morgan suggest that friendships can change, encouraging the young reader to consider friendship as a range of relationships, not always of the same intensity or serving the same purpose or lasting for ever. 

Over the chapters, she points out that friendship asks for understanding and that sometimes one needs to say sorry, or not to take things too personally or seriously. I also liked how, in one chapter, she promotes the value of just being friendly by acting inclusively towards outsiders within social situations and lunch-breaks: an outward looking view of friendship, not just a focus on "me."

Nicola Morgan’s tone is warm and straightforward; she makes it clear that this is a book of general advice and information, and frequently tells troubled readers to talk to trusted friends or adults. The last section, which supplies plenty of helpful addresses, includes warnings about the dangers of misleading articles, unofficial blogs and web-sites.

Best of all, I felt, was the way that Nicola Morgan tries to give her teenage readers more confidence in managing their social circles and that intention, in particular, makes her book, THE TEENAGE GUIDE TO FRIENDS, a useful and an easy read. I’d say that this title would be a welcome addition to secondary schools self-help collections, in the library or wherever such books can be quietly and easily reached by those who need them.

Penny Dolan.

Ps. Just to avoid misunderstandings, Nicola Morgan does visit schools frequently and is an established writer of fiction and non-fiction books. 

She is not Nicky Morgan, the past Secretary of State for Education.

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59 Seconds by Professor Richard Wiseman, reviewed by John Dougherty

In my last Awfully Big Blogpost, I mentioned the truth about ‘visualization’ - the idea, prevalent in so many self-help books, that the first step to success is to imagine it.

Examined under experimental conditions, visualization turns out to be rubbish. It doesn’t only not do what its proponents claim for it; it has the opposite effect. This is just one of the fascinating facts in 59 Seconds.

59 Seconds is a self-help book with a difference. Written by “Britain’s only professor for  the Public Understanding of Psychology”, it challenges some of the prevalent self-help myths, and offers alternatives grounded in proper peer-reviewed scientific research and presented for the reader in an accessible

and entertaining way.

The book is divided into 10 sections - happiness, persuasion, motivation, creativity, attraction, stress, relationships, decision-making, parenting & personality. In each section, you’ll learn of some fascinating studies - did you know, for instance, that it’s possible to fool someone into thinking they’re drunk when they are in fact completely sober? That people are more likely to do you a big favour if they’ve already done you a small one? Or that you can accurately make predictions about a child’s future using only 3 marshmallows and a bell?

I’ve always been fascinated by this sort of thing, and if the book was just a collection of interesting facts gleaned from psychological research it would have kept me entertained. It’s more than that, though - you’re quite likely to find something in here that you want to try. One of my aims for this summer, taken from the chapter on creativity, is to work with my kids to produce a piece of art that will help with my writing. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Actually, the creativity chapter is probably my major reason for reviewing the book here - I know a lot of ABBA readers are creative types, and the chapter contains a number of quick and easy tips for getting that creativity going. I intend to give some of them a go myself, just as soon as I’ve worked through the tips on procrastination in the ‘motivation’ chapter.

Oh, and the title? It comes from a realisation that self-help books attract people because they offer quick & easy solutions to real-life issues, whereas academic psychology is often seen as either avoiding these issues or presenting answers that take years. Some of the ideas in this book, by contrast, can be put into practice in less than a minute.

You’ll find this a fascinating and enjoyable read; and who knows? It may just, dare I say it, change your life.

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Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth by Susan Jane Smith BSc

          

Category: Adult, self-help.

Susan Jane Smith

Reviewer: Susan Price.

          Susan Jane Smith’s photo shows someone very like the ideal grandmother: smiling, kind, wise, good humoured, ready to listen, and understand.

          Her book, Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth shows this to be an accurate assessment.  Life experience has taught her wisdom.  Twenty years of counselling means that nothing surprises or shocks her.  Her advice may not be what you want to hear, but it’s probably what you need to hear.

         Susan Jane Smith herself says that this is ‘another self-help book.’ What makes it different is the fine anger underlying the compassion and advice, and the passion for helping people to overcome the emotional pain she suffered herself.

          Emotional pain means you cannot be healthy: you cannot live at ease with yourself.  Nor can you be emotionally wealthy. You may have material wealth –you may be driven to tirelessly acquire more and more ‘success’ – but  emotional pain prevents you from relaxing, or simply, wholeheartedly enjoying anything.  The pain forever chafes and nags.

Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth

          It can be so established that it seems normal, yet it still hinders people, adversely influencing their choices in careers, in partners, life.

          Susan Jane Smith knows all too well that attaining the peace of ‘emotional health’ isn’t easy.  Habits are hard to change, and trying often rouses old terrors: but many live with such distress they are willing to work hard to be rid of it: to endure the nightmares, the withdrawal, the loss of family and friends… Whatever it takes.

          Susan Smith went through this struggle herself, and relates how, after years of counselling, she woke one day to a puzzling sensation: an absence of the emotional pain that had chafed her for so long.  The experience set her on a crusade: to qualify as a counsellor so she could relieve others’ pain.

          Her message is simple: If you don’t like your life, change it.  If you can’t understand what is causing your pain, don’t know what to change, or how to begin – then find a therapist to help you puzzle it out, and encourage you when it gets tough.

          Her advice is excellent, but she doesn’t expect you to simply accept it, recommending many other titles and organisations for consultation. The book is a veritable self-therapy source-book.

          She discusses the pain caused by the abuse of children, domestic violence and rape – and also the addictions and compulsive habits so often employed in a desperate attempt to control the resulting emotional pain: alcoholism and other drug abuse, compulsive eating and starving, over-work, self-harm and violence towards others.

          The advice is always based on what Susan Smith has found to be practical and effective.  It is admirably down-to-earth and realistic.

          She has counselled abusers and rapists, and although she has compassion for them, her attitude is refreshingly steely: ‘My understanding from the people I have worked with who had perpetrated abuse is that they simply “wanted to” and could.  They have a callous disregard for the victim… One man said… it would be a crime [only] if the victim told the police.  Distorted thinking!’

          The book’s empowering anger is inspired by injustice, cruelty and apathy.  A Telegraph headline – ‘Child Abuse Won’t Be Overcome Until We Define What It Is’ – makes her demand: Do governments and social services still not know what it is?  She provides, from her experience, a full definition for their assistance.

          She has listened to the damaged adult victims of every kind of child abuse: children hit with pokers, constantly ridiculed, left hungry and cold for days, raped.  Her fervent wish, I think, is for us all to sort ourselves out and stop treating each other so badly!

As the old Russian tale says, There would be no suffering on earth…if only we were kind to each other.

          Sadly, that time will never come, but Susan Jane Smith will battle on – an odd shining knight, but a brave one.

          Almost everyone would gain some insight, some help from reading this book – and if you are one of the many bruised and reeling from a cruel childhood, or rape, or assault by a partner – to name only a few possible traumas – I think this book would be a strong, supportive, wise friend.

           Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth can be found here (UK)

           And here (USA)

          Susan Price is the Carnegie winning author of 'The Ghost Drum' and 'The Sterkarm Handshake'.

          She blogs at Nennius  and with the Authors Electric.

          Her website is at www.susanpriceauthor.com

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