REVIEW: "Refuse to Choose" by Barbara Sher - a book about the journey to the true self

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Guest review from Evgenia Artemyeva on the book by Barbara Sher "I Refuse to Choose" - a book that helps to streamline the chaos of ideas, projects and deeds, without being driven into the framework of "normal life."

Yes, I'm a typical scanner. Now you can honestly admit this to yourself and stop pushing your versatile nature into the square-nesting frame of “normal life”.

Over the past 10 years, I have tried myself in two dozen professions: counselor, merchandiser, political strategist, journalist, marketer, training organizer, fitness trainer, sales manager, magazine editor, head of the web development department. And this is not counting dozens of hobbies, hundreds of books read, constant craving for development and knowledge of something new.

By the age of 28, all this merry carousel began to tire. Looking at my less active peers, I began to notice that over the years of quiet sitting in one place, they had families, children, apartments, cars … And I continued to flutter like a bright butterfly in search of myself.

Barbara Sher's book "Refuse to Choose" came to me at a time of mental crisis.

One phrase gave me hope that my lifestyle is not the fruit of total carelessness, but has a real basis and something can be done about it.

Chances are good that you have a special type of thinking inherent in people I call scanners. You are genetically different from those who once and for all find a sphere of interest for themselves and are content with one area of activity. You are attracted by many different matters at the same time, and you are trying to fill your life with them.

This is not an entirely typical book. It contains a fundamentally new system.

• First, a rehabilitation program that aims to repair the damage done to you by years of misunderstanding and restore your pretty shabby self-esteem.
• Second, special training - you should learn how to best use your unique innate abilities.
• Thirdly, the issues of a professional device. Scanners, like everyone else, need to make money, and the book will guide you how to look for a job where you will not get bored and provide yourself with the means for the life you aspire to lead.

The most valuable thing in the entire book is the practical techniques and exercises that help to streamline the chaos in life. They are simple and straightforward, a mixture of my favorite written practices, creative experimentation and self-knowledge. Barbara does not teach us how to live, there is not a word in the book about the need to drive ourselves into the framework of strict discipline, become normal and act correctly. She invites us to follow her to journey to your true self.

I was struck by the story of Pamela, whose letter is published in the book:

Hi, my name is Pamela, I'm forty-two, the first time I read your books when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight.

Since then I have managed a lot: I went to Greenland, spent a year in Alaska, watched whales in the wild, tracked UFOs for the US Air Force, did various businesses, bought and sold a couple of houses, hunted for a ghost in an English castle, read tarot cards at psychics fairs, performed a loop on a small high-speed plane, designed her current house and participated in its construction, grew about ten thousand different flowers in her garden, worked in a tattoo parlor, became a drummer in a rock group (by the way, already released two discs and are recording the third!); raised dwarf pinschers, received a certificate of an expert in feng shui, read nine million books, knitted a whole miniature village - a Christmas present for my mother, independently mastered database programming, led excursions in the Atlanta zoo, handed out a huge number of your books to those who dared to declare: "I can't do this or that." I also helped my mother undergo and endure cancer treatment … three times! And everything else that I don't remember now.

In short, I'm just a bored housewife (ha!). Now I live in Alabama, I have a land of one hundred and sixty acres - in the wilderness, far from any habitation (stop laughing!), And I sit and think: what next should I take? In general, this is my whole … well, or a part of me.

This story touched me to the core. Thanks to this book, I suddenly believed that everything was fine with me. It makes no sense to endlessly reshape yourself. It's much more fun to explore your strengths and open them up to the world. This is how the most interesting projects are created, dreams come true.

The book is very easy to read, literally in one breath. But, in my opinion, it makes sense to savor it on long winter evenings, like a glass of spicy mulled wine. It unfolds gradually, layer by layer, meaning by meaning. It begins to acquire volume in everyday affairs, texture in words and density in thoughts. Life with her changes gradually, it becomes calmer, the fidgeting leaves and a state of flow comes. And it creates and creates much more productively than in the usual chaos of ideas, projects and deeds.