The Confident Woman

The Confident Woman:  How to Boost Self-Esteem and Happiness for Everyday Women by Carolina Ordoñez is exactly what it sounds like:  a self-help book for women.  Ordoñez has taken her journey from being a meek and depressed young girl to a confident and successful woman, sharing anecdotes of her own experience while explaining what she did to improve herself.  Each chapter focuses on one particular aspect, and Ordoñez discusses why the issue is important to your self-esteem, what she did to change this aspect in her own life, and offers advice as to what she personally recommends to truly get the most out of improving yourself with regards to this aspect.  At the end of the book are lists of recommended reading and videos to watch, which are relevant to the bettering of oneself. 

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The Confident Woman may be a quick read, but this is certainly not a book that guarantees a quick fix for your self-esteem issues.  To be completely honest, when I started it, I actually wondered a little whether such a short book could really even be all that helpful.  And now that I've finished reading?  My verdict is that The Confident Woman is absolutely a helpful book.  I tend to be fairly picky about the self-help books that I pick up, since most of them end up falling well short of their purpose for me.  Once in a while, though, I come a cross one, or one is brought to my attention, that shows a bit of promise, and this was one.

Ordoñez writes in a tone that is rather conversational, and I got the sense that I was being given advice by a friend or a trusted acquaintance.  I've read other books of this nature that try to achieve this same tone only to end up coming across as patronizing or condescending, but I got none of that sense from this book.  English is not Ordoñez's first language, and there were some instances where I picked up on that either from the grammar or the language used, and in general, the technical aspects of the book were kind of rough around the edges, so I'd probably send it to an editor for some tidying up, if it were me.  I don't feel that the content of the book suffered much because of this, though, and I think I got a lot out of reading it.

Transforming Body Image

Transforming Body Image:  Learning to Love the Body You Have by Marcia Germaine Hutchinson is a self-help book for women who have negative body image (though it wouldn't be difficult, I think, to adapt the content for men to make use of, as well).  Each chapter in this book provides mental exercises and workbook-style questions for the reader to answer on her own.  Hutchinson makes a point of focusing attention on mental, rather than physical, changes, but unlike some other books on this topic, this one isn't all about feeding the reader pages of insincere flattery.  Hutchinson's methods are very introspective and are designed to take time and real effort.  There are stories from women who have taken Hutchinson's workshop using these exercises, and though the four women featured in the final chapter were still working through their issues well after the workshop had taken place, they all had significantly improved mindsets about their bodies.

In my opinion, the fact that these women were still works in progress, so to speak, lends Transforming Body Image a certain amount of credibility.  It proves that Hutchinson isn't trying to sell readers some kind of quick fix in her book.  Changing your self-image is not something that can be accomplished overnight, and this book acknowledges that and encourages readers to take their time and really focus on each exercise individually until they feel they've improved in each step.  It rings very genuine to me.

Love Your Body

Love Your Body by Louise L. Hay is a small book of positive affirmations designed for you to say out loud to yourself every day; there is an affirmation for many different parts of the body, and there is a blank page for each as well, so you can write in your own thoughts and affirmations to go along with the ones Hay has come up with.

For a self-help book, I actually do not think Love Your Body is at all helpful.  I'm sure affirmations work for some people, but the ones Hay provides in this book are mostly all the same few things repeated for every single body part she goes through.  I thought this was supposed to be full of affirmations to help someone be better able to try and accept the parts of themselves they dislike, and to eventually develop a more positive self-image through the continued use of the affirmations.  But since there is very little in each affirmation that is even relevant to the body part being "focused" on, I fail to see how it should help.  Some of the affirmations aren't even for body parts - there is one for breath, and quite a few for various internal organs such as the liver, kidneys, and bladder.  Here's an example for you - the affirmation for the spleen:

"My only obsession is with the joy of life.  My true identity is one of peace and love and joy.  I choose the thoughts that create joy for me in every area of my life.  My spleen is healthy and happy and normal.  I am safe.  I choose to experience the sweetness of life.  I love and appreciate my beautiful spleen!"