The Source - Ginger Dog Book Club Review

This book has a whole lot of ingredients that should have worked really well for me – a personal story and lived experience, practical tools and techniques, neuroscience. What’s not to love about all of that? Sadly I didn’t love it. In fact I loved it so little that I haven’t finished it. In actual fact, full confession, I haven’t got further than page 75 although in the interests of balance I have flicked and dipped into the rest of it.

I found this book (yeah, yeah, alright, the first 75 pages..) rather self-obsessed and I was quickly tired of hearing about the author’s journey. In stark comparison with last months’ book by Michelle Obama I found the author’s account of herself and her experiences quite cloying and all a bit ‘me, me, me’. There are ways of telling a personal story where it brings to life the tools and techniques that you’re offering for people – this doesn’t do that for me.

In brief ‘the source’ is your brain and if you want to live a fulfilled and productive life the more you learn to manage that brain of yours rather than letting it run amok like an untrained puppy the better. I absolutely buy into this. It’s fundamental to all the work I do developing mental toughness. What did I tell you? I should have loved this book. But I just didn’t. Maybe it was just a bit too ‘self-helpy’ for me. It made me feel as though I should be wearing hessian knickers in a women’s commune somewhere and getting involved in self help groups and chanting. By the way I’ve got nothing against any of that (apart from the knickers which I think would be itchy) if it works for you then go for it, it’s simply not how I want to feel when reading a book.

It’s clearly aimed at women which I find bothersome. Men need to manage their brains too but I can’t imagine a man picking this up and getting further than the preface. I found myself irritated by the style and writing and life is too short to read things that irritate me. In my opinion Steve Peter’s ‘The Chimp Paradox’ is a better way of understanding and managing your brain.

This book has many great reviews on Amazon so I suspect if you are just starting out on learning about and understanding the way your brain works then this might be a good book for that. If you’re a fan of ‘The Secret’ you’ll probably enjoy this. Try it and see what you think. And do please feel free to post your own review or comments on this blog. It is, after all, simply my opinion.