Covey’s book has sold over 15 million copies for a reason: It ignores trends and popular psychology, and sticks with enduring principles of lasting change. His seven principles build a lasting foundation for truth, openness, and integrity. The principles are timeless – unchanging to events – which has made the book the personal development favorite of many self-help experts.

The first three principles are: 1) be proactive, 2) begin with the end in mind, and 3) put first things first. These first three principles deal with dependence as the author moves the reader through new paradigms.

The first principle moves people from blame and victimization to responsibility. The second principle moves people from destructive centeredness and obsessions to a healthy focus and clear values. While the third principles deals with the “fourth generation” of time management where you will learn to do what matters most instead of following to-do lists and doing frivolous tasks that contribute little to your life and other people’s lives.

The second lot of three principles (four to six) deal with interdependency. The second triplet of principles are self-explanatory: 4) think win/win, 5) seek first to understand, then to be understood, and 6) synergize. These three principles are more like communication skills as the first three principles provide you with the foundation to use them.

It is sad to see many people ignore these principles. As a result, their relationships suffer and people resent them. Any success they get is short-term, unsatisfactory, and often lonely.

Covey emphasizes that effective people are interdependent on others. While they are independent and strong in their own right, when they use the three principles for interdependence, the sum of people’s work is more than the individual parts.

The last principle is called “sharpen the saw”. It deals with renewal in the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Just as a blunt saw becomes tiresome for a woodcutter, so does a failure to renew in these four dimensions result in unproductive – and sometimes destructive – living for the exasperated individual. When these four dimensions are renewed, the seventh principle of “sharpen the saw” is followed to encapsulate the other six principles. It is in such ways that all the principles feed off one another.

The last point I want to emphasize to encourage you to invest in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People if you have not already done so is the character ethic Covey focuses on. Most books these days focus on the personality ethic. A personality ethic deals with attitudes, behaviors, skills, and the techniques for human interaction. While the personality ethic is important, without the character ethic that offers courage, patience, and integrity, long-term success is inhibited. The establishment of a strong character ethic creates change from the inside-out.

Overall, you must get the book. I have heard so many personal development public speakers, authors, life coaches, and organizational trainers say the book is the best they have ever read. I highly encourage you to grab your copy of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People now from Amazon right now by clicking here today.

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1. The Heart of Effective Communication: How to Love People
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3. Review of Winning with People by John Maxwell
4. The Decision Tree of Effective Leadership to Create Freedom and Independence
5. Review of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Savoy is not the author’s real name, but a pen name, like what most guys (especially the teachers) have in the seduction community to protect their identity. Savoy is CEO of Love Systems, a corporation of dating instructors who teach guys how to meet, attract, and keep women. Magic Bullets ebook is the main product they offer as it provides the entire framework and many great concepts they teach in their bootcamps around the world.

If you’ve read the New York Times best seller The Game, you know a little about this new field where guys learn how to be more successful with women and dating from the book’s main character, Mystery. Mystery Method was that original corporation where Mystery – arguably the world’s greatest pick-up artist – was an owner of the company. Since then, Mystery has left the company, which was later renamed to Love Systems.

In my review of The Game by Neil Strauss, I wrote a little about how the book provides several tips, and many insights, into the pick-up process. This is integrated in with an entertaining narration style of writing, which is why I’m assuming it was a New York Times best seller – that and the fact it revealed the intriguing pick-up community to the general public. The techniques and concepts in Magic Bullets describe the foundations used by the world’s best pick-up artists in The Game; though parts of the Love System’s seduction model has evolved over the years into a more reliable description of the seduction process.

The greatest part about this new model taught in the book is in the second phase, transition, because this determines if the relationship moves forward or ends as quickly as it started. Any guy who can open (the first phase) knows that opening is easy once he can overcome approach anxiety. The barrier in the past for guys has been figuring out what happens after you open. It’s easy to use a canned opener like asking for an opinion, but what do you do to transition and move forward in the relationship? What do you say that doesn’t seem like a big “jump” from your opener to your conversation topic? The transition phase in the book’s model is the answer to this problem.

The model in the book which forms the basis of Love Systems is:

1. Opening
2. Transitioning
3. Attraction
4. Qualification
5. Comfort
6. Seduction
7. Relationships

If you have experience in the seduction community, you know the whole seduction process is a structured framework (your understanding of it may be a little different to the one above). The model provides a step-by-step guide of the entire process. Every intimate relationship goes through the model – almost always unconsciously unless you consciously understand the steps. The steps tell you exactly what you must do and when to catalyze the seduction process while having it under your control. All this ultimately means you can quickly build relationships with women you find attractive.

If you grab your copy of Magic Bullets, you’ll learn more about each step within the seven phases and no longer be left clueless when you have an unsuccessful pick-up. You’ll continually improve yourself and your skill set so you are better in your next approach. If you take this seriously, like many guys do, you can ultimately become like many experienced students of Love Systems who are able to have almost any woman they want. The instructors from Love Systems have been learning and experiencing seduction for years so you are sure to learn a lot from their expertise.

The book is nicely divided into four parts: introduction, emotional progression model, context, and skills. Here is more detail of the book’s table of contents:

I’m pretty sure Savoy said the book was originally 500 pages. What a whopper that would have been. Fortunately, it was condensed down to approximately 200 pages with the magical use of many to-the-point bullets. (That’s not the reason for the book’s name, but there’s an interesting fact.) The many bullets means there is plenty of jam-packed information in this book. It is called Magic Bullets because, ironically, there is no magic bullet – an ultimate guaranteed solution – to successfully attract and hold onto a woman. The book is the closest thing to a “magic bullet”.

If you’re after a book that teaches you how to approach, attract, pick-up, and date more women in your life, Magic Bullets is your solution. It is a leader in the seduction community for one reason: it works. Thousands of guys have transformed themselves from being frozen stone-cold when approaching a woman to being “the man” in a nightclub and social situations in the day.

I highly recommend you grab your copy right now. It isn’t free, but the investment is worth it if you want to feel good around women. It is an ebook you can download and be reading within five minutes by clicking here today.

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1. Review of The Game by Neil Strauss
2. Review of Double Your Dating by David DeAngelo
3. Review of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
4. Review of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
5. Review of Catch Him and Keep Him by Christian Carter

Greene takes the reader back through many centuries when Marie Antoinette become the French Queen and was later decapitated, and Machiavelli charmed the court to his way of thinking. From nationwide victories to intimate seductions and lies of alchemy, Greene has written a masterpiece that deduces 48 laws of power from past powerful individuals and the not so powerful.

Greene is author of three savvy books covering seduction, war, and power. His interest in topics others overlook because they appear greedy, manipulative, and condescending have caused people to frown upon his work. On the “opposite side” of his reviewers are people greatly thankful for his teachings on the power, manipulation, and the seduction games that take place regardless of one’s liking towards the topics.

The 48 Laws of Power is divided into 48 chapters. It starts off with a fascinating discussion in the preface on the arguments many people have against power. The author says many people think power is immoral or unfairly differentiates people. It would be unfair for all people to have equal power because each of us are unique and have different skill sets. People who unconsciously use moralistic arguments against power, openness, and attempts to be fair, actually further their own power or bring someone else’s power down. Robert Greene goes on to say:

“To some people the notion of consciously playing power games – no matter how indirect – seems evil, asocial, a relic of the past. They believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people… they are often among the most adept players at power.”

Power games are inevitable. I won’t say that all 48 laws are useful in all your relationships, however, because power isn’t everything; though many people do underestimate the importance of power in everyday living. From personal relationships to dealing with customers, more power will benefit you – and when you use it correctly, it will benefit the relationship. Thinking otherwise uses the same moralistic arguments Greene discusses in the preface. Even so, some laws of power seemed harsh to me, but this is the reality of power and I accept it. Power isn’t meant to be pretty. We are talking about power; not a book about fairies and pixey-love.

Moving on, the historical research within the book is phenomenal. The author and his team of researchers have dug through many books on history to provide hundreds of stories about users of the laws of power. The reader is given insights into powerful historical greats like Sun Tzu, con artist Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, and seducer Casanova.

With the large number of references to Niccolo Machiavelli and Baltasar Gracian, I assume these were Robert Greene’s primary figures of authority from which he developed most of his principles. Even if you have little interest in history, like myself, you will still find the stories interesting. The stories in each chapter show how the discussed law of power being was used to increase power and when it was disobeyed to decrease power. An “interpretation” section is provided after each observance and transgression of the law to help you understand the interpersonal dynamics and power games played by those in the story. The author’s interpretation of the story provides a great way of understanding the keys to power and adapting the principles to your everyday life.

At the chapter’s end, I found the images Greene paints in the reader’s mind with a vivid statement to be influential. Here’s one example of an image used for law 20 (Do not commit to anyone): “A Thicket of Shrubs. In the forest, one shrub latches on to another, entangling its neighbor with its thorns, the thicket slowly extending its impenetrable domain. Only what keeps its distance and stand apart can grow and rise above the thicket.”

Initially it may appear some rules contradict each other such as law 15 (Crush your enemy totally) and law 47 (Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop) as well as law 16 (Use absence to increase respect and honor) and law 18 (Do not build fortresses to protect yourself – isolation is dangerous), but they are not contradictory. Discussing the latter, absence and maintaining a connection with people have their own uses in specific circumstances. Be flexible and use common sense to determine each law’s application. Each law has a context for its application.

Most of the pages within the book have fables, quotes, and small interesting stories that “distill three thousand years of the history of power.” Anecdotes line one side of the pages to nicely complement the chapter’s discussion. At a large 450 pages, the book mimics a textbook. You can expect to discover many great techniques to increase your power, stop yourself from being manipulated by others, and get what you want. Securely grab your copy now from Amazon by clicking here today.

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3. Review of Voice Power by Renee Grant-Williams
4. The Power of Apologizing
5. Change Your Words to Change People: Persuasive Power Words

You’ve been to told to see the glass half full, but how do you do it? How can you reinterpret worries, fears, disagreements, interpersonal conflict, anger, and misunderstandings, for example, to empower you, instead of disempower you? L. Michael Hall and Bobby G. Bodenhamer’s Mind-Lines will show you exactly how with the magical neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) technique of reframing that shows a new way of living through interpretation.

How you interpret events determines how you feel and the quality of your relationships. Most people, unfortunately, use harmful interpretations. A father sees his son watch television while laying on his bed. The father gives his son’s behavior a meaning of “laziness”. As a result, the father starts criticizing his son out of the lazy frame. There’s another father and son in the same scenario. This other father gives his son’s behavior a meaning of “relaxation” then lets him be.

The premise of reframing is the world has no meaning by itself. What you see around you means nothing until you give it meaning. “By mind-lines we refer to the lines (the linguistic constructions) that we connect and associate to things that create meaning formulas,” write Hall and Bodenhamer. “By the changing of meaning, our emotions change, as do our behaviors, habits, moods, attitudes, skills, health, etc. and our life.” You become empowered to transform your world when you see that you give “reality” its meaning.

Each of us has what the authors call a “map”. Our map is our understanding of reality that provide us with a direction in this world. The map is only a construct of reality (a NLP presupposition); it’s not reality itself. Mind-Lines will have you analyze your map, see its many faults, then help you construct a healthier one for your mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. The same lines used on yourself can be used in your communication with others to change their behaviors, habits, moods, attitudes, skills, health, and life.

In the fifth edition of Mind-Lines exists 26 reframing techniques. These 26 reframes are conceptualized in the meta-model, a model introduced in part one of the book to illustrate how the reframing methods fit together. I found myself overwhelmed at the beginning of the book as the first of four parts focuses on the meta-model theory of reframing. Once I finished reading part one, however, I realized the foundational material gave me the framework to understand and more easily use the 26 reframes discussed in part two.

When you read this book, if you have a similar experience, don’t let this small hurdle block you from experiencing the book’s power. The majority of the book will be understandable for everyone. It will just take more time than your average self-help book to read.

It is a practical book. All 26 reframes get applied to six specific statements plus many additional statements scattered throughout the chapters. The authors encourage the reader to try each reframe on the six provided statements, then compare one’s answers to the authors’ answers. I encourage you to apply your limiting beliefs to each reframing technique to feel the magic of instant change in how you view your problems.

To give you an idea of how reframing is used and the power it possesses, I’ll give you an example of positive prior intention framing, the eighth reframe. The foundation under positive prior intention framing is that every behavior has a positive intention behind it. Even hurtful behaviors contain a hidden positive intent, which you sometimes must dig for to discover. A positive intention reframe in response to, “I hate it when you treat me badly” could be, “It’s good to hear that you want to be treated well. What can I do to treat you better?” This is a drastic and powerful change to a reply of, “I DON’T treat you badly! You’re the one who is mean to me!” that most people would use.

Here’s an example of criteria and values framing, the fourteenth reframing technique. This reframing techniques puts into perspective what the person deems important. You give people, or yourself, motive to change. A criteria and values reframe in response to, “You’re rude for not washing the dishes” could be, “When you tell me I’m rude for not washing the dishes, it hurts me which makes me feel bad about our relationship. Is our relationship more important than the dishes? If so, would you prefer to tell me about the need to do the dishes without hurting our relationship?” What a wonderful example of reframing a person’s behavior.

Another interesting aspect of the book is something called a “meta-state”, a term that describes a state about a state. For example, you can be angry about being stressed. Our meta-states get multi-layered and confusing. Let’s say you experience guilt from hurting your partner. You then wrap the guilt with anger by becoming angry about the guilt. The anger leads to depression about the anger. The methods in this book allows you to overpower “lower levels” with “higher levels” that give you more productivity, efficiency, a better mood, relieve stress, and generally anything else that is beneficial for you.

I have experienced the NLP technique of reframing in changing my behaviors, moods, and fears – as well as helping other people change themselves – more powerful than other NLP techniques like the swish pattern. Knowing how to reframe is a skill for life you can use anywhere at anytime to improve something about yourself or another person. The book is helpful for your personal development and relationships with everyone as it changes everyone’s perception of reality. Mind-Lines is a great book that teaches a great technique.

The six pages straight after the preface titled “Mind-lining a Toxic Idea”, is worth a thousand times the book itself. I say this with confidence that reading those six pages will change your life. In those six pages, the 26 reframing techniques are applied to “failure”. The word “failure” will be eliminated from your life for good if you apply the simple reframes – but it doesn’t stop there. The reframes will not only cancel limiting feelings and thoughts towards failure, but the reframes transform the concept of failure into a power energy source for better behavior, mood, skills, and health. Is living a life absent from seeing yourself as a failure important to you? Imagine the happiness and success you would experience when failure isn’t even a concept in your life? (Notice the reframes I just used.)

To finish this in-depth review, I want to use the mind-line of story-telling. There was a poor illiterate man who lived isolated in the woods. One day while walking through the woods he stumbled across a piece of paper. It was written in Chinese with a few strange diagrams he couldn’t understand. Because of his confusion, he threw away the paper. Years later, a few Chinese tourists were visiting the area and found the same object. With a scream of excitement, the tourists realized they had accidentally stumbled upon an ancient Chinese document. The tourists later sold their discovery to a collector for a large amount of money.

The map is your understanding of reality. It can give you more things than wealth if you pay attention to it. Learn to alter your map to empower yourself to change your own, and other people’s behaviors, habits, moods, attitudes, skills, and health. I know you want what is best for yourself and your relationships, so I recommend you grab a copy of Michael Hall and Bobby Bodenhamer’s Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds. The little price of the book is nothing when you consider that everything you experience in this world depends on how you frame it. You can grab your copy of the book now from Amazon by clicking here today.

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5. Review of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers

If you’ve ever felt the need to have an important conversation, but couldn’t bring yourself to it, this book is for you. Author Susan Scott details the exact methods to have conversations we know will change our life and other people’s life, but we procrastinate having usually because of fear. It’s important to overcome whatever barriers we face in communication because a conversation is not about the relationship – it is the relationship.

When people see the word “fierce”, they may think pain, tough, or brutality. As written on the book’s cover, “fierce” means robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, and unbridled. A “fierce conversation” brings authenticity into your life as you communicate who you are and what you believe.

Fierce Conversations will get you to have the most important conservation you can have with someone, right now. Fierce Conversations will be especially helpful to you if you have trouble: expressing yourself, talking with others who have trouble expressing themselves, dealing with passive-aggressive people, or resolving an ignored issue people know exists. After all, if you want someone or something to change, you need to initiate the change. If something bothers you, you need to be the one who does something about it.

Whether through fear of hurting a person, receiving retaliation, or someone pointing out our own mistakes, we delay the conversations we need to experience. The problem comes down to how we present ourselves to others in conversations and how we think when we are by ourselves. All conversations are within yourself and some are with others.

From Ignorant Communication to Open Relationships

It is the book’s purpose to achieve four outcomes: interrogate reality, provoke learning, tackle tough challenges, and enrich relationships. These are achieved through the following 7 principles of fierce conversations:

1. Master the Courage to Interrogate Reality
2. Come Out from Behind Yourself into the Conversation and Make It Real
3. Be Here, Prepared to Be Nowhere Else
4. Tackle Your Toughest Challenge Today
5. Obey Your Instincts
6. Take Responsibility for Your Emotional Wake
7. Let Silence Do the Heavy Lifting

As a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, Scott leans the book’s examples of principles and models, towards business communication. If someone has communication problems at work, however, Scott says the same problems likely show up in their personal lives – so the book is just as applicable to personal communication. We need to have fierce conversations with family members, spouses, students, and friends; not only with those we share a business relationship.

Scott gives you a series of simple and practical exercises to do at the end of each chapter to help you use the chapter’s communication skills. She also provides insightful scenarios of her experience with clients’ use of communication models and their notable improvements from the change.

Be warned: Fierce Conversations is no emotional walk in the park. You’re forced to face hard questions about your reality. “It takes a certain fearlessness to make your private thoughts public,” writes Scott. “But if what you’re thinking makes you squirm and wish to wriggle away, you are probably onto something.”

If you choose to awaken to the truth by beginning a fierce conversation, communication opens up to improve your relationships. You will talk about what everyone pretends to not know. Don’t miss having one conversation that could change your life. Achieve success at work and in life, one conversation at a time by getting your copy of Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations directly from Amazon.com by clicking here today.

(You may also want to read Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen’s Difficult Conversations for another source of tips to have the conversations you avoid. Both books provide good tips, but lack the psychology and fear of talking about tough issues. Because I never could find a book that explained this problem, I wrote a book that shows how I solved my fears of difficult conversations. To understand the deep psychology of fear in difficult conversations, read the first chapter of my program Big Talk.)

Related Media Links

1. Video and audio links – Links on the Fierce Incorporated website with Susan Scott.
2. Companies, careers built or lost one conversation at time – An article published in a Seattle newspaper by Susan Scott discussing how conversations, one by one, shape our lives.

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1. Review of Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
2. Review of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
3. Review of The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie
4. Review of Conversationally Speaking by Alan Garner
5. Review of Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

What better way to improve the quality of your voice than to listen to a speech expert teach the skills she has learned for several decades. Since 1968, Carol Fleming, a doctorate in communication disorders from Northwestern University, has ran her private speech communication consultancy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fleming has made her vocal techniques, gathered over years of learning and teaching, available in her entertaining audio program.

You can buy books to improve your voice, such as Renee Grant-Williams’ Voice Power, but until you hear a good voice and become capable of breaking it into specific reasons why it’s good, you’ll hope your voice is good. It is vital to know a good voice when you hear one and understand the qualities of a good voice then transfer this understanding into your voice through practical exercises – all steps covered in The Sound of Your Voice.

The program isn’t a boring dictation of a book. It is an entertaining, well produced, free-flowing program. Fleming is the primary speaker accompanied by Wesley, a Brit with a soothing accent. I’m not particularly fond of British accents, having an Australian one myself “mate”, yet it is enjoyable to hear the two talk about speaking. Moreover, the program is not two people conversing about talking – it is a well produced program that contains real-life examples, entertaining sounds, and many speakers with diverse voice qualities that Fleming dissects. It is a lively program.

You won’t be caught up in technicalities when doing the program. It is a simple and effective program taught by Fleming who knows how to breakdown vocal complexities into layman’s term after her decades of experience teaching vocalics. The program will show you:

• How to add vocal vitality to your voice so you are not boring. Men especially struggle to remove their monotone voice and speak with vitality.
• How to speak in a powerful, mature manner. While men struggle with a monotone voice, women sometimes struggle to convey power in their voice.
• How to eliminate or change your accent. (Example students in the program remove their accents by making a few simple adjustments.)
• Breathing exercises to support your voice.
• How to remove annoying content from your speech like filler words and superlatives.
• How to speak clearly and smoothly articulate each word.
• What to do to get your voice ready for speaking.
• And plenty more.

The vocal exercises in the program took my voice to the next level. I have always struggled to understand resonance and getting my voice to vibrate clearly from the front of mouth for better articulation, and a simple exercise has helped me do just that.

If you want to improve your voice, Carol Fleming’s The Sound of Your Voice is the way to go. It is the best voice program I’ve come across. You can grab your copy from Amazon by clicking here today.

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1. Review of Voice Power by Renee Grant-Williams
2. 5 Steps to a Charming (and Sexy!) Voice
3. Review of Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
4. Review of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
5. Review of Magic Bullets by Savoy

How do some good communicators effortlessly grab people’s attention and make them listen to each word? These attention-grabbers have mastered their voice – and now you can do the same. If your voice isn’t what you want it to be, Renee Grant-Williams in Voice Power will show you how you can make it resonate with powerful clarity. .

Having worked with celebrities and singers such as Garth Brooks, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and The Dixie Chicks, Grant-Williams has established herself as an authority on improving the human voice. You don’t need to be a singer or even a public speaker to improve your voice. A better voice will help you with every spoken word. Whether you’re disciplining children, motivating employees, seducing a partner, or teaching a workshop, a better voice helps get your point across and make it stick.

Voice Power isn’t about getting you to speak loudly. In fact, volume was mentioned rarely in the book. It is about creating the support and resonance for a commanding voice with little effort.

The basis for the book is good breathing. When we were babies, we naturally breathed well. We lost good breathing habits when we were taught to puff-out our chest and hold our heads high – two techniques that tense vocal muscles. The breathing techniques will have you relax, balance yourself, reduce stress, minimize muscular tension, and improve your voice.

Grant-Williams advises the use of powerful consonants where you elongate sentence-important consonants – another powerful piece of advice that counters common knowledge of elongating vowels. Saying “Ssstop it nnnow” is more powerful than “Stooop it nooow”. I think you’ll find many insightful lessons about vocal quality with the author’s simple and effective teachings that reveal a lot of vocal myths.

Other central techniques in the book include silence, rhythm, and volume. Grant-Williams describes a musical beat to speaking that is extremely valuable – especially for when you prepare a speech. Elvis Presley’s singing technique, posture, and body positioning is used to demonstrate and breakdown a beautiful sounding voice.

The last section in the book deals with voice care. A few tips include getting enough water, eating well, exercising, and using a humidifier to keep the air moist. The author also discusses some common problems with unhealthy voices such as reflux and nodes to ensure you don’t have a health ailment limiting your vocals.

Overall, it is a great book to power up your voice and make it sound richer. I found myself pulling many pieces of advice and techniques from it. Make your voice count because it has so much power in making a good impression on others. Make your voice an asset that shows you’re a confident and powerful person by getting a copy of Voice Power from Amazon by clicking here today.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of The Sound of Your Voice by Carol Fleming
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3. 5 Steps to a Charming (and Sexy!) Voice
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Dale Carnegie’s name is synonymous with How to Win Friends and Influence People. Though The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking is not as popular Carnegie’s all-time classic, possibly because of its narrow market in public speaking skills, I believe it lives up to the author’s name. (If you haven’t read Dale Carnegie’s all-time classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, with over 16 million sales you’re missing out.)

Originally called Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business in 1931, Dale’s wife, Dorothy Carnegie, revised the book, and renamed it The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking in 1962 with Dale’s notes and suggestions before he passed away. With many improvements made possible from the couple’s speaking experiences and the Dale Carnegie Organization, this book is a great primer in effective public speaking.

Dale Carnegie taught public speaking for 40 years and has transformed public speaking into a skill anyone can develop. He has seen what works, what doesn’t work, and what works brilliantly. He has helped thousands of people overcome their fears of public speaking to present exciting speeches that hook the audience’s attention.

The book has 5 parts with 14 chapters. It begins with the basics of public speaking. You learn how to choose a topic, express yourself with excitement, and improve your speaking skills. Other bits of advice to improve your speaking skills include how to let others know your thoughts, cut-down the number of points in your speech, and sincerely appreciate your audience.

The most repeated point in the book is to choose a topic that interests you and get excited about it. Convince yourself that what you have is worth sharing and you will convince the crowd to listen attentively to you. Choosing a topic that excites you will make you talk with interest, vocal variety, and good body language because 93% of our communication comes from nonverbal communication when we discuss our likes or dislikes.

This book has the same style of writing as How to Win Friends and Influence People. Many stories are delivered in an easy-to-read language along with the practical simplicity of the advice. While it takes time to develop public speaking skills, the advice given is the easy way to effective speaking because it leverages our natural abilities and knowledge.

A brief review of the table of contents is below for your convenience:

I have left out in-depth detail of parts two, three, four, and five because there are too many points to list here. (I guess you’ll just have to read it yourself!) A full summary of each part is found conveniently at its end for quick reference so you can revise and easily memorize what you have read.

In my opinion, the advice offered on how to give an impromptu speech (a speech where you’re given a topic on the spot) is the best part about the book. I have always struggled to think quickly on my feet by speaking smoothly on a topic I was just given, but the advice Carnegie shares is helping me solve the problem. I am quickly improving, becoming more confident, and talking longer – and these improvements will continue because you learn how to continually improve your speaking skills.

I highly recommend you get this book to improve not just your public speaking skills, but to also improve your conversational skills, remove self-consciousness, and boost confidence. Effective public speaking can give you these benefits. If you haven’t already grabbed your copy of Dale Carnegie’s The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking, you can get yours from Amazon by clicking here.

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1. Review of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
2. Review of Conversationally Speaking by Alan Garner
3. Review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
4. The Heart of Effective Communication: How to Love People
5. The Decision Tree of Effective Leadership to Create Freedom and Independence

Why is it that urban legends, conspiracy theories, and public health scares can reach the other side of the world; while most businesses, teachers, and public speakers cannot get their ideas to reach a person two feet in front of them? The answer lies in Made to Stick.

Everyday we get pounded with information from people. Most of it slips straight off us like food sliding off Teflon. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients,” said Herbert Simon, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics. “Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick shows you how to grab people’s attention in an information rich economy, get your ideas through, and make the message stick with a simple formula. The two authors use their first of six principles, “Simplicity”, in their stickiness formula by making their six principles form an acronym SUCCESs:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

Reading a book about sticky ideas makes you hope the authors’ make their own principles sticky – and the Heaths do so using what they teach. Each principle contains many real-life, and not so real, examples of ideas stuck in people’s minds. The stories used are entertaining, most notably is the urban legend of Kidney thieves.

While Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and Dan Heath has conducted research for Harvard Business School, they don’t throw technical information at you – that would break their principles. Their book embodies many entertaining and practical stories. They also provide the reader with several exercises, and allow you to compare your answers with their answers, to practice the principles.

Teachers, public speakers, marketers, authors – anyone interested in improving their business communication – needs to read Made to Stick. The book’s ideas focus around the Curse of Knowledge, a principle that explains why experts fail to make their ideas stick in students’ minds. Business managers fall into the trap of thinking they have successfully presented their proposal, or convinced people to buy into their idea, when they finish a PowerPoint presentation. “What they’ve done is share data”, says the authors. Expressing your thoughts is one thing; it is an another thing to convince people and remember your words.

I purchased the book to help me better communicate the communication skills I teach in books and articles, but I found how important it is to use as much of the SUCCESs formula in your everyday conversations. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize how most charismatic and persuasive persons naturally use the SUCCESs formula.

If you want you, and your ideas, to be remembered in conversations and presentations, then the New York Times Best Seller Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is the book you need. Grab your copy now from Amazon by clicking here.

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No longer do you have to try a mumbo-jumbo technique, a psychological trick, or the latest dietary secret to “remove” your fears. According to Jeffers, just do the thing you fear. If reading that statement scares you, you are normal!

There’s no wonder this book has sold over 2 million copies. With fear being so common in society, Jeffers has a solution that gets the reader to act in the face of fear.

Ironically, your fears disappear, or at least greatly diminish, once you “just do it”. When you feel fear, yet take action, anxiety vanishes as you see the irrational nature of the fear. Then you become what people call “a confident person“. You save yourself time and worry in failed attempts to deal with your fear.

Jeffers’ best-selling book is named after a class she taught on fear. The class quickly became a hit. Her students were able to act in the face of their fears and build confidence from their action.

As was common in her classes, the students thought their fears were weird, unique problems. Her students felt different from the rest of society. As students gradually began to share their stories, each class always warmed and filled with a sense of excitement, a sense of hope their “weird problems” could at last be cured.

We think fear is a psychological problem. You may perceive yourself to have some weird mental or emotional problem, but it isn’t some weird problem. The fear we experience is more an educational problem than a psychological problem – an educational problem made clear to you in Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

The book’s main message is that fear comes from an uncertainty in capability to handle the situation. Our fears come from a disbelief in our ability to handle whatever life gives us. Jeffers says, “All you have to do to diminish your fear is to develop more trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way.”

Though this may seem contradictory to the book’s main message, the book is not focused on removing fear – as the title goes: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Many of your fears can go away, and the book helps you to remove fears, but as Jeffers shares with her first truth about fear, “The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow.” The 5 truths about fear are real eye-openers.

Everybody fears doing, or being, something new because of the uncertainty within unfamiliar situations. If you don’t fear, you don’t grow. Moreover, if everyone experiences fear in approaching something new in life, the problem itself is not fear. The real problem is how you hold fear.

People paralyzed by fear feel helpless, indecisive, and angry; while those empowered by fear are powerful, action-oriented, and loving. The difference between the two categories of people is an educational problem solved by Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Fear, indecision, and anger are transformed into power, action, and love.

As you may have noticed in this review, the book doesn’t only talk about fears. It helps you become more decisive, powerful, action-oriented, and loving. Many of our personal problems relate to these issues that are subtle fears beyond our conscious awareness. For example, a wife stays in her miserable marriage not realizing that she fears the uncertain life ahead of her if she moved out. She continues to remain in the marriage constantly blaming her husband for what occurs in her life. The wife has anger and indecisiveness originating from her fear. You likely do too.

Chapters are devoted to understanding fear, personal responsibility, blame, self-talk, positiveness, and transformation to name a few topics. Jeffers has you control the “chatterbox” within you that makes you worry. I think the chapter on wholeness is brilliant because a whole life prevents us from fearing loss in other areas of life. Another great chapter was on no-lose decision-making. The author made me realize that no matter what choice I select in any decision, each choice leads to its own unique, fulfilling reward. What a great way to remove anxiety in selecting a choice.

The book is well written and simple to read. It doesn’t have the psychological terminology that can throw people off reading books about the human mind. Its simplicity combined with a concise 209 pages will have you quickly finish the book. You can be feeling the fear and doing it anyway in no time. Securely grab your copy of Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway now from Amazon by clicking here.

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