Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens - Review

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens: A Guide to Living an Extraordinary Life

By: Joseph V. Ciarrochi, Louise Hayes, Ann Bailey, and Steven C. Hayes

Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Source: Publisher via NetGalley

136 pages

Genre: Non-fiction, Self-Help

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Goodreads Description – If you could only get past feelings of embarrassment, fear, self-criticism, and self-doubt, how would your life be different? You might take more chances and make more mistakes, but you’d also be able to live more freely and confidently than ever before. Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens is a workbook that provides you with essential skills for coping with difficult and sometimes overwhelming emotions that stress you out and cause you pain. The emotions aren’t going anywhere, but you can find out how to deal with them. Once you do, you will become a mindful warrior—a strong person who handles tough emotions with grace and dignity—and gain many more friends and accomplishments along the way.

You will:

· Use the power of mindfulness in everyday situations

· Stop finding faults in yourself and start solving your problems

· Be kinder to yourself so you feel confident and have a greater sense of self-worth

· Identify the values that will help you create the life of your dreams

4 Stars. Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens had me hooked from the foreword. Obviously, I’m not a teen anymore so I’m not exactly the target market, but I do sort of wish this book had been available for me as a teen. There were so many times that I judged incorrectly, not just people, but situations, and frankly still misjudge sometimes. But had this book been available to tell me that pushing past my comfort zones could be potentially rewarding and that saying no out of fear would only lead to building that fear up even greater in my mind…well I can’t say for sure that it would have made a huge difference, but it might have.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and being able to look back on my teen years from adulthood, I’d say I think these ideas, principles, and exercises presented in this book would have definitely helped. But that’s if I was actually willing to do the exercises as a teen. Also, considering I was a pretty stubborn kid (was????), I’m not sure I would have listened to anyone telling me to step out of the safety of my comfort zone.

All of that being said, I feel like this book if it’s not helpful for teens (again, I’m not really in a position to judge that) might be helpful for parents of teens (even pre-teens maybe) and any other person (i.e. teacher, school counselor, etc) that might work with teens and pre-teens. The authors try to cover quite a large subject in a small book, and while I personally feel like I got a lot out of it and feel like I know some other adults who might also be able to benefit from this read, I think some of these subjects might be better handled not from a book but with interaction with one’s parents or loved ones. Now I realize that’s not always an option, at which point, I would definitely recommend this book. For me, it was a fast 4 star read with a lot of take away information to be applied to myself and to my future children. (Chapter 7 especially stuck with me. Realizing my mind is a problem finding machine, and that frankly sometimes the problems it finds are completely imaginary was quite helpful.)

Updated: July 7, 2018