Book Review: Living Your Best Life

By Jackie Damrau

Living Your Best Life: Discover Your Life's Blueprint for Success (Author: Laura Berman Fortgang, 2001, ISBN 1-58542-157-X)

This book provides you with useful steps on effectively analyzing your life and discovering your strengths and weaknesses. Fortgang provides ten personal coaching strategies in her book that explain how to overcome your own fears ("get over yourself"); how to nurture, not deplete, yourself in your relationships, work, finances, and physical environment; and how to create circumstances in your life that are good for your overall well-being.

Fortgang has written this book in three parts. The first part, The Reckoning, helps you take an internal look at working towards "productive thinking that will get you what you want" (p. xvi). The next part, The Doing, works on the physical actions that will help you breed the success and fulfillment in your life to achieve living better. The third part, The Being, looks into "spiritual resources that will help you learn how to set up your life to receive the unexpected" (p. xvii) and shows you how to recognize signs that will let your wisdom guide you to the right life decisions. Regardless of your spiritual views, this part is written in a non-invasive manner that should not offend anyone from any particular religious faith.

The ten personal coaching strategies include:

For communicators, Fortgang has written this book in a personal journaling style. She has exercises in each chapter where she asks you to look at your current life situation and write about it. Using her personal coaching techniques, she offers a different way of looking at situations, such as instead of asking "Why" questions, we should be asking "What" questions. The "What" questions help us to examine what is wrong or missing in our lives and then allow us to pinpoint solutions to the problems. Chapter 1 talks about creating WAQs (Wisdom Access Questions) that rely on "What" questions. Fortgang provides several pages worth of WAQs in Appendix 2 for you to review when you are going through the examination process.

The other communications-related exercises include Wisdom in Action, Wisdom Writing, and Wisdom Stories. These exercises help you gain a better perspective on how to create your own success blueprint for your life.

To put this book into perspective, Fortgang at the end of the book makes these statements (pp. 187–188):

"Your best life (where you are meant to be) is a life where you can take the good with the bad, experience a lot of love, and feel that you are fully expressed in the world without being anyone or anything other than your truest self.… To maintain what you've accomplished here, keep these things in mind:

• Be responsible for your thoughts, words, and deeds.
• Decide who you want to be before deciding what you'll do.
• Cooperate with your world by taking action.
• Be grateful for what is (even if you do not like it).
• Behave as if the result has already arrived.

I purchased this book at the 50^th Annual STC Conference at the STC bookstore. It was perhaps one of the better books that I purchased. When I first saw the title, I was struggling with some personal issues and felt that this would help me get a balance in my life. After reading this book and working on a few of the lessons, I gained a better perspective for looking not at the cause of why something happened, but what I could do to "get over it" and focus on the future that I wanted for myself. This book is very easy to read, and the stories that Fortgang offers are realistic cases that help you see how to change your life and work toward your life's success blueprint and not its failure.