A Crisis is A Terrible Thing to Waste: The Art of Transforming The Tragic Into Magic by Kelly Sullivan Walden
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Web ID: 15733410The kind of book you want to give everyone
After finishing just the introduction and first chapter to this book alone, I sent a copy to my mom and had a list of friends I couldn't wait to send this book to. I really feel that reading it has given me a helpful tool to forever improve my quality of life and relationships. Kelly's writing is charming, funny, page-turning and endearingly vulnerable—reading her stories feel like hanging out with your wise best friend, the one who can crack you up until you're crying with laughter yet somehow also manages to leave you feeling seen and with a real, actionable sense of empowerment and solutions to handle whatever you're dealing with that day. This book has given me the gift of a simple, easy-to-remember shared language to better understand myself, my loved ones, and others through difficult times. I use Kelly's OGLE formula to process, heal, and navigate everything from challenging conversations to disempowering self-talk, and it's a secret weapon in empowerment that I find myself returning to almost daily. Every time I use it, any intense feelings like anger, frustration, helplessness, or otherwise feeling like a victim (which are often justified!) get processed and somehow transform to leave me feeling I have more insight, calm, peace, compassion (for both myself and others), and clarity into how to move forward and handle difficult situations in a way that feels aligned and kind to everyone involved. I highly recommend getting this book as a gift to yourself as a way to genuinely improve your life and relationships (while feeling like you're having fun instead of working hard), especially if you and your loved ones are going through tough times, like mine are. I read it in two days and didn't want to put it down: it's an easy, value-packed page turner where each chapter made me want to discover the next, like the episodes of a new favorite series you I couldn't stop binging. But instead of leaving me feeling like a couch potato (though that is one of my favorite feelings after a long week), this book left me with helpful new tools to live a happier, more peaceful life, and like I have new access to a perspective on hard things that makes even the most heartbreaking challenges feel like adventures I can navigate in good company. That's not to say this book alone will solve all of my heartbreak or problems (and Kelly never claims it will), but Kelly's stories, insights, and easy OGLE process have meaningfully helped me on my journey towards living a less stressful life, processing pain and emotions to better understand myself and others, and resolving conflict with healthier tools. The real secret value I find in Kelly's book, however, is access to a perspective that makes me feel lighter and more capable, and makes life feel more fun, playful, kind, connected, and exciting to live in, which is what I need most when going through hard times. This isn't a dry self-help book that you can only read 3 pages of at a time before it feels like a chore (which many amazing but dense self-help books can feel like)—reading it feels like going o fun date with a highly qualified, extremely entertaining, and genuinely lovely and vulnerable human bearing her soul to help us better love our own.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
An inspirational romp both wild and tender
I found myself reading Kelly's book chapter by chapter like a bedtime story of hope and humor. It was a romp both wild and tender. So inspirational. I have so many images now to draw on: face to face with a giraffe after a hot air balloon emergency landing, out of body experience on a hash brownie, climbing up the wrong side of a volcano. And the tenderness of the adoptive daughter who never came home. So many beautiful stories! Kelly's use of the OGLE approach to reframe her mishaps soaked into my brain so deeply that I found myself easily applying it to my personal experiences to start turning my own tragic into magic!
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
What a Remarkable Feat!
Deftly combining a natural talent for exceptionally vivid storytelling and then sharing a simple, snappy formula for gleaning the goods from any challenge, Kelly Sullivan Walden somehow manages to make this hybrid of memoir, metaphysics and very practical self-help a fluid, focused and fascinating journey. I kept thinking that each chapter was like a slice of dense delicious cake - in so many wildly unpredictable flavors! After each tale, Walden's O.G.L.E formula (an acronym), she bravely and merrily leads by unflinching example to unpack the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the inspirational and the practical from each and every crisis. and running through it all is a refreshing tone of friendly, earthy wisdom and comradery. The author/dream expert successfully reclaims and rescues the word "ogle" from its historically lecherous bad rap and beckons us to transform this now wonderful word into something infinitely more healing and useful - that is, a loving gaze of compassionate self-scrutiny. She demonstrates how to use this very simple, yet profound tool to mine the gold of any crisis, great or small - and her crises run the gamut. I should add that purely as a collection of stories, "A Crisis Is A Terrible Thing To Waste" is a blast to read - bristling with vivacity, intelligence, warmth and charm. Like the image on the cover might suggest, the author does this with a stellar sense of humor, and 100% dyed in the wool honesty. This book radiates a generosity of spirit in its ultimate quest to help us make meaning of the mayhem of being a human being. Bravo!
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com