Review: Setting Your Heart On Fire by Raphael Cushnir

Reviewed by Lee Sinclair

Setting Your Heart On Fire:  Seven Invitations to Liberating Your Life by Raphael Cushnir

This book started off as a 4 star book but dropped to 3 stars about halfway through.  The change was subtle, and initially, the only thing I noticed was that my attention was no longer being held by what I was reading.  I thought it was my fault, that I was too distracted by other things to focus on it.  But when I went back through the book to remind myself of the content before writing this review, I was able to find where the book lost me.  As a result, this review focuses mostly on how the book was written, rather than the content.

There were two parts in the book that contributed to this problem, both in different ways.  The first was when Cushnir was talking about the Fourth Invitation, “Live Like You’re Dying.”  Ironically, it was not the topic of dying that was the problem, although it’s not the most comfortable thing to think about.  Instead, it was his use of the “stop reading and do this exercise” technique.  I generally don’t stop reading in the middle of a book to do an exercise that takes longer than 30 seconds.  I’m an impatient reader, eager to get to the next interesting point, especially when a book is good.  Exercises disrupt my train of thought and also create a major distraction.  In the back of my mind I’m conscious of the fact that I did not do the exercise.  And if the author does not include a clear statement about the intended results from the exercise, an element of uncertainty is introduced as well.

In the part about dying, there was more than one exercise presented that I didn’t do, so my focus had already been broken up when I got to the Fifth Invitation, “Live Like You’re Dreaming.”  This is where the book lost clarity for me.  The change in the writing wasn’t immediately obvious, so it took me a while to figure out what happened.  There is an odd phenomenon in writing—too many specific details confuse readers rather than give them a clearer picture.  Yet, time after time, writers will pile on more and more details whenever they themselves are not totally clear about what they want to say.  At the same time, philosophical or summary statements that guide the reader’s thought processes become vaguer and wordier.  The reader is left to figure out for themselves what details are the most important and what meaningful conclusions are suppose to be drawn.

I stumbled through the entire section about the Fifth Invitation and never felt like I truly understood what he was saying or where he was going with it.  It just didn’t seem to have the same clarity as the first four.  After that, the book was never able to recapture my full attention.  Even worse, I felt that when he was discussing the Seventh Invitation, “Widen Your World,” he was attempting to foist his own personal beliefs on me, rather than showing me how to discover them myself, although the feeling was probably my fault, most likely an overreaction and resistance to being told what to believe.

In spite of all this, I do recommend reading the book for the content.  If you’ve read books by Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, Gay Hendricks, and Frank Kinslow, etc., much of what this book covers will be familiar.  But Raphael Cushnir does have a somewhat different perspective and presents the information in a more practical and less spiritual way.  This book expanded familiar concepts, filling in gaps and answering some of my questions, making the ideas more applicable to every day life.

The first three Invitations were particularly worth reading.  “Feel Everything” addressed the problem of emotional shutdowns, the triggers that cause them and the ways we numb ourselves to feelings.  “Question Everything” delves into your beliefs and judgments about yourself and world.  “Resist Nothing” covers resistance and acceptance of what is.  Other readers may not have the same problem I had with relating to the second half of the book.  At the very least, if you do have the same experience with it as I did, perhaps it will be less disconcerting and confusing since you will have been forewarned.  And the book was good enough so I plan on reading two more of his books.

The Seven Invitations:

1. Feel Everything
2. Question Everything
3. Resist Nothing
4. Live Like You’re Dying
5. Live Like You’re Dreaming
6. Love Like You’re Dancing
7. Widen Your World

Self-Management

by Lee Sinclair

Self-management seems to have fallen out of style.  For some illogical reason, we have come to believe that we can improve our lives and the world we live in through changing or manipulating external events and other people.  Even more illogically, we think it’s easier to change external events and other people than it is to change ourselves.  Well, perhaps it is, but only because we’ve lost the ability to manage ourselves.  The truth is, the only thing we have any real control over is ourselves and the choices we make.  We can’t control what happens to us or the behavior of other people.  Yes, our choices can make something more likely to occur.  But we can not control results.  So our focus should be on what we can control—ourselves, our choices, our behavior.

In order to effectively manage ourselves, we need to be self-aware, that is, to have adequate knowledge of ourselves and our behavior.  But we spend so much time automatically and unconsciously acting or reacting while thinking about other things we’re seldom aware of our actions.  We are a preoccupied society.  We think we’re aware until we start paying attention to what we’re really doing or, even more revealing, keeping a log of our activities.  A written account exposes the truth, and we are usually amazed by it.  Do I really watch that much TV?  Or spend that much time on the Internet?  Did I really fritter away that much money on impulse and on stuff I don’t care about?  Do I really waste that much time on inefficient solutions, unsolvable problems, or things that don’t matter to me?

So the first step is to create a current and accurate picture of who you are and how you spend your time.  Not as a self-judgment, but a simple evaluation.  That still takes a whole lot of honesty.  And you need to look at all areas of your life and from different perspectives.  Who you are is a combination of what you do, what you think, and what you feel.  The specific information you need is what you do, how you do it, when you do it, where you do it, and why you do it.

After you gather the information, you evaluate it by using categories, grouping similar activities, and looking for patterns.  Diagrams, grids, or charts can be used to break down your life, using subdivisions such as work, family, social life, and recreational, creative, and educational activities combined with the subdivisions of physical, emotional, and psychological needs.  Gather and evaluate the necessary information in whatever way best suits you, as long as it gives you a clear enough picture of yourself and your behavior.

Once you know yourself, you can determine what areas you’d like to change, what goals and values are important to you, what habits you’d like to modify or discard, and what new habits or skills you’d like to add.  Of course, that’s easier said than done.  Any change is difficult and takes effort.  We’re comfortable with what we’re doing, even if we’re not particularly happy about it.  We also feel “better” when we’re doing things we’re already good at.  Learning something new can make you feel really inept and stupid.  But people who want to excel spend most of their time working on areas where they are less proficient and on learning new skills, rather than practicing what they’ve already mastered.

Habits are particularly hard to change, partly because they’re ingrained patterns of behavior and partly because we usually don’t want to change them.  So unless we pay attention to what we are doing, we’ll fall back into the old habit pattern.  And more often than not, we want a different result but we don’t really want to change the habit that created the result.  We may want to lose weight, but we don’t want to change our eating habits.  At least not permanently.

Sometimes we won’t be able to change our behavior until we reexamine and change the belief that causes it and address the fears behind it.  Frequently, that belief arose from an old situation that was either misinterpreted or no longer applies, so the belief needs to be reevaluated based on updated knowledge and your current situation.

The reality is we already know all these things, but we probably won’t make much use of the knowledge.  We’ll continue as we are, only changing when forced to by other people, external circumstances, or serious negative consequences.  Essentially, we have fired ourselves as our managers—and deservedly so, given the bad job we were doing.  But then we gave that job to no one in particular, to everyone and everything else.  Our lives have become someone else’s responsibility, someone else’s fault.  We need to rehire ourselves, and this time provide more training and support, so we’ll do a better job than before.

The consolation is even one small change can make a huge difference in our lives.  Since everything is interconnected, a change in one area has a ripple effect which expands into every other area of our lives, continuing outward and changing our external world, as well.  So start small with a pebble or even a grain of sand, if that’s all you can manage.  It will make a difference.

You see that tiny grain of sand, the one right next to the giant, immovable boulder.  That’s the little bit I’m working on right now.

Also posted on my Sinclair Stories Blog.

The Management of Time by James T. McCay

Reviewed by Lee Sinclair

This book was written for business managers and was first published way back in 1959 when business was “simple” compared to nowadays.  Yet, much of what it says about time pressures and the rapid changes in the business world seem to be even more true now than it was then.  So can the information and techniques presented in the book be used by managers today?  Since I’m not a manager or directly involved with the business world, I can’t answer that.  Everything in this book seems pretty basic, and business may very well have progressed far beyond what it has to offer.

However, sometimes progress and change makes us forget how important these basics are.  It’s only when we reach a critical point or a crisis occurs that we remember them and bring them back into common practice.  Many of the principles and techniques that McCay puts forward in his book are so fundamental they can be used by the average person to more effectively manage time.  With all their busyness, people fritter away huge amounts of time.  And if people are not using these elementary time management tools in their everyday life, it seems unlikely they’re using them at work.

The main tool for managing time that McCay focuses on is what he calls the “principle of refinement.”  It’s not enough to work harder or longer.  One needs to increase one’s output, or in today’s terms, one’s productivity.  To do that, you start by breaking down what you do into small, individual parts and then examining each area to see what can be eliminated because it’s unnecessary or obsolete, or if it can’t be eliminated, to determine how it can be improved upon.  Refinement is that process of looking at and working on smaller and smaller parts.

Forming a clear and accurate picture of the job or of any situation is essential before you can successfully take action.  This skill is cultivated by increasing your alertness, increasing your available energy, and increasing your knowledge and range of experience.  Increasing alertness consists of practicing your ability to pay attention and fighting against preoccupation and distractions.  Increasing your available energy is mostly about finding and stopping energy leaks caused by such things as negativity, especially criticism and defensiveness, and physical sources.  Increasing your knowledge and range of experience involves learning how to select what information resources and activities will be the most beneficial and, even more important, what is not the best use of your educational time.

Some of the specific tools he recommends using are grids to subdivide areas for analysis and diagrams to reveal connections and share complicated ideas.  He also discusses various communication techniques.  The last section of the book covers setting goals and implementing all these techniques, which is the final and most necessary step to improving anything one does.

Two caveats:  This book focuses on just one aspect of being a good manager, and it does not include all time management techniques available.  Therefore, one should also read other books about being a good manager or even about managing time.  Second, if you want to apply this information to other areas of your life outside of work, you will probably need to modify some of it to fit the particular situation.

Throughout the book, the material is presented in a clear, easily digestible style.  Everything is so simply stated that it appears obvious, and the reader may underestimate the depth and the value of the information.  But the book is full of useful  time management principles and techniques that apply to all areas of life.  It’s well worth the time and energy spent reading it, no matter how busy you are.