Background:

You might be asking yourself why I got a copy of Steve Pavlina’s new book, Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth to review and why am I reviewing it on a blog about public speaking and Toastmasters?

Over three years ago, I read the blog post “Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking” by Steve Pavlina. Steve’s blog post got me going to Toastmasters meetings, attending Darren LaCroix boot camps, and working on developing myself as a more thoughtful person. Luckily I got a copy a few weeks ago, and after getting back from a number of business and personal trips, have the time to sit down and write my review of the book.

Review:

Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, by Steve Pavlina is not a manual. Unlike many self help books, it does not give you what the author thinks are step by step instructions to make money, be happy, or be healthy. What I found the book offered was a very practical foundation in a philosophy of personal development and practical guidance into how to apply that philosophy to your personal life.

The book is broken down into two parts:
1. Fundamental Principles or what I found to be the Philosophy of Personal Development.
2. Practical Application or how to apply the Fundamental Principles to your life.

In Part 1, Steve lays out the fundamentals about truth, power, love, authority, oneness, and intelligence. The descriptions of what each one of these contains are thoughtfully interlaced with personal stories from the author’s life. I was pleasantly surprised by the readability of the first part. When I first read the introduction, I was worried because sometimes Steve’s blog posts are so content rich that it takes me a long time to read and digest the material. This was not the case, and I found the fundamentals enlightening and it gave me some purpose to make changes in how I think about personal development.

Part 2 is the instructive portion of the book. What I found in part 2 was a very good description of how the elements described in part 1 can be applied to the topics of habits, career, money, health, relationships, and spirituality. What was enjoyable about the practical application was that it was not, “you have to do X to get Y.” It was more of a description of what steps you can take to make yourself a more congruent and conscious person in the different topic areas. Becoming more congruent and conscious will then allow you to advance in the different topic areas. Definitely a much different approach then other self help authors have taken.

Overall I really enjoyed reading the book. I did not find myself chucking it aside like many other self help books I have read recently. Honestly, I can say that I gained a lot out of this book and know that it will lend itself to be a great reference in my future development. There are a lot of new ways of approaching self development contained within the pages of the book and I hope to apply more of them everyday.

As with all of Steve’s writing, the most important thing to take a away is to try it out yourself. If you don’t get results after a month, then stop doing it, but you won’t know until you try. That goes with speaking, exercise, diet, and anything you can do to develop yourself as a person. So if you want, give Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth a try and hopefully you will get as much out of it as I have.