2 out of 4 stars
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Are you a woman who wants to get to a better place in life, but you aren’t sure how to get there? Maybe you are hoping to improve your financial situation, your family relationships, or your faith and are looking for a way to get started. In her book, Ten Secret Powers of Successful Wise Women, Dr. Evelyn Hill hopes to help you accomplish your goals. As she states in her author’s note, “…this book will give you keys to recognize and solve areas of lack in your life so you can build a support system to help you move out of the valley of apathy and ineffectiveness to the mountaintop of prosperity in every area of your life.”
The author begins with her own story of personal growth. She dropped out of college to enter into what turned out to be a bad marriage. She eventually found herself a divorced, financially unstable single mother, struggling with feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. Dr. Hill shares her story of how she recovered and eventually thrived in life. In the remainder of her book, she goes on to list and explain ten “secret” powers that every woman can harness to give herself the life she wants and deserves.
Each power is given its own chapter. Examples of some of the powers include the power of struggle, the power of gratitude, and the power of rest. I always enjoy self-help books that are structured in this way, because it makes it easy for me to focus on and apply the parts that resonate with me, as each woman will have different areas of weakness to concentrate on. For each power, she explains the importance of the power itself and provides some examples of famous women who have used that power to achieve great things. She also shares how she has applied each power to her own life. She incorporates quotes from the Bible to emphasize her points. As I am not religious, I didn’t personally gain anything from this aspect, but it was not pervasive enough to annoy me or make me feel that I could not apply the book to my life.
The tone is uplifting and encouraging, although it borders on preachy from time to time, such as when she went to great lengths to explain the importance of education and going back to school. I also felt like most of the powers were not well researched or explained. My favorite chapter was on the power of focus. She used the acronym FOCUS (“Follow One Course Until Successful”) and outlined ways to get rid of distractions and concentrate on one area of life you want to improve, step by step. I found that there were enough details and suggestions for how to accomplish this that I could put this into practice. Most of the other chapters seemed very surface-level. They just explained that the powers are important without really providing any steps on how to implement them. She did provide a bibliography of her sources, and she also listed some resources for further research. But overall, I got the impression that this book really served more as a pep talk than an actual instructional manual on how to develop your powers.
The other major complaint I have about this book is that it was not professionally edited and was riddled with errors throughout. Given the errors and that so many of the chapters lacked enough detail to really help me get started on self-improvement, I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. Since I did like the writing style and was able to find some helpful tidbits, I felt it deserved more than one star. I would recommend this book to a woman who is looking for a quick, inspirational read as a jumping-off point for her self-help journey. However, if you are hoping to find an all-inclusive guide on how to improve your life, there are better choices out there.
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Ten Secret Powers of Successful Wise Women
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