You Are What You Think

The Book I Choose is called, You Are What You Think by David Stoop. I picked this book because I could relate to the topic. During the time of the assignment I was faced with some life differencing changes, which were affecting my perception on myself. I would blame myself for failures and in turn I was being too hard on myself. I knew the reason I would think down was because my attitude made myself perceive myself that way. In turn when I saw the title of the book it stood at me. I was at borders and not practically looking for a book like this, but a book for this assignment. I was glad to find something that could potentially help me and with out hesitation choose this book.

Strengths of this book include Dealing with attitude, your personal attitude. Rather create a facilitative mind frame rather then being debilitative. It also helps to counter creating fallacies for your self such as fallacy of catastrophic expectations. Believing you will fail will make you perceive yourself as loser and cripple your attitude. The book also touches base with our belief system; such as self-talk is a key essential as long as it is used properly. We all believe self-talk is beneficial to understanding our identity but sometimes we don’t realize when we are being debilitative and in turn we can’t grow. The book teaches you the “ ABC’s of our emotions, it states “ A, represents activating events in our life’s, b, refers to our beliefs system, C is Consequences.” (p.g. 29 You Are…). It helped me perceived a positive attitude to in turn be positively rewarded.

The book had a very strong perception on how attitudes make the person. It used a lot of great examples to prove different situations for different people. The only weakness I thought was that as I read some of the attitudes people were using I couldn’t relate to them. The book says “Overwhelmed people are accepting of their emotions but lack the self-discipline to experience self-control” (p.g. 24, You Are…) I can recall usually when I’m overwhelmed I consider myself in to deep over my head, but that doesn’t mean I have a lack of self-discipline. I believe you must have an understanding of emotions from different people or an open-mind to relate.

This book relates to me in various ways. One way that I can appreciate is in how we use self-talk to determine our self-esteem. I discovered that my self-talk was more in likely a contributing factor to minimal depression. In chapter six the book talks about self-talk and depression, it breaks down patterns of distorted self-talk that help maintain negative patterns of thinking. The one I was more able to relate to was arbitrary inference, were we draw conclusions in the absence of any evidence.

The Text from class, Interplay, and my book, You Are What You Think are both very comparable. One obvious similarity is that both books have a good amount of self-asserted test to determine how you personally compare in each chapter. On a deeper issue, they both deal with factual information. The textbook touched more on key terms that helped me understand my book more thoroughly. More notably chapter three in the text talks about perceived self and self-fulfilling prophecy that in turn