Local Adelaide comedian and life coach, Maggie Wood, has been exploring happiness both professionally and personally. She’s ran her own life coaching business, written blogs, developed Fringe workshops, and has now released her first book.
Don’t Take My Advice is the title but you’d be wrong to heed that advice.
Teaching from personal experience, Wood’s debut book shies away from her comedy background to treat the material with a little more seriousness but her style is relaxed and easy to read. She lightens the load with a number of funny stories and openly calls out some of the quirks that get thrown at us on this journey called Life. Don’t Take My Advice is a highly enjoyable read.
The chapters are themed around happiness: Happy Talk, Happy Heart, Happy Holidays, and so on. Each topic begins with a scene from her own life which are sometimes brutally honest, like when her first husband didn’t come to pick her up from the hospital after the birth of their child. From there, Wood goes on to discuss the personal development issue on hand and how it related to herself at that time. She covers self-awareness, internal vs external motivators, changing your perception, developing a richer inner spiritual life, generating love from within, and so much more.
Wood acknowledges that there is no one solution to fit every person and this is an important theme throughout. In line with that, she concludes each chapter with a very useful breakdown of Here’s What Worked for Me followed by Questions to Ponder and some last thoughts on the matter. By shining a light on her own evolution and providing a starting point for self-examination, each example becomes easy to adapt to one’s own situation.
I like to consider myself relatively self-aware and, for the most part, self-confident, but Wood still manages to provide several “A-ah!” moments, most memorably with her example of purple cars on page 39 to demonstrate how opportunities hide in plain sight. I’m not going to explain that one to you!
Everything that comes after the title of Don’t Take My Advice is good advice. It’s logical, easy to follow, relatable, and friendly. It doesn’t highlight the reader’s faults nor make anyone feel guilty. The focus is on acknowledging the ‘now’ and building a positive future, which is something we all want and need.
With that in mind, take her advice.
Reviewed by Rod Lewis
Twitter: @StrtegicRetweet
Rating out of 10: 9
Released by: Wridgeway Press
Release Date: November 2017
RRP: $24.99 paperback, $9.30 eBook
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