The Complete Idiot's Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem

Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful for raising self esteem
Review: Dr. Warner has done an incredible job in this book of making sense out of self-esteem. He uses humor, compassion, and creativity to give the reader numerous tools for developing their own self-esteem, and for contributing to the esteem of others. This book is a great gift -- to yourself, or to someone you love.

Rating:
Summary: A Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Review of this book
Review: I am always wary of books that begin with the accolade of 'The Complete Idiot's Guide' as it suggests that those who buy such books, are, indeed complete idiots.

Not believing myself to be in this category but being in search of ways to boost morale and productivity and teamwork I bought this book after having flicked through and found the contents to be short and well illustrated with anecdotes, humour and other such features to make this appealing to even the most reluctant readers.

This book certainly has all of those things and at a basic level it does a useful job in highlighting a number of features which help in enhancing self-esteem. The book is clearly well meaning but misses it's target by a long way.

My understanding of what this book is meant to be is as a self-study workbook. To some extent it is but really does not go far enough to help those who suffer from lack of self-esteem. Let me give one very crucial example. The author cites S.W.O.T. analysis, the first being Strengths, the second being weakness. The reader is asked to list his or her greatest strengths and serious weaknesses. However, there is no guidance given as to how someone should determine those, and, given that those who lack self-esteem do not feel good about themselves to begin with, they will find it hard to list strengths and will feel that they have more than three weaknesses.

The book does serve as an introduction to the problem and does point the way to some exercises that can be done to assist in enhancing self-esteem. For anyone serious about tackling this problem this is not the book for them.

...or of course I could just be a complete idiot and have missed the point of this book alltogether. Hmmm

Rating:
Summary: Waste of 265 Pages
Review: I bought this book hoping I'd at least find an ounce of motivation or a way to work on my view of myself. I was dead wrong.

The book ended up being a huge jumble of pop psychology and uninspirational quotes. It also asks you to write out past failures and successes, as if doing that would somehow show you how to work on things in the present and the future. It however, does not give you any information on how to work on the present. The book ends up being a quick self-evaluation, which with people with low self-esteem really isn't going to mean much. It also is too focused on how you, the reader, reacts to others. I thought this was SELF-esteem and not interpersonal relationship help.

Rating:
Summary: Not very helpful for raising self esteem
Review: I found this book pretty much useless for boosting my self esteem. The advice given in the book was poor with silly, little quotes and poems. I felt that it was lacking good, hard research on low self esteem and how to improve one's self esteem. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I took away from the book to help me with that.