The Change Guidebook and The Success Guidebook Receive Positive Kirkus Reviews

I am very honored to now have two excellent Kirkus Reviews for my guidebooks. The Change Guidebook - How to Align Your Heart, Truths, and Energy to Find Success in All Areas of Your Life and The Success Guidebook - How to Visualize, Actualize, and Amplify You have BOTH received excellent Kirkus Reviews.

Every author aspires for positive Kirkus Review. It's like going to the World Series for authors and a positive review is like winning it all! The magazine was founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus and is headquartered in New York City. Kirkus Reviews reviews over 10,000 titles per year, including fiction, nonfiction, children's, and young adult books.

Here are the reviews:

The Success Guidebook - How to Visualize, Actualize, and Amplify You

Life coach and entrepreneur Hamilton-Guarino offers a motivational guide for achieving success.

Hamilton-Guarino, the founder of the Best Ever You Network—which produces motivational guidebooks, podcasts, and magazines—aims to inspire readers to “Create awesomeness within” in this book. She begins with her own family’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story, which led to her decision to quit her jobin the finance sector and create the Best Ever You brand. Her strategies for success fall into three categories (“Visualize Your Success,” “Actualize Your Success,” and “Amplify Your Success”) and consist of 10 factors, including imagining what success looks like; believing in oneself; focusing one’s vision and energy; taking action toward achieving one’s goal; and six others, ending with toasting one’s success. Hamilton-Guarino illustrates her concepts with real-life anecdotes about successful people, such as Jesse Cole and Emily Cole (the founders of the exhibition baseball team, the Savannah Bananas) and Georgetown University baseball head coach Edwin Thompson. A recurring “Stories from the Heart” section features first-person accounts by others with impressive achievements, and “Points to Ponder” and journal prompts provide encouraging thought exercises. Hamilton-Guarino’s most notable contribution is her broadening of the definition of success; rather than using “conventional measurements such as data or the dollars in your bank account,” she asserts, one can see success “reflected in the smiles that brighten our faces and the peace that settles in our hearts.” Readers looking for an introduction to basic self-help ideas will find that this book does the job. However, those who are already familiar with the genre may feel that much of the advice draws on clichés, such as “Reach for the stars!” and “Believe in yourself.” Other encouragements, such as “Live your superpowers,” may strike some readers as saccharine. The text also suffers from excessive verbosity at times: “Success to me is in the relationships you have, the bonds you create, the network, and collaborations, and treating everyone you encounter with a sense of grace, compassion, elegance, kindness, peace, and genuine interest.”

An earnest self-help manual that treads overly familiar ground.

The Change Guidebook - How to Align Your Heart, Truths, and Energy to Find Success in All Areas of Your Life

A certified master coach and CEO of The Best You Network shares best practices for overcoming adversity and creating positive change.

Hamilton-Guarino has helped thousands of clients live richer, more authentic lives by cultivating a change mindset, and here, she outlines the techniques she has refined throughout her career. “True change happens when you align your heart, your truths, and your energy,” she says. Over the course of 10 chapters with titles like “Assess,” “Implement,” and “Master,” Hamilton-Guarino guides readers through the process of developing new and better habits and includes a series of exercises designed to help readers define and manifest their goals. The book ends with an invitation to the reader to obtain their own master class certification. Hamilton-Guarino notes that trying to adopt new behaviors that aren’t aligned with our values and our true desires is likely to fail, and lasting change requires hard work and conviction. She illustrates the principles she presents with anecdotes told by those who have overcome various challenges, from childhood trauma to life-threatening illness. One woman, for example, tells a story about surviving a potentially deadly incident while surfing by focusing on her strength rather than fixating on the danger. In the critical moment, she trusted her own power. Much of the guidance Hamilton-Guarino offers is useful for developing new habits, but some of it may not be realistic for all. In a chapter on discerning what we truly want, Hamilton-Guarino tells an anecdote about a client trying to decide whether he should stay in his job. When she asks him, “What does your heart say?” he responds by saying that he’s miserable. “Well,” she replies, “There is your answer.” That’s not an answer many can readily choose. And readers should know that there is a lot of talk about weight and weight loss throughout this book. That said, the exercises alone make this a serviceable guide for anyone looking for a road map to a more fulfilling life.

Encouraging and strategic but not always pragmatic.

Both books are available where books are sold and are in eBook, audiobook and paperback formats.

Purchase link: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Elizabeth-Hamilton-Guarino/187979471