Book Review: Put on Your Crown by Queen Latifah

Queen Latifah is a fabulously respected, savvy businesswoman. She is an Oscar-nominated actress, a Grammy winner, a Cover Girl, and a self-made entrepreneur. She has been an inspiration to many women and young girls throughout the years as she has proven time and again that you can become a successful woman without compromising yourself or your standards in order to fit into some magic mold society insists you must fit into.

Queen Latifah has been a positive role model when it comes to body image and body acceptance. That in itself was the reason why I was excited to read her newest book, Put on Your Crown. The book, she says, is “a wake-up call to empowerment”, written predominantly for young women after noticing the severe lack of self esteem held by young women, which she believes is an epidemic throughout the US. She wrote this book for those young women who need to know that as you learn and grow from the experiences of your past, you can use them to turn yourself into a strong, confident woman.

Put on Your Crown is not a typical self help book. It is not a book of pages upon pages of bullet points on how to miraculously find self confidence and start treating yourself like a queen. It is not written in a tone that screams “I’m a professional and I have all the answers, so listen to me and your life will become awesome!” While it could be classified as a self help book, the premise of Put on Your Crown has to do with moments in our lives that essentially make us who we are and how to take those moments and, regardless of how devastating or surreal, use them to better our lives and appreciate what we have in our lives.

Queen Latifah shares pivotal moments in her own life that fall under one of eight topics, which she has set up as chapters throughout her book. The moments range from the way her parents had treated her and her brother the same without leaving one of them left out, to the openness of her family and their unwavering support throughout her life, to finding out who her true friends were after she had become a celebrity, to the times she worked herself too hard and had burnt out when she was trying to launch her recording studio and then again when she had to appear for photographs and interviews, to becoming very wealthy and suddenly finding out she had gone completely broke, to going to see her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and to the sudden and tragic death of her brother. These moments, as well as many others that have shaped Queen Latifah into the woman she stands proud as today, are listed under the categories of success, beauty, money, love, fear, loss, strength and joy.

As she reflects on her past and the moments she has had in her life that have made her who she is today, she lends not only the stories of these moments to the reader, but also advice and compassion. Essentially, this should have been a great book for young women. The premise of the book is good, the morals of her stories are fantastic and she does touch upon very important topics, such as drugs, prostitution and violence breaking out everywhere in her hometown and telling her readers about her mother, who is also her best friend, who has always been a teacher and who has also committed herself to helping young people who were plagued by drugs and violence and has helped them. Realistically, I found this book to be filled with tiny, redeeming morsels among a book that, as a whole, I found dry, repetitive and boring. The hardcover edition of this book is small and at 197 pages where, if it were laid out in a standard 8×11″ book would make up even less pages, was pretty painful to get through. While I don’t have too much time to sit down and read a book to begin with, I could easily get through something of this size in a few days. Instead, Put on Your Crown took me a month to read and most of that time I spent staring at the book when I did have time to sit down with it, willing myself to pick it up and keep on reading.

I can definitely appreciate the tone of her book; it was not written by a psychologist or a trained professional, but straight from the source. Queen Latifah writes solely in her own voice, as you would imagine she would speak to someone who was talking to her in-person. While I typically enjoy what Queen Latifah has had to say in the past (not including her recent comment about how we need to stop “beating up” Chris Brown, of course), I think this book would have made a better blog–something a great deal shorter. I do not think that she had enough content to fill a book with, since I found her going back to the same stories, anecdotes and scenarios several times throughout the book and it got boring pretty fast.

Despite my boredom with Put on Your Crown, I was looking for something specific within its pages. I wanted her to elaborate more on body image and body acceptance. As a full-figured woman who has actually made a career for herself in Hollywood, she is widely seen as a role model for young women who has not given in to society’s need for thinness. Very early in the book she dedicated a section of her book to the topic, that topic being entitled Real Women Have Curves. She speaks about the pressure to lose weight that she felt throughout her career, frequently being told to lose weight by studio executives, but she had remained adamant on keeping her figure. As long as she was healthy, she liked her size. End of story. That is the Queen Latifah I was looking for. On the second-to-last page of her book, she erased that entire section on how much she liked the size she was and didn’t want to lose weight. In writing to her 19-year-old former-self, she writes, “Dana. Do you know who you are? Guess who you get to be! And guess what, you even get to lose weight!”

I’m sorry, but excuse me? Did I read that correctly? Wait, I went back and looked and yes, I did! For a woman who has solidified herself as a champion of body acceptance to end an entire book she has just written on that note is not only a letdown; it is absolutely devastating for any young woman who feels she is not pretty enough or thin enough and picked up this book thinking it would be something different.

Good Vibrations Launches Sexy Mama Resource Site

Good Vibrations has come out with something thoroughly awesome recently that is sure to excite all the sexy mamas out there. The brand new Good Vibrations Sexy Mama resource site contains all sorts of intriguing, eye-opening and absolute must-see/read/have information just for parents–because moms need to take some time out for themselves while they’re working hard caring for their families every day.

At goodvibessexymama.com, you will find the , containing items like the book Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex 3rd Edition. You can also read great articles from talented and educated writers at the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama Blog.

What is really great about this blog is that it is completely inclusive. Every single mother can relate to something that has been written and if a topic you’re interested in or looking for hasn’t been written about, why not write about it from your first-hand experience? Good Vibrations is currently looking for sexy mamas to contribute articles to the blog and have even come up with a few topic suggestions in case you’re very interested in contributing but are stuck for an idea. Some possible topics include:

• How pregnancy and motherhood affected your sexuality
• Humorous moments in talking to your kids about sex
• Who are your Sexy Mama Role Models?
• The challenges of balancing a sex life with having kids

If you’d like to contribute to the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama Blog, email your submissions to submissions@goodvibes.com.

This resource site will definitely give you pointers, ideas and support to continue being the awesome sexy mama that you are. They can also provide you with the tools to unleash that sexy goddess in you because remember, Good Vibrations is a provider of sex education and sex positive products.

Go check out the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama resource site and get inspired!

Book Review: Law of Connection by Michael J. Losier

This is a guest post by Allen Van Wert, professional musician, author of technical guitar and songwriting books, and student of NLP.

Law of Connection: The Science of Using NLP to Create Ideal Personal and Professional Relationships is from the author Michael J. Losier, the same person who wrote The Secret. He is an NLP practitioner and attempts to simplify verbal communication between humans into four types of speakers/listeners. The neuro linguistic programming (NLP) portions of this book consist of the authors own use of NLP to get you to believe in his system, tell friends about it and get you to “love all of the white space as well as childish illustrations in the book”. He is basically using as many NLP tactics or “tricks” as he can to get you to “buy” his idea and feel like you are in fact part of it. While NLP practitioners are amazing at selling people on ideas or thoughts. I, being a student of NLP, found the tricks contained in this book at first to be quite comical because they are applied in such a blatant fashion, and then quickly off putting. I was hoping the NLP was based around the system itself to gain skill in communication. This however, was not true. The NLP is used as a method to trick you into thinking it will work and that it is based around a valid judgment system for communication.

The only NLP within the system itself is the idea of making a conscious decision to use certain wording to best appeal to a specific audience. The rest of it is common sense that boils down to people liking someone who “mirrors” them verbally. While I can see how this does work, there are some problems with the theory.

Here is an example: Just because someone says “see you tomorrow” Does NOT mean they are a visual type of communicator. They will most likely also often say things like “talk to you soon”, “have a good one” or “we will touch base again soon”. This implies various communicator types at any given moment. Basically, there are very few people who use the indicator statements consistently enough in one “style” that would even allow an accurate judgment on their communicator type.

The second issue I have with this theory is that if you were able to analyze someone and decide what communicator type they are, you would end up being a false representation of yourself just to “get what you want”. This has a bunch of big red flags with the words “malicious, opportunistic, control freak” written all over them to me. Using tricks to make someone else feel at ease with you or tricking them to feel like you are just like them is on the shady side and is why I tend to personally not use NLP or social engineering for the most part.

He gives a very short run through about physical cues and rapport building via mirroring but it lacks the real in depth substance I was expecting.

The book and its ideas are NOT going to make you a better communicator. However, the simple fact that you will have to become more careful in listening to other people and how you word yourself WILL make you a better communicator. If you take time to listen to people in general it will make them like you more anyway, people love to talk about or hear about themselves more than any other topic in the world. When you take more deliberate care in anything you do, including speaking, you will often yield a better result anyway.

The book would be interesting for someone who has no knowledge of neuro linguistic programming. They may “love the white space in the book”, or “tell their friends to also buy it”. I, being someone who already happened to study NLP can see right through the trickery and feel that the content of the book itself is a little shallow and misguided. There are many parts of the short book that are basically copied and pasted over and over and then there were slight modifications to each section for each “communicator type.” There is even a test right after all of the authors own NLP tricks to get you to love his work. This test left me thinking that I may either have a multiple personality disorder or that the authors theory about communication falls flat.

I am led to believe that this work was solely an attempt to generate income and had nothing to do with helping people communicate. It feels rushed, copy-pasted, redundant as a children’s book (see Johnny run, see Johnny play) and above all, the beginning of the book itself being used as one big NLP tactic against the reader was the biggest indicator of greed.

This book could have been summarized in to this short paragraph and would hold the same merit:

Act physically how other people you are communicating with are acting, use the same types of phrases they do, speak at the same speed and really listen to what they are saying before speaking back.

Book Review: No Matter What! by Lisa Nichols

I usually stay very far away from any type of self help-like books; I’ve always believed that people who just so happened to become successful in their lives felt it was their right to write a self help book for the masses based on very little personal merit and rode on the coattails of the fact that the mass populace had heard of them before (ie: Dr. Phil.) I’ve also become very fed up with books targeted towards women that repeat the mantra of “You’re great and can do anything you set your mind to… As long as you have a man in your life.” So when I had heard of Lisa Nichols’ book, No Matter What!: 9 Steps to Living the Life You Love, I was weary. In fact, I was ready to pass on the book completely because to me, a self help book of any kind is pretty much interchangeable for the next supposed “big, self help phenomenon” on the market. But I didn’t pass on the book and luckily, Lisa Nichols didn’t present her readers with regurgitated bullet points and run of the mill anecdotes and advice to reaching your greater good.

To put it bluntly, Lisa Nichols is real. No Matter What! is full of Nichols’ true to life stories from relationship struggles, to thoughts of suicide, to becoming a single mother, to more relationship struggles, to knowing what she wanted to do with her life and her own struggle to get there. She shares with her readers the truth about her life and what she had to do to get to where she truly wanted and knew she had to be. She sugarcoats nothing, which is what appealed to me the most. I cannot tell you how many times I found myself rolling my eyes while reading a book that claimed it could help me and my life because the situations in the book were too small to really put my own life in the shoes of the author. Everyone has had relationship trouble and many people have weight issues and while these two life situations come up in most everyone’s life, an author will not get into the heads of the readers to really help me without touching on the fact that these situations can become increasingly difficult to deal with. These situations vary in severity from person to person, obviously, but an author must be prepared to handle the severity of the situation that may be present in a great deal of their readers lives. That is the reason why I enjoyed Lisa Nichol’s book so much. She shares uplifting stories from her life as well as the heartbreaking, angry, and even shameful stories of her life and throughout it all, she tells her readers that no, it wasn’t easy to get past those roadblocks, but she did it and she has the same hopes for the people that she reaches out to through her book and through her speaking appearances.

No Matter What! is not merely a book that is to be read once and then forgotten; it is a resource that can be used countless times throughout your life. In every chapter of the book there are a series of action steps to help hone your nine “bounce back muscles” that are imperative to have throughout life because with these muscles (The Understanding Muscle, The Faith in Myself Muscle, The Take Action Muscle, The I Know Like I Know Muscle, The Honesty Muscle, The Determination Muscle, The Forgiveness Muscle, and The Highest Choice Muscle) you can achieve what you want to achieve in your life… No matter what!

Admittedly, I enjoyed reading Lisa Nichols’ stories about herself rather than the sections where she gave advice on how to change your life. She is a great writer and can tell a great story that leaves you wanting more information about the situation and what she did afterward, which is understandable since she is also the co-author of Chicken Soup for the African American Women’s Soul. I am assuming I would have enjoyed the Lisa Nichols memoir even more.

Book Review: Getting Naked Again by Judith Sills, PhD

Relationship expert and bestselling author of titles including Excess Baggage, Fine Romance, and The Comfort Trap, or What If You’re Riding a Dead Horse?, Judith Sills’ latest offering to women is a big dose of reality, compassion, and humor served straight up.

Getting Naked Again is for any newly-single (or not-so-newly single) woman easing into romance, sex, and/or a new relationship after a divorce or a death of a spouse, but mostly and especially for women emerging from divorce after a lengthy marriage. Sills’ language is fast-paced and hilarious and will undoubtedly make you think that she is not merely a relationship expert, but someone who has met you, spent time with you, and then wrote a book about you and your life through the past months or even years. This book reads more like a group of close girlfriends with the famous, no holds barred dialogue between good friends that every woman experiences at some point in her life, or if she’s lucky, throughout her life. Getting Naked Again exposes that dialogue women have either with their friends or with themselves because sometimes what women think to themselves is not something that they would openly share with other people. Why? Because women do not like and will sometimes even downright refuse to put themselves in a place of vulnerability that is able to be seen by other people. Instead of seeming vulnerable, we appear strong, put together, confident, and self-aware while inside, we sometimes feel not completely sure of ourselves and even scared, especially when it comes to easing ourselves back into romance after thinking of ourselves as a part of a couple for so long.

Getting Naked Again will ease you out of whatever comfort zone you have been living in, whether you’ve thrown yourself into grandparenting, your career, a new career, compulsive baking, or a myriad of other activities women have a tendency to rely on in order to keep themselves afloat or just busy. It will guide you into realizing and accepting your situation and even embracing your singlehood while you test and try on potential long-term companions. Not only does Sills make you feel comfortable in who and where you are in your life, she gives you the Lincoln Logs to build your own future where you decide what happens in your life and how you transcend into the next phase of your life.

Getting Naked Again is the ultimate resource for older women (around age 30 and up) who have found themselves newly-single and need that one friend who identifies with what they’re feeling and is always full of great advice.

Book Review: Remember Who You Are by Linda Carroll

Remember Who You Are by Linda Carroll immediately caught my attention with the dedication and ultimately was the reason why I was so interested in reading her book. The dedication includes Carroll’s daughter’s names including Courtney Love and her granddaughter’s names including Frances Cobain. I jumped at the chance to read a book, especially a book about a woman’s spirit and learning and living with authentic power, written by the mother of the famous and never boring Courtney Love.

Linda Carroll is a practicing therapist whose life’s mission is helping women and in Remember Who You Are, you can clearly see her passion and dedication as she offers personal anecdotes and genuine wisdom she has gathered throughout her life and from the people she has met and bonded with.

As a person who blogs almost compulsively, I have often used the phrase ‘life got in the way’ to excuse my absence from the internet world, as disappearing from this technological world a lot of us become staples in, is bound to happen from time to time; but that phrase has many more meanings–-Because life can so easily get in the way, obstructing our paths to what we truly want to do in our lives, we also have the ability to forget who we are in a sense. With the help of the words and wisdom of many inspiring and creative women such as Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Jane Kenyon, Alice Walker and many others, Carroll makes her readers really think about their lives and the people they have grown to be. According to Carroll, a woman’s “journey of spirit” involves seven stages–Forgetting, Remembering, Exploring, Practicing, Shadows on the Path, Reclaiming and Acceptance. As Carroll takes us through the stages, her book makes us dig down inside of ourselves and fearlessly acknowledge what makes us tick by using the teachings of several different cultures and the world’s major religions.

Being an atheist, I did not think I would take much from this book, given that the subtitle mentions a journey of spirit; however, I was happily surprised by the outcome. The reason why I am an atheist is because I know a great deal about the world’s major religions and while most of these religions instill a series of teachings that are the equivalent of personal morals and common sense and what goes into being a good person, that alone does not instill a sense of faith inside of me or the belief in a higher power that will ultimately have their say in what is to become of my soul at the end of my life. Given those facts, Carroll is not teaching one specific religion in this book; she introduces us to many different religions and aspects of those religions that coincide with her seven stages that she believes every woman moves through, perhaps even several times, throughout her life. Ultimately, the goal Carroll is teaching us is to remember who we are as people before life got in the way.

Book Review: A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids by Margot Datz

Margot Datz is a self-taught painter, sculptor, interior designer and prolific writer whose imagery and beautifully crafted metaphors whisk those who read her words away, almost immediately.

As a woman who lives by the sea and spends her life creating genius pieces of art, including a spectacular eighty-five-foot mural and bas-relief installation for the Arkansas Children’s Hospital and illustrations for four children’s books for friend Carly Simon, her talent is apparent and defined in her book, A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids.

Her book, while it may first look like a typical children’s book, is filled with the wisdom a woman learns through years of life experience. She advises that in order to even think about a man in your life, you must first not only accept, but truly love yourself, faults and all. She also goes through the types and behaviors of men and reminds us all that love is a luxury to have in one’s life.

While Datz advises us women on all of life’s little setbacks and luxuries, she also reminds us that it’s important to also focus on the fun stuff, like accessories and sexy lingerie that makes a woman feel her absolute best and it’s always important to be a little naughty.

I really enjoyed reading A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids. It’s a cute and quick read, while also being inspirational and eye-opening for all women who have the pleasure of picking up this book.