Book Review: Confidence Your Secret Weapon (Ashley McLean)

Confidence Your Secret Weapon

by: Ashley McLean

Genres: Self-help, Motivation

Confidence Your Secret Weapon is a personal development guide that provides readers with the tools they need to improve confidence, develop high self-esteem, and set goals to achieve their dreams. Ashley Korin McLean shares the concepts, skills and techniques that helped transform her from a timid and shy teenager, to a successful entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker.

Confidence Your Secret Weapon delivers basic exercises designed to help instigate confidence building tactics and methodologies that can be utilized in everyday life. Confidence Your Secret Weapon will help readers form a healthy and self-assured thought process, and to recognize that confidence is a never ending journey, where there is always room for growth and improvement.

**WE WERE GIVEN A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK IN EXCHANGE FOR THE FOLLOWING HONEST REVIEW**

This book has been sitting in our TBR list for a very long time. In fact, it was one of the very first books that we agreed to review. Being new, to the blogging world, resulted in our making our fair share of mistakes...one of which was expecting part-time reviewers to share our passionate for reading. Life happened, reviewers left, and our TBR list continued to grow. Needless to say, there were times that we became overwhelmed with the requests/support that CommonBookSense was getting and we had a hard time prioritizing. Our authors, fans, publishers, and even our critics are important to us. We made a commitment and, regardless of how behind we've fallen, we intend to keep our word!

Confidence your Secret Weapon is one of those motivational/self-help books that make you take notice. I literally highlighted five key points within the first few pages. Ashley McLean's "former" self is one that I can relate to. I was her in high school. I can very vividly remember the dreadful days of having to read aloud in class. There were times I felt physically ill....wondering if I was the only person who dreaded speaking in front of others. THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN FOR THAT GIRL. It was written in a way that promotes self reflection, while being extremely relatable.

I am certain that I will revisit this book again. It will be my secret "refresher course," anytime I feel like my confidence is wavering. I feel like this would be the perfect book for a high school English to start a new school year with. I know it is definitely one that my daughter will be reading!

As always, all the good links can be found below.

Until next time,

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Book Review: From the Buff Dude in Your Gym: How to Never Stop Eating and Training (Paul Johnson)

From the Buff Dude in Your Gym: How to Never Stop Eating and Training

By: Paul Johnson  

Genre: Nonfiction, Motivation

Not the book you want, but the book you probably need. 

Tell me your vision of bodybuilding, and I’ll tell you whether or not you’re bound to fail. 

Surfing the Internet, one might think that bodybuilding is something fun, easy and, most importantly, that significant amounts of muscle can be grown fast if you’ve got enough motivation. That is simply not true. Building muscle tissue is a very, very slow process, and requires an adequate approach. 

Growing your muscle base is a huge project. It will require years of consistent work, both in and outside the gym, and the progress will be so continuous that it will be almost invisible. That’s why the better prepared you are from the very beginning, the less likely you are to quit somewhere along the way. 

How many of your friends have had gym memberships? Out of those people, how many have trained long enough to reach their dream physique? 

Of course, everyone who quits has a valid reason. Usually it’s lack of time due to work, school or kids. Sometimes people quit for other reasons. But most of the time, the real reason why people stop building their body is that they expected something else. They expected more, sooner. 

And I can’t blame them. We’re all eager to see results, and we get discouraged when we don’t. The problem with bodybuilding is that it is such a slow process that it’s extremely hard to notice any results. That’s why the best approach is not to look for evidence of muscle growth every now and then, and rather set up your mind for a long journey with an undefined arrival date. 

In this book, I’ll try to show you what bodybuilding is truly all about. I won’t go into specific exercises or nutrition plans. I will talk about realistic expectations and tuning your mind for long-term success rather than jumping into bodybuilding after a spike of motivation. I will also cover basic nutritional principles which will provide you with tools to make your own bodybuilding diets. Lastly, I will illustrate how bodybuilding diets integrate into our daily lives, talk what are the sacrifices and compromises we have to make to eat properly, and share a couple of practical tips that will soften the impact of said sacrifices.

**WE WERE GIVEN A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK IN EXCHANGE FOR THE FOLLOWING HONEST REVIEW**

As someone who has been in and out of gyms for about 16 years now, I really enjoyed this book.
I have been out of the gym now for over a year, due to having huge motivation problems.

This book gets straight to the point, and delivers the type of honest no nonsense facts and information that everyone needs to know.
I expected to read about different workout programs and such, but was pleasantly surprised to see that this book is about the toughest part of getting in shape which is the diet and meal preparation. 

I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to know what it takes to be a lifter of any type, without all the better body in 6 weeks mumbo-jumbo.
It made me feel anxious to get back into the gym while and after reading it.

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