Title: Proactive and Applied Resilience: The Sixteen Experiences
Author: Glenn E. Richardson, PhD
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1392-8
Pages: 368
Genre: Self-Help / Personal Growth
Reviewed by: Allison Walker
Pacific Book Review
In a world full of self-help books, it takes something exceptional to stand out among the crowded shelves. Glenn E. Richardson’s Proactive and Applied Resilience, The Sixteen Experiences is a break from the mold and an engaging point of view towards personal progress. This may be because Richardson’s book comes from a place of true understanding, sympathy and learning.Richardson’s novel begins with a story. In his story, Richardson is struck by a car and placed in the hospital. Months of care and rehabilitation forced him to find a strength he didn’t know he had, and to trust in a strength beyond himself. Through this very emotional event, Richardson begins to show readers how they too can overcome life’s most dire challenges. At the same time, he’s often very clinical in his approach to the material. Richardson intersperses notes throughout his personal story to guide the reader through these very objective analyses of a very emotional tale. They make you evaluate and find the same patterns in your life. No event is too small to be meaningful when put in context with Richardson’s guide: “Your adventures describe a journey of progression.”
You can tell the author is also a teacher. His self-help book isn’t just reading and desperately trying to absorb the fields of text scrawled across the page. Too many self- help books spew affirmations at the reader, but instead, Richardson includes learning activities. He shows readers how to make lists and interact with the material, how to make change in their own lives. It’s one of the many ways his book exceeds standard self-help content.
The Q-nexus, a term coined by Richardson, features heavily in his advice. The Q- nexus are the moments that infuse your soul with the qualities you need in your life, or creating the interconnection of qualities needed in order to progress. Richardson chooses Q for its symbolic value in many different words: quanta, quintessence, quickening, qi, questioning, and quest, to name a few. The Q-nexus is also Richardson’s trademark, the foundation of his advice to his readers and how he separates his book from the hordes which can only offer Freudian quips. The Q-nexus is a powerful idea, one with enough strength to create an entire book, but also enough flexibility to become intimate and personal for each seeker.
Richardson shares a beautiful idea of life as a journey, wherein you collect the Q’s or virtues you will need to progress through your journey. It’s an idea which challenges you to find meaning in the terrible things that happen to you, and to appreciate more the wonderful things. Through Richardson’s book, we learn both negative and positive life events meaningfully contribute to your progress and without one or another you would not be the person you are today. He makes every life event seem momentous, and indeed it is.
Proactive and Applied Resilience is a self-help book for students tired of Freud and affirmations taped to the bathroom mirror. Embrace every aspect of your life and then find the truth inside yourself, Richardson urges. The activities beg readers to interact with the material, charts and graphs urge understanding, and through it all Richardson is a kind and wise adviser.
