Alter Your Life: Overbooked? Overworked? Overwhelmed? (Paperback)

by Kathleen Hall (Author) "DOES THIS SOUND LIKE YOU?..." (more)
Key Phrases: Bishop Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Henry David Thoreau

Editorial Reviews

Review
Dr. Hall gets right to the point, with interest, understanding, inspiration, and very effective literary allusions to highlight the story. -- Writer's Digest, April 2005

Product Description
Themes like “I just don’t have time” and “I’m exhausted” rule our lives today. We are overbooked, overworked and overwhelmed. Just getting done what must be done fills our days. The notion of finding a precious hour or two to learn how to create balance, reduce our stress and discover an intentional life to soothe our aching souls is simply out of the question. Dr. Kathleen Hall’s new book, Alter Your Life: Overbooked? Overworked? Overwhelmed?, provides an alternative to the struggle to “make time” for renewal. In the breakthrough book readers will: • Discover how to overcome obstacles preventing you from living the intentional life of your dreams • Practice easy stress reduction techniques that deliver immediate results • Maximize the simple moments in your life to be the most rewarding • Enrich the quality of your life by achieving work-life balance We can discover how to live an intentional life in a manner that requires no doctrine, no memorization of a new vocabulary, no trekking off to distant holy lands. It does not require us to change our jobs, our lifestyle or transplant our personalities. It doesn’t even require any additional time. We can develop our own unique personal practices that can help us return “home” once we realize that we are out of balance. In time these practices will become an effortless and restorative part of living an intentional life of mental, physical and spiritual well-being. Alter Your Life: Overbooked? Overworked? Overwhelmed? offers tools to help you find your own unique choices that will bring greater balance to your demanding life. These simple effective tools, based on age-old, time-honored medical, psychological and spiritual knowledge and wisdom, will soon become second nature and bring with them a greater sense of ease and fulfillment.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Oak Haven (April 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974542725
• ISBN-13: 978-0974542720
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #678,704 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Your Average Self-Help Book, May 26, 2005

By	JennieSBevcom (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

Alter Your Life is not your regular self-help inspirational book. It is practical, engaging and powerfully life-changing. Unlike other self-help books that focus on the goals you'd like to create for your life, Dr. Hall provides a different angle of everyday activities, so you'd be able to alter your perspectives, which are the key of lifetime joy and happiness.

Divided into 24 chapters, this book talks about ways to give meaning in the simplest and overlooked activities, such as walking, shopping, gardening, listening to music, taking a bath, watching the evening news and, even, washing dishes. The author's easy-to-read conversational tone is an added plus, as most people prefer not reading a preachy book.

Written by a former Wall Street stockbroker who lived joylessly for years, the soul of this book shines throughout the pages, making the reading a breeze. The author has walked the walk and talked the talk, indeed. It is evident from the depth of one's innermost issues covered as she encourages the readers to choose the joy and the enlightened path in their hectic and, oftentimes, boring lives.

Alter Your Life is, indeed, a self-help book of its own class. For once, an enlightened friend has spoken. Thanks, Dr. Hall.[]

A review by Jennie S. Bev of BookReviewClub.com

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars self-help masterpiece, May 15, 2005

By	BookReview.com (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." (Quote by Anonymous, page 55 Alter Your Life)
The greatest threat to America and its inhabitants has been revealed and experts are naming it, "Stress." As a medical professional, I'd like to add complacency, and lack of knowledge regarding how to break the stress- cycle to the problems facing American's today. Turn a page in any health magazine, flip through your local TV stations and what you will find is: article after article, report after report, linking stress and the fast-paced American lifestyle to: cancer, obesity, heart disease and a myriad of other diseases. Overworked, overweight, undernourished, and suffocating under piles of work, over-using our natural and spiritual resources, we American's are in a heap of trouble. Fortunately, Dr. Kathleen Hall author of Alter Your Life has devised a sound, step-by-step, non-dogmatic approach to changing your life-and your own special corner of the planet-without having to: surrender all of your worldly goods, give up your job, or move to the mountains. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Hall will hook readers from the first page by appealing to their desire for a better life. Her plan, carefully woven together with the wisdom and appreciation of multiple spiritual traditions, provides a true blueprint for a better life. Learn how to wake up and embrace life without caffeine in chapter one. Follow simple steps to turn your commute in to your chance to commune with your Divine Self in chapter six. Rediscover the joy in life by reclaiming your leisure time on page 127.
Alter Your Life is flawlessly written, well edited, and the information is presented in a format readers can actually apply to their lives. Blissfully devoid of double-speak, cryptic passages, and superior guru-ish talk, Dr. Hall's self-help masterpiece is not your mama's promise-you-the-world, but give- you -zilch- for-useful- information, type book. Anyone willing to live a better life, can easily pick up a copy and apply the simple techniques to achieve a better, more compassionate existence, without abandoning their faith, their family, or making any drastic, overnight life changes.
Review by Kate St.Amour

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lot of Very Practical Suggestions..., August 30, 2005

By	Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty (Port Orford, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

There is little question, it seems to me, that most Americans living in this new century of ours are suffering from a condition one might refer to as the "stressed-out" syndrome. (And the really unfortunate thing is that this is true of young people as well, some of them barely into their teenage years.) Many of us are working harder, trying to raise families while advancing a career, competing obsessively in the marketplace for that promotion, striving to keep up with the Jones next door, hoping that the pay check will last until the end of the month, and, well, you get the point. Are we simply condemned to this malady by the realities of modern life, or is there a way of successfully meeting this challenge and conquering it? Dr. Kathleen Hall, the author of this book and one of our nation's leading authorities on stress management, thinks there is and she calls it "living an intentional life."

This is a self-help book, to be sure. Many of you probably think as I do: most self-help books are so full of psycho-babble, unrealistic expectations, impractical advice, dogmatic prescriptions, and are so far out of touch with the actual world in which most of us live, that they seem to be written only to make some quick money for the author. I assure you this is not the case with Dr. Hall's book. Believe me, I look hard for incidences of psycho-babble in self-help books (it's one of my pet peeves) and I could not find a single case of it here. In sum, she has outlined a simple, easy-to-read, very practical and, above all, undogmatic, blueprint for living an intentional life.

The "intentional" life, Dr. Hall says, has three simple ingredients: awareness, choice, and energy. These are not sequential; it is simply necessary to "become aware of these three key elements in your life and learn how to navigate them." She emphasizes that we ought to look at our daily experiences, listen to what our body and mind are telling us, and become more conscious of how we are living our lives and how we want to live them. If I could put this general prescription into my own words, I would say she is proposing living a "proactive" life as opposed to a "reactive" life, and most people do seem to mostly "react" to the situations they encounter in life rather than make a proactive choice.

There is absolutely nothing complex about the prescriptions in this book regarding how to live an intentional life. Above all, they are very down-to-earth; very much a matter of applied "common sense." It is simply that so many people, if not the majority in today's hectic world, either "forget" to pay attention to these simple ideas or are stressed out and distracted by the events surrounding them. The author here is really recommending that we all need, now and then, to "stop and smell the roses," so to speak.

But, of course, there is much more than that presented. She gets down to the "nitty-gritty," shall we say, and, chapter by chapter, discusses everything from making your morning shower an event for setting the stage for your day, suggesting gardening (even though you may have to plant a "mini-garden" in your bathroom) as a means of reclaiming your roots to the soil, altering your dinner experience at home so you have "dined well," and, yes, even how to turn dishwashing into a unique and fulfilling experience. To point out the range of "ordinary" daily experiences she discusses, just let me say that Chapter One is entitled "Waking Up" and Chapter Twenty-four is entitled "Sleeping." Between those two points of reference are chapters devoted to most of the other daily activities we perform and encounters we experience (breakfast, commuting, working, leisure, family, etc.). Furthermore, most chapters end with a suggestion as to how to "alter your life" in the area discussed.

What I like most about Dr. Hall's book is that it is sound, pragmatic, and undogmatic. It deals with the simple pleasures we can experience in our lives, if only we would pay attention to them rather than ignore them or get distracted by other things which contribute to our "stressed-out" syndrome. Since I am by education, inclination, and choice, a philosopher in the formal sense (and an Aristotelian realist, at that!), let me conclude with a more philosophical observation.

Aristotle's famous work, the "Nicomachean Ethics," was written to provide us with a blueprint for living "a life worth living." His book is, in my opinion and in the opinion of many others, the only sound, pragmatic, and undogmatic work in moral philosophy within the Western tradition of intellectual thought. I have used those same words (sound, pragmatic, undogmatic) to describe Dr. Hall's "Alter Your Life." I think this is justified. Furthermore, I suspect that Aristotle, if he were living today, would also approve of her work; he was, after all, that most practical and commonsensical of philosophers. His "Ethics" was a manual on how to put together a "good life" through the practice of the virtues; hers is a manual on how to deal with the stresses of this contemporary world or, if you will, how to live a "good life" through the practice of intentional living in spite of the stresses surrounding us. I think Aristotle and Dr. Hall would have gotten along famously.

I recommend this book and my fellow males should not shy away from reading this book. After all, women on the average live longer than we males do, and it may be (at least partially) because they are willing to seek help and guidance rather than face stressful conditions alone. I know men tend to avoid self-help books because they consider them to be "for women." This is unfortunate. Men also need to learn strategies, even the simple ones suggested in this book, in order to live a healthy and meaningful life.