You may have become numb to all the books, methods, systems, authors, consultants, and celebrities touting this or that idea that will change your life, bring you happiness, free you from the crushing chores of daily life, and throw in whiter teeth and shiny hair in the bargain. You would be forgiven for assuming that this is yet another of those books, but you would be wrong. Oh there is the catchy title that is also a metaphor and an acronym for the ideas the author is trying to share, and that is certainly the first impression you get with any of the normal books in the self-help genre. But for me, the similarity ends there. This book is about examining yourself and challenging your own motivations and responses to your life. There is no mechanism you can apply to avoid having to face your life and coast through it chanting some slogans as if they were mantras. Here you face deep and thorough self-examination from your harshest critic; yourself. But rather than beating yourself with a cudgel, the authors show you how you have bound yourself in chains and how you can remove them and find the freedom you think you want. Only real freedom can be intimidating because of its accompanying responsibilities. If you avoid them, you will engage in license and fall back into bondage.
Rather than talking about empowering yourself, the Quinns show you how to examine your habitual and well-worn responses to your life situation and take a fresh approach. Not to gain power over other people, or even to use power for good ends, but to use what they call "lift". The book uses flight as a metaphor for the mental and social processes they want you to recast in your life. They use it quite a lot and, I think, rather successfully. Of course, I can't take you through the whole book and work through all its features with you, but the core of the book that they use entire chapters to flesh out, are:
1) "What results do I want to create?" Almost all of us, at least I know it is too often true of me, deal with difficult situations by trying to get back to where we feel comfortable. We want to fix problems to get back to our life as it was before. But maybe we should be thinking about using the situation to see a new level of life, a transformed life for ourselves and those we love (or at least interact with).
2) "What would my story be if I were living the values I expect of others?" You will be shocked when you try to answer this question in a thoughtful way. You will see that much of what you (at least, I) do is motivated by external factors and often conflict with our true values and what we cherish most in life. This question points you towards becoming free to use your internal motivators by cutting yourself loose of those external chains.
3) "How do others feel about this situation?" Here you get outside your head and think about others and what you can do to best transform the situation by including them in your plans and efforts. The truth is that you will be happier by lifting others than by trying to soar through your life alone.
4) "What are three (or four or five) strategies I could use to accomplish my purpose for this situation?" Now you let go of your fixed responses and become open to fresh possibilities.
These four questions can help you achieve the lift the book is talking about. You don't need anyone to agree with you. You don't need anyone's help. In fact, the whole world can oppose you and yet when you achieve your own lift, you become such a positive force that others will find it hard to resist coming with you. You need no compulsion, no snappy patter, and no gimmicks. Just finding the source of your own lift in any situation will free you and those around you to transform any circumstance into an opportunity for doing good, experiencing vibrancy, and becoming profoundly connected to those around you and seeing your own life in terms of the richness you can bring to others because it makes your own life even more blessed.
The book has eleven chapters. The first two lay out the psychology behind the authors' thesis and their metaphor of lift. Three and four deal with being comfort and problem centered versus becoming purpose centered. Five and six deal with compromising our own values, even without our being aware of them, and replacing external direction with an internal direction that is consistent with our own true values. Seven and eight compares seeing others as objects versus focusing on them. Nine and ten talk about our normal resistance to feedback versus being not only open to feedback, but seeking it. The final chapter shows you how to integrate these principles into a power of lift in your own life.
The Quinns share experiences from their own lives (and the lives of others). They are quite frank about where they have failed, where their sources of pain were, and how they applied these principles. You might also be surprised that they admit the limits of lift. You can only lift yourself and invite others, but if they resist and want to stay firmly on the ground, well, there isn't much you can do but persist in transforming your own life. Maybe they will eventually catch on. Hey, it is very difficult to resist genuine love and attention for very long.
This is a very good book and I hope you can take the time to go through it slowly and thoughtfully. This isn't a book you can race through and use a couple of slogans as its message. Here, the most important aspects of the book are what your examination of your own life shows you in light of the ideas surrounding this metaphor of lift.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
