The Power of Choice : A Guide to Personal and Professional Self Management [Hardcover]

Ted Willey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1988

Do you want to:
- Set and stick to your personal and professional goals?
- Improve relationships with your partner, children, friend, boss?
- Make agreements that produce desired results?
- Have the final say of what happens in your life?

You'll find out how in The Power of Choice: A Guide to Personal and Professional Self-Management. Better yet, you'll discover the secret of having complete control over all aspects of your life. And how easy that is to achieve! You'll never again need to be a victim. While reading the book, you'll discover that you really do have a choice about what happens next. A must reading for people who never want to stop growing and enjoying life to its fullest.

The Power of Choice can be applied to every facet of your life - personal and professional. What initially appears to be controversial and idealistic becomes practical -even common sense.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Avoiding personal responsibility has become this nation's most popular pastime, according to Ted Willey, author of The Power of Choice: A Guide to Personal and Professional Self-Management. This revolutionary book shows us a workable and positive way to take control of our lives by accepting total responsibility for all our experiences.

Willey believe the members of our society see themselves as powerless victims in a world where people blame everyone and everything else. In order to break out of this mentality, we first become conscious of the choices we make and accept full responsibility for the outcomes, good or bad.

Written for professionals, parents, couples - all individual interested in personal and professional growth - The Power of Choice tells readers how to be effective self-managers. For individuals to be responsible for directing their children, effective in running a company, managing a department, or dependable in sustaining a relationship, they must first be responsible, effective and dependable in directing themselves.

The Power of Choice appeals to all individuals who want to make more satisfying choices in their lives and enjoy enhanced relationships at work and at home. -- Berwick House Publishing Company

Recovery is possible when we stop being at the mercy of things. Willey is a human performance consultant and from the commonsense look of this book he's a good one. He deals with crazy beliefs we carry around, act on, and fail with, and he teaches in very human ways how to calmly select the life you want and get it.

His writing style is wild and wackily sane. Superb tools to improve performance, using methods that are simple and effective. "You recognize you are totally responsible for your actions, and only your actions."

Recovery is a simple road. "To rebuild our world of shattered integrity, to rebuild trust among us, people must make fewer agreements than they have been making - but keep a lot more of the ones they do make." -- The Book Reader

The Power of Choice: A Guild to Personal and Professional Self-Management

Winner of The Benjamin Franklin Award in the categories of Self-Help, Psychology -- Publishers Marketing Association

From the Publisher

Avoiding personal responsibility has become this nation's most popular pastime, according to Ted Willey, author of The Power of Choice: A Guide to Personal and Professional Self-Management. This revolutionary book shows us a workable and positive way to take control of our lives by accepting total responsibility for all our experiences.

Willey believes the members of our society see themselves as powerless victims in a world where people blame everyone and everything else. In order to break out of this mentality, we first become conscious of the choices we make and accept full responsibility for the outcomes, good or bad.

Written for professionals, parents, couples - all individuals interested in personal and professional growth - The Power of Choice tells readers how to be effective self-managers. For individuals to be responsible for directing their children, effective in running a company, managing a department, or dependable in sustaining a relationship, they must first be responsible, effective and dependable in directing themselves.

The Power of Choice appeals to all individuals who want to make more satisfying choices in their lives and enjoy enhanced relationships at work and at home.

Berwick House Publishing Company

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: Berwick House Pub Co (November 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0929376927
• ISBN-13: 978-0929376929
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #554,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I can't recommend this book enough, December 17, 2004

By 

Taiji 218 (The Frozen North) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Power of Choice : A Guide to Personal and Professional Self Management (Hardcover)

This is an exceptionally lucid exposition of the power of personal choices in each of our lives. It also details the innumerable ways in which we all do everything we can to deny the choices we have in our lives and how the evasion of personal responsibility serves only to psychologically weaken us.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned by any of the previous reviewers is that Ted Willey uses some of the key language and notions of Werner Erhard and the old est movement to forward his ideas. He does so in a way that is highly conversational, rational and communicative, without any of the controversial baggage that made est and its later incarnation, the Landmark Forum, so unpalatable for so many people. For this alone I appreciate Ted Willey's book. Erhard had some great perspectives, learned from his own personal experiences and also from therapists such as Fritz Perls. Unfortunately for Erhard (as well as for Perls), his overall lifestyle was eccentric enough and his packaging of his ideas controversial enough that the message was lost in the sometimes bizarre medium of its expression. Ted Willey's book manages to bypass all of that. His expression of fundamentally sound ideas is framed in a way that is immediately understandable. The average person stands to gain a great deal from reading and applying the concepts presented in The Power of Choice.

In conjunction with The Power of Choice I might recommend John Narciso's book Relating Redefined as well as William Glasser's book Choice Theory. They all complement each other and are most relevent in this time of personal and cultural abdication of responsiblity.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Choose This Book Now and In Your Every Now, August 2, 2001

By 

J. Reynolds (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Power of Choice : A Guide to Personal and Professional Self Management (Hardcover)

Ted Willey's *choice philosophy* is extremely appealing to people of reason. He suggests that every aspect of your life is determined by the choices you make, and he supports that assertion with eminently plausible arguments and examples. His book is quite illuminating, and if you read it thoroughly and critically, you will significantly upgrade your personal effectiveness in life.

Consider: Have you ever been offended over something? Well, the fact is that no one offends you but YOU. Feeling offended is a CHOICE you make - as is being angry, embarrassed, irritated, annoyed, upset, exasperated, humiliated, degraded, guilty, insulted or any other state of mind. Willey drives this valid point home very well.

Additionally, he focuses upon living in the present, the here and now, your body and your mind in the same place at the same time. Such constant consciousness naturally leads to constructive choices, both internally and in your relationships with others.

Willey suggests you treat his book as a cafeteria, extracting from it the portions you can use. The fact is, much of his philosophy is integrated, its components working well with one another. Though he is a purist (he has to set that example, for gosh sakes, he's the one who wrote the book!), about 95 percent of his material is instantly comprehensible and useful - one need not perform exercises every night, or work at developing habits. It's all pretty immediate.

Thus if you don't want to feel a little guilty, and mess around in life because things come up, you will read this fine book and begin living it now... and in your every now.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars slave or master?, June 10, 2004

By 

Dh Heun (Doncaster, South Yorkshire - United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Power of Choice : A Guide to Personal and Professional Self Management (Hardcover)

I met Ted years ago in Lake Lure, North Carolina and Read his book very near the time on recommendation of a close friend who was also my boss. No book I have ever read has had a more profound effect on my view of life or how to live. I don't read self-help books, but if you read this "self help" book you will never need another.

What I took from Ted's Philosophy is as simple as it is true. When you blame circumstances or others you are a "slave" to them. When you accept responsibility you are in power and you are the "master". Want to be in control of your life? Then take responsibility for it.

Who's the daddy? It's your life. It's your choice.