Book Reviews

TBR – TopBookReviewers.com Review dated September 24, 2019:
“This little book will get you on track in a short amount of time!”
The One Minute Therapist by M. Leigh Smith will get you on the right path in a short amount of time. What I liked is each chapter has many small sections on different aspects of therapy and issues we may have. Each section can take a minute or a little more to read which is perfect in this world of diminishing attention spans. Smith, the author, has extensive experience working with people. Smith tends to give examples from real life therapy sessions, making it more than just a how to book. By doing this, he brings in the raw emotions for difficult topics like stress, beliefs, parenting, bereavement and even relationships. It gets real, very quickly.
Smith breaks down topics into what drives emotions and how to work with those emotions depending on the situation. Some were simple actions to take, some more complex. It’s a lot for a short book, but it works. The book is written so you do not need to read through the whole book at one time. Just take a section here or there as you need it. As I was reading through, there were a couple of things I took away from it. One was journaling. Again, a simple suggestion that I needed to put back in my life. I have been journaling for years for a side job I do but stopped about a year ago. In the first section on stress, I related to it immediately and pulled out my mechanical pencil and started journaling my thoughts. It came at the perfect time because my life had been stressful the past week and I now had a record to look back at to see the specific times and my state of mind at those moments. Invaluable. All I needed was a reminder. I also took his other suggestion, which was meditation. I again had started that earlier in the year and had procrastinated. This little book set me straight again.
Another section I found fascinating was about millennials and what makes them tick. Smith did go into the other age groups, but he delved more into the millennial demographic because they are unique and soon, they will be the age group that will take over the baby boomers in numbers. They are a powerful force that will soon be taking over things in the world. I am not going to give anything away, but the part about why they date in groups more than individually answered a nagging observation of mine. My millennial friends always seem to be in a group here and there and this provided an explanation. They are very social and this will be interesting for the world coming up as we know it.
Will this book solve all your or my problems and issues? Of course not. It will, though, open your eyes, mind and heart to alternatives that maybe you hadn’t thought of or like myself, who needed a reminder or nudge to go a different pathway. There hasn’t been a day in the last few weeks that I have not thought about this little book. I am glad it came across my path and will certainly keep it around to keep me on track.

OnlineBookClub.org Review dated September 27, 2019
The One Minute Therapist by Marvin Leigh Smith is a collection of short, self-help chapters that can be read quickly for a quick boost. The chapters cover a number of topics such as managing stress, living with grief, the power of belief, relationships, parenting, finding personal happiness, and living healthily so that your physical and mental health are a match. Smith is a practicing therapist and often shares stories of his patients in many of the chapters.

I’ve mentioned this in many reviews before, but I am a self-help junkie and always jump at the chance to review such books. I’m a firm believer in the idea that your mind may know what is true, but it takes having someone tell you (or, in my case, reading the same information) over and over in order for it to sink in.

I liked the way that the chapters were grouped together and how they seemed to flow into each other. It made for easy continuous reading, but if I were to revisit the book for a specific chapter, that would also be easy to find with a quick look at the table of contents. Also, as mentioned earlier, Smith sometimes tells stories of his patients and how they worked through some of their issues. These personal stories added depth to the book and reminded me of the author’s status as an expert in his field. Some of the chapters, especially those regarding the power of belief, hinted at the Law of Attraction and manifesting your own happiness. Although I’ve read books about these topics, I’ve never seen them mentioned as a side note in others. I thought that was interesting and fairly rare to see in the self-help field.

I would recommend it to people who are just getting into the self-help genre or are thinking about making changes to their life and are looking for somewhere to start.