Book Review: Have a New You by Friday by Kevin Leman

Leman, Kevin. Have a New You by Friday: How to Accept Yourself, Boost Your Confidence and Change Your Life in 5 Days. Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2010.

By “new you”, Leman doesn’t mean a completely different person. Part if his plan is for you to accept yourself. He does mean a happier more successful you, which is probably more in line with what you really want.

The book is organized into a chapter for every day of the weekday. Leman’s style is light, so you probably can read a chapter a day with no problem. If you thoughtfully complete the exercises in each chapter, it will may a little more time. Some are simple, but as the week progresses, deeper thinking is called for.

In broad terms, Leman calls for you to know and accept yourself, recognize the lies you tell yourself and live with a new perspective. Much of the book addresses self-knowledge.

Leman addresses several areas of self-knowledge. First is temperament. He uses the classical humors (choric, melancholy, phlegmatic, and sanguine), though he humorously compares them to dog breeds. Next, he addresses way birth order effects personality. Birth order is one of Leman’s specialties. Midweek, he explores early childhood memories and the rulebooks we’ve written unawares based on these memories. I found this to be one of the most difficult chapters, but in some ways, I think it is one of the meatiest. The final aspect of self-knowledge is your love language. By understanding the things that make you feel loved, you can ask for what you need. You can also discover they ways the people close to you feel loved and begin to improve your relationship with them.

By the time we’re adults, our personality is set. Leman isn’t trying to give you an entirely new personality. Accept that you have certain strengths and weaknesses and begin using that knowledge to build a happier life. The truth can set you free to make new decisions that lead to new outcomes instead of taking the same paths that have always lead to frustration.

One of the things you can change is you’re rulebook. These are concepts of how the world works we formed as children. Being children, i.e. ignorant and immature, we formed some wrong ideas that can be driving our behavior even in adulthood. As adults, we can take a look at those rules a see if they are true and if they are helping us live the life we want. With the knowledge and maturity we have as adults, we can begin to counter wrong and unproductive rules (lies we tell ourselves) and develop new rules. Your rulebook won’t change in an instant, but you can train yourself to approach things from a new perspective instead of reacting unthinkingly.

In the Friday chapter, Leman lays out the program for implementing the new you. A couple of the best points are to take baby steps and give yourself room to fail. By the time you’ve been through the first four days, you’ll see that you come to be where you are by many steps over a long time. Getting to a new you will be similarly incremental, and old ways are bound to reassert themselves periodically. Leman encourages you to give yourself some grace, forgive yourself for stumbling, and take the next little step to get moving in a good direction again.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Little Shifts by Suzanna Beth Stinnet
One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

This review of Have a New You by Friday by Kevin Leman
appears courtesy of Keenan’s Book Reviews, a book review blog that includes reviews of many self-help books.