 Welcome to this week's book review. Each week, I review a book that I believe would be helpful to the general public and or clinicians. I'm never paid to do the reviews. However, in some instances, I may receive a small commission if you purchase the item, which helps to fray the cost of our podcast and providing the free educational videos. The cost to you, however, remains the same. Today we're going to be talking about self-esteem. And this is the fourth edition. I actually started out using this book when it was back in the third edition. And I absolutely love it. It's a very comprehensive guide to helping people improve their self-esteem. In the book, you're going to learn how to uncover and analyze negative self-statements. So talking about that internal critic, create new, more objective and positive self-statements, let go of judgmental self-attacking thoughts and act in accordance with what matters to you most. So the book is 300 and some odd pages and it goes on for a while. But what it does is walk you through step-by-step understanding what self-esteem is, because it's kind of one of those terms that we talk about, but we may not really know what it is. And why just telling yourself that you're okay may not work? Well, the key is you have to believe it. So he starts talking about why people don't believe they're okay, even if they tell themselves they are. Then he introduces you to the pathological critic and encourages you to explore why you listen to it and learn how to disarm it. It moves on from that point to creating a balanced self-description, accepting weaknesses and embracing strengths, recognizing that we're not perfect, but nobody's perfect. So embracing yourself and cherishing yourself as you are. He moves on from there to identifying and combating cognitive distortions that keep you feeling bad, because a lot of times when we start looking at our weaknesses, we magnify them. And when we look at our strengths, we minimize them. And that keeps us feeling bad about ourselves. So McKay goes into great detail about how to combat some of those cognitive errors or thinking errors. He encourages you to explore your thoughts about compassion and developing self-compassion. One of the reasons that many people have difficulty developing self-esteem and being kind to themselves is because somewhere along the way they were taught that having compassion for themselves or being kind can be seen as weakness or failure or something negative. So he really challenges you to look at your beliefs about self-compassion and self-acceptance. He explores how to reframe mistakes and accept fallibility, because again, even though we know we've got strengths and weaknesses, we're also gonna make mistakes. So accepting those and learning from them and not turning them into something huge, but accepting that everybody makes mistakes. Then he talks about what to do with the constructive and destructive criticism that you receive, sometimes on a daily basis, to help you respond in a meaningful way. And basically it boils down to a bunch of techniques that will help you learn how to take what's useful and leave the rest, accepting that sometimes criticism is not as much about you as about that other person's stuff. And then he ends with helping you clarify what you want and need and using your skills to get those needs met more effectively. So creating win-win situations and learning how to assertively communicate with the people that are important to you. This book is written in really plain language with practical tools, which is one thing that I love about it. You can read three or four pages, get something really useful and insightful and work with that for a while, then come back the next day or the next week and read another three or four pages. So it can be really useful for self-help or as a tool to guide individual or group therapy sessions. Visual learning clients like to have it as a reference to review, markup and bring for discussion in the next session. So a lot of times when I do self-esteem groups, I'll have each client get a copy of this book. We go through it page by page, activity by activity. We do them sometimes in class, sometimes as homework. And then we talk about what they learned and then they can go back and review over the week between sessions what we talked about and get those visual cues that help them remember the important skills. I hope you've enjoyed this book review and please feel free to log on. It's self-esteem by Matthew McKay. It does have a Google preview. So you can read a little bit more about what's in it and see for yourself and see if it resonates with you as a good tool for self-improvement.