Rescript the Story You’re Telling Yourself: The Eight Practices to Quiet Your Inner Antagonist, Amplify Your Inner Advocate, and Author a Limitless Life

Life coach Georges’s upbeat but formulaic debut applies the tenets of positive psychology toward a motivational practice centered on reframing negative thoughts. Georges writes that “life is like a story, and we have more authorship over the script than we often tell ourselves,” and imagines that story is told by two opposing narrators: the healthy “Inner Advocate” and the “Inner Antagonist,” which needs to be quieted. She presents eight tools, across eight identically structured chapters, for maintaining focus—“Release Rumination,” “Engage Growth Goals vs. Evading Them,” “Seek Strengths vs. Scrutinizing Shortcomings,” “Challenge Catastrophizing,” and “Restrict Regrets,” among others. Overuse of alliteration and overwhelmingly detailed lists (such as suggested “acknowledgments and affirmations”) drown out Georges’s more creative ideas about shifting one’s personal “negativity bias.” The workbook format is generally frustrating and poorly done, leaving blanks to be filled in without sufficient space and repeating the same sections in each chapter. Nevertheless, Georges provides a thoughtful framework for changing one’s attitude, and readers should be able to find some workable approaches among the dozens of practices Georges covers. Readers willing to sift through the myriad prompts and repetitive structure will find motivation for battling one’s inner critic. (Self-published.)