Don't Let your Mind Stunt Your Growth: Stories, Fables, and Techniques That Will Set Your Mind Free

Abstract

As the introduction says, 'Don't Let your Mind Stunt Your Growth' is a collection of sixty-four stories that encourage you to examine your life by paying closer attention to how your mind creates each experience that you have (7). That, from my experience of the first fifteen stories or so, seems an accurate description. This seems like a sound self-help book that respects the power of narrative to suggest new ways of envisioning our lives. Many of the stories are personal experiences from the author or from things he has read. Several of the two-page chapters include fables. One finds, for example, on 20-21, the four-phase Chinese story of the farmer who loses his horse, gets a herd of wild horses, watches his son break a leg taming one of them, and then sees his son passed over for soldiering since he has a bad leg. His response each time: Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows? A page later we see the story of the farmer who meets two strangers, both asking about the kind of people in this territory. In answer to both the farmer asks what kind of people the stranger encountered where he came from. To either, with their divergent answers, he answers I expect you'll find the same sort of people around here (22). Each chapterlet has a helpful title and quotation summing up what it has to offer. Who could argue against the kind of good advice you find here?