Plodding to confidence

Press, 8 January 1983, Page 14

Plodding to confidence

Know your strengths and be Confident. By Iris Barrow. Heinemann, 1982. 91 pp. $6.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Ms Barrow is an Auckland social worker who devotes herself to a personalgrowth type of counselling. Her offer in this book is that anybody can become confident, and like and accept themselves more, if they are willing to work at it. Our self-concept, she reiterates over and over, should be to love ourselves and recognise our worth as people of value because of this. No matter how unimportant we think we are, if we review our lives to date we will find areas of personal strength which entitle us to self-respect and to the respect of other people. Our subconscious reasons for the tearing down of our own importance is based, she says, on childhood experiences. She provides plotted case histories, of rigidily controlling parents who tell their daughter that she was born as the result of an “accident,” and of shyness as the result of parents never encouraging good points in a child. In handling other people she advises

repairing the mistakes of the past and telling them good points about themselves so that they end up by also accepting the good part of oneself. Once we start to think positively, she says, the force of love and the power of Jesus Christ wakes to work for us as a huge reservoir of strength.

If all this sounds terribly familiar for those who have browsed through countless articles and punchy, witty books in the field — the tradition of Napoleon Hill. Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, as well as the more modern American exponents such as the erroenous zones explorer Wayne Dyer — this is indeed the ball picked up by Ms Barrow and given a little dribble forward. The style is pedestrian, the thinking and psychological understanding shallow, and the message bluntened by phrases hackneyed in most professional and intelligent lay groups. No doubt some inadequate, anxious, isolated people will gain from the simplistic exercises described, but the pervasive atmosphere is that of one in the Lady Bountiful mould explaining her comfortable insights to those in a lesser stage of development.