Laura Silberstein-TirchHow to Be Nice to Yourself: The Everyday Guide to Self-Compassion: Effective Strategies to Increase Self-Love and Acceptance

As a thank, you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced readers copy I shall give an honest review of How to Be Nice to Yourself by Laura Silberstein-Tirch PsyD. Coming into this guide for practicing self-compassion I largely examined it from a professional perspective as I come from a therapeutic background. This book acts as a guide that we may use to practice self-compassion using techniques that any one can learn. This text draws on resources from a variety of therapeutic techniques including meditation, mindfulness, and acceptance and commitment therapy. If you are un-familiar with these resources that is okay as the author explains the impact of these resources if practiced daily. All she asks is that you provide a notebook where you may write down your thoughts and use them to recount what you provided. Thus providing yourself proof that you are practicing what it asks and are internalizing it yourself. I shall recommend this in my personal and professional capacity. Overall I give this book five out of five stars on good reads.

I enjoyed the book and the self compassion exercise. This was a very easy read. Looking forward to putting what I learned in to practice.

I read this book in one sitting and love it! I'm a psychologist and will definitely use this with clients, as well as for own self-compassion practice. It's easy to read and down-to-earth. Some books on compassion use language that is hard to understand, much less put the concepts into practice, but this book contains well-explained exercises that anyone can follow. I also ordered the paperback as it looks beautiful!

wonderful book to read in these stressful times

I like it! Thank you!!

Not really what I expected, nothing stood out to me as an “a-ha, so That’s it!” piece of advice or information.

I am impressed with this clear and accessible plan for people to work with at home on their own, written by a therapist. Using this book you can take yourself through an entire process of increasing what they referred to as self compassion.This book is easy to read and this is important work that some of us need. I wish I had this decades ago when I was trying to learn this content through different less helpful self-help books. This is a better book, It’s kind of like a workshop in print form. Step one is doing breathing exercises in order to center yourself. Next you give yourself permission to feel emotions, some people were raised that they are not to let themselves feel anger or negative emotions as it is “not nice”. Suppressing emotions causes major problems because of the attempt to block the natural thoughts that their mind has can create physical problems or disease, anxiety or depression. Mind and body are connected. Self acceptance of one’s physical body is advised and dealt with. After being aware of triggering events and emotions, you learn how to not judge yourself for feeling those justified reasonable emotions. You become aware of your negative self talk and how harsh people are to their own selves. This book helps you work to stop being so rotten to yourself. How to deal with self-criticism and working on building up resilience is the next step. The last part is that once you know how to treat yourself well, then you can in turn practice giving compassion to other people: your family, people in your life, and people in your community. Then the world is a better place for you and others. Okay, that last sentence sounded corny but it’s actually true!I really like the authors approach and I’m grateful that a therapist was willing to write this book and get out so much valuable information which would be expensive to go through in therapy. Ot everyone can affird therapy. To have all of this information in a low-cost book is pretty amazing.There is information here and food for thought as well as exercise is to lead yourself through. The book asks you questions and then you ponder your own answers. You might have to fill in the blank. You may have to make a list. The book is very clear and easy to read, it is Unintimidating. This book is helping me think about things that I say to my teens, my students, into some of my friends who are still struggling with self acceptance. I love this book = 5 stars.

I expected to find this book very helpful and was disappointed, but not necessarily in the book itself. Let me explain! It didn't take me very long after I began reading this book to realize that the problems I had hoped to resolve by reading it weren't the result of me being "not nice to myself." You may have a seen a fairly common poster that says "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by Jerks" (that's not actually what the poster says, but Amazon's guidelines won't allow me to finish the quote). Well, my experience of reading this book was that I realized how much of the negativity I experience is actually real (not in my head or open to interpretation) and that I actually am already in the habit of "being nice to myself."At first I found this very disappointing. Then I realized that I should appreciate that I don't have a problem I thought I had, and that's pretty reassuring. It's good to know when you are actually doing something right, even if you didn't know you were. It also has helped me to start tacking those issues I had in mind, now that I have seen that they are not a result of low self-esteem or negative attitudes. Having said all of that, it should be obvious that I am not the ideal reviewer for this book, but I'll do my best anyway.I think the book offers a good balance of concrete personal examples, activities and thought exercises, and thoughtful insights. The chapters progress in a coherent and logical way that moves the reader forward along in their own personal progress. Most of it seemed fairly obvious to me, but again, this apparently isn't my issue. I think the book does a good job of explaining how people get sucked into negative self talk and offers practical advise on how to break that cycle. I would say to start listening to your self talk is the most important thing, really listening to it, and then critiquing it. You'll find a step by step analysis on each strategy in here, and you'll be given a checklist of steps you can take to implement more self-compassion into your day to day life.

Too many exercises and information that I became lost. I found some information contradictory or was it because I was lost. Not an easy read but maybe great if you have the many hours a week to make endless notes on your emotions and thoughts. Not for me and I’m finding there aren’t a lot of books yet written on self compassion.

Well written and structured book. It really breaks down the concept of compassion and how to apply it into your every day life.

Waste of money