August 16, 2006

I bought and perused HIGH PERFORMANCE GOAL SETTING: HOW TO CONCEIVE AND ACHIEVE YOUR DREAMS by Dr. Beverly Potter about five or six years ago. I have found it on my bookshelf recently while sorting out my personal library.

Despite its new agey connotations, I find this book to be interesting as well as practical for its intent & purpose. The author tells how to engage your intuition or inner knowing to guide you in conceiving & achieving your dreams.

'Conceiving' takes artful imagination & intuitive processing on your part, while 'achieving' requires systematic planning & disciplined execution on your part. Without both working synergistically, you will often find that goal setting becomes an inner battle against imposing demands all the time.

This book has less than 100 pages, with twelve short chapters. Within each chapter, the paragraphs under each sub-heading are generally crisp & succinct. Hence, reading the book is a breeze!

I would have expected the author to include some form of goal setting sheets in the book. These would help the reader to integrate his/her intuitive wisdom with a pragmatic approach to goal setting. This would have made the book particularly more palatable to those readers who are more logically oriented.

I would like to add that the author is a mainstream psychologist/counsellor with obviously a new age slant. However, she has written many good books & I own many of them, including 'The Way of the Ronin', 'Maverick as Master in the Workplace' (my first book/audio from the author), 'Overcoming Job Burnout', 'Preventing Job Burnout', 'Beating Job Burnout', 'Finding a Path with A Heart', 'From Conflict to Cooperation', 'Turning Around' & 'Brain Boosters'.

On the whole, this book is definitely worth exploring. My final advice to readers: Read it with an open mind! It would have gotten a rating of 5 from me if the goal setting forms have been included in the book in the first place.