Review:
I like this series' format - alternating text sections and manga sections helps make topics that might otherwise bore me to tears a little easier to deal with. In this case, the manga sections follow Reisa Suto, a 27-year-old woman who recently changed jobs and is now working at an advertising agency. She's super stressed and feels like she keeps doing things wrong. Her supervisor seems to do nothing but criticize her. The one bright spot in her day is when she's on her own time and can try out local cake shops. Then Hasegawa Gou takes over as director for one of the project Reisa is working on and messed up, and she's shocked to learn that this confident person was her laid-back senior in college. With Hasegawa's help, Reisa learns to change her perspective, keep an eye out for her assumptions, and accept help from others when she needs it.
I hate to say this, since Kuze sounded sincere in his desire to help people gain confidence and resilience, and his writing on staying positive and motivated while learning business English was kind of touching, but I'm not sure this book would actually help anyone who really needed it. Most of the advice was stuff I've seen discussed in a lot of other works, and there wasn't a lot about how to get started with some of it if you really had no clue. Kuze's advice for gaining resilience and confidence basically boiled down to "it's something you have to train, so take on challenges that stretch your abilities but that aren't impossible." The social support stuff was more about recognizing the support already present in your life that you may not be using than finding that support to begin with.
The most unusual thing that author did was present people's assumptions as dogs, so there's the righteous dog, the loser dog, the worrywart dog, the abandoning dog, the apologetic dog, the criticism dog, and the apathetic dog. There's a chart where you're supposed to identify the negative emotion you're feeling, which then tells you which "dog" you're probably dealing with. So if you're dealing with a lot of anxiety at work, you may have the worrywart or abandoning dog, either a pessimistic mindset or a powerless mindset. Where things fell apart for me was when it came to how to deal with the "dogs." Kuze presented three options: banish it, accept it, or train/tame it. The whole dog thing made "banish it" seem kind of sad. Plus, on the whole, I found it easiest to understand how train/tame might work (don't automatically assume that your assumptions are true, try to change your viewpoint).
I did at least really enjoy the manga portion of this, even though it seemed a bit odd when literal assumption dogs were suddenly introduced to the story and then just as suddenly dropped.
No comments:
Post a Comment