You Got This: Face Your Fear, Find Your Confidence is the second book by Caroline Foran. I previous reviewed her first book Own It, which I was quite impressed with. In this book, she aims to turn your mental fear blocks into building blocks to boost your confidence.
The first part of the book gives background information on fear, confidence, and related concepts like perfectionism and impostor syndrome. Simple language is used to explain psychological theories, neuroscience, and research findings. The author explains why the comfort zone isn’t inherently a good place, and why there is an optimal anxiety level.
The second part of the book is the confidence-building toolkit. The first tool presented was stoicism, which I’ve seen a number of people writing about recently, although I’ve never taken the time to really look into it. My understanding of the author’s explanation is that it’s essentially being in the present without allowing ourselves to be swayed by the desire for pleasure or the desire to avoid pain. She acknowledges that some of what you might read about stoicism may trigger your bullsh*tometer; I always like it when someone is in tune with that kind of thing.
Some of the other tools include temptation bundling (pairing something you don’t want to do with something you do want ) and getting to the “fuck it moment” where you override your fear and do a task anyway.
While there’s nothing I can identify that’s “wrong” with this book, I felt a lot less engaged than I did with the author’s first book. It didn’t feel like she was quite as present in this book as she was in Own It. I don’t see any clear problems, and it’s quite possible that I wasn’t engaged because I wasn’t in a great place while reading it. My lack of engagement aside, I think this book could be quite useful for someone looking for some strategies to boost their confidence.
You Got This is available on Amazon (affiliate link).
I received a reviewer copy of this book from NetGalley.
You can find my other reviews on the MH@H book review index or on Goodreads.