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Seasons of Change : Using Nature's Wisdom to Grow Through Life's Inevitable Ups and Downs
A wise, helpful book that provides practical tools for one of modern life's greatest challenges Change. True help for everyone no matter what difficult or exciting transition you are in! Provides a model based on the four seasons to help align you with natural forces. Using a simple questionnaire, you can discover where you are in your transition process, how to move forward, and how to not get off track. Includes advice for building a strong support network for times of change.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 4, 2019
Very helpful book to help you think about life’s transitions and how we respond to events in our lives—using nature as a parallel to describe literal seasons of change. I found it practical and motivational!
January 20, 2018
A poetic and pragmatic approach to navigating change, which is inevitable in all our lives. We all go through seasons in our lives: ideas blossom and take hold, things die and are reborn. The author invites us to take a page from nature and welcome all stages of the cycle of birth, death, rebirth -- taking time to grieve loss, slow down, hibernate, make plans, and await springtime as necessary without forcing anything to bloom before its time.
It had its tedious moments but all in all very helpful and a wonderfully easy to remember and adaptable framework for dealing with change gracefully. I recommend reading about all the seasons, not just the one you think you might be in.
It had its tedious moments but all in all very helpful and a wonderfully easy to remember and adaptable framework for dealing with change gracefully. I recommend reading about all the seasons, not just the one you think you might be in.
July 24, 2015
Self-help book loaned to me by a premarital counselor. McClelland analogizes the life transitions of middle-class North Americans to the four planetary seasons, each season purportedly representing a universal stage of the process that all people undergo during these transitions.
While McClelland's mixed metaphors and Gaia spirituality are turn-offs for an intellectual like me, on an intellectual level I think the book's main failure is the way in which it subsumes a variety of problems and issues under the single rubric of "change". McClelland's oversimplifying narrative interprets failure to overcome difficulty as statis in a generic psycho-spiritual cycle, statis for which she offers a number of simple psychological diagnoses and antidotes. These explanations, I believe, are likely to misrepresent the more complex, overarching narratives that are operative in people's lives and may even be a hindrance to obtaining self-knowledge.
Despite these weaknesses, I suppose a framework as flawed as McClelland's might be valuable to some people for the sheer fact that it spurs any reflection at all. Of course, for this purpose, almost any bad, clichéd metaphor will do: "change as a rainbow", "change as a cross-country trip", "change as a loaf of bread rising in the oven". But I think most wisdom seekers would be better served by reading M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled.
While McClelland's mixed metaphors and Gaia spirituality are turn-offs for an intellectual like me, on an intellectual level I think the book's main failure is the way in which it subsumes a variety of problems and issues under the single rubric of "change". McClelland's oversimplifying narrative interprets failure to overcome difficulty as statis in a generic psycho-spiritual cycle, statis for which she offers a number of simple psychological diagnoses and antidotes. These explanations, I believe, are likely to misrepresent the more complex, overarching narratives that are operative in people's lives and may even be a hindrance to obtaining self-knowledge.
Despite these weaknesses, I suppose a framework as flawed as McClelland's might be valuable to some people for the sheer fact that it spurs any reflection at all. Of course, for this purpose, almost any bad, clichéd metaphor will do: "change as a rainbow", "change as a cross-country trip", "change as a loaf of bread rising in the oven". But I think most wisdom seekers would be better served by reading M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled.
October 25, 2007
I am taking a course on change at NCCCR and this was reccommended. Quote:" the potential for growth that comes with change is phenomenal..".
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews