The Psychology of Personal Growth and Better Relationships: Manga for Success

by Toshinori Iwai

LEARN SKILLS THAT WILL LAST A LIFETIME WITH MANGA FOR SUCCESS! Do you want to get along better with people? Overcome negative thought patterns that are holding you back? Or are you looking for a basic understanding of the popular ideas of Adlerian psychology? Whatever your reason for picking up this book, The Psychology of Personal Growth and Better Manga For Success makes psychology concepts easy to understand using practical examples and situations. You’ll read
The story follows Yukari, a 28-year-old area manager of a bakery chain who finds her career gridlocked by frustration and adversarial relationships. Luckily for her, Adler’s Ghost appears to teach her how to turn the situation around. As her communication improves, she builds relationships of trust, and her career begins to move forward smoothly. Applicable in both business and personal life, this book has the potential to change your life for the better―and you’ll have fun reading it. Find out why the Manga For Success series―now available in English for the first time―is so popular in Japan, Korea, and beyond.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

Published April 25, 2023

Reviews

[LG (A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each book in the "Manga for Success" series alternates between textbookish sections and fictional "scenario" section in manga format. In this volume, Yukari is the area manager of a popular bakery chain. She's constantly frustrated by issues at her stores, and her efforts to deal with them just result in her employees becoming equally as frustrated with and angry at her. While cleaning up a warehouse, she discovers a photograph of psychologist Alfred Adler and his wife. Suddenly, the ghost of Alfred Adler appears. In order to thank Yukari for finding the picture, he decides to teach her about Adlerian psychology so that she can gain a forward-thinking perspective, change her life, and improve her relationships with others.

The author's introduction tells readers that there are three ways they can approach this text: they can read it straight through, they can read the text portions first and then the manga portions, or they can read the manga portions and then the text. I opted to read it all the way through and found that I really enjoyed the way the book was set up. Each time I started to get bored of the text portions, those wrapped up and switched to manga portions, which helped me from getting too bogged down. Yukari's story was designed to illustrate the concepts of Adlerian psychology and wasn't exactly riveting stuff, but it injected just enough "fun stuff" to yank my attention back when it started to drift.

This was very much a self-help sort of book - the idea was to not only come away from the text knowing more about Adlerian psychology, but to also be able to apply those concepts to your own life just like Yukari. While I did find this to be an encouraging book and thought that the author did a great job presenting things in a way that was easy to understand, I still felt that actually applying all of this wouldn't be quite as easy as the author made it seem. For one thing, most of us don't have a tiny Alfred Adler pointing out the exact shifts in thinking needed for our individual situations.

All in all, I thought this was a good book, and I really enjoyed the "text + manga scenarios" format. I'm looking forward to trying other entries in this series.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

[hoji · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was on the shelf for many years, and recently I wanted to learn more about psychology. It's a nice book that explains Adlerian psychology through cartoons and words. My biggest learning from this book is the difference between rationality and emotions. This book says emotions and rationality are not contradicting qualities but are actually mutual qualities because emotion stems from actions. Furthermore, the book states emotions are not driving us to do something, but we use emotions to achieve something. So, feeling emotions is solely our choice because we are the ones who use them as a tool. This gave me insight into my daily life which I've been complaining about every day. I realized that I've been consuming my energy to express negative emotions and that have been making my life worse. Anyway, it's not like I didn't know before but knowing Adler's principles of psychology kinda helped me figure out what emotionally healthy life is.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great little volume that I plowed through in a few days – entirely a book I just randomly picked up off the library shelf to give a shot and see how well it helped me navigate some relationship issues I am having with those around me. It was a helpful primer on Alderian psychology – an avenue that I didn’t know by name but knew a lot about in terms of various self-help and counseling advice I have gotten over the years. The book covers his biography, relations with Freud and Jung (no mention of Reich, but whatever), teachings, how to apply them, and then uses a cute manga story about a lady who is running a bakery but has very poor interpersonal skills and expectations of those around her. While most of it was helpful, some of it seems to be somewhat of a stretch (such as the siblings portion I felt it spent too much time on and found irrelevant – but then again I am a big brother myself and really can’t tell if I have any of the elements of that in my psyche).

I enjoyed it and felt like it gave some good advice and attention to some of the issues I find myself confronting regularly. Right after this, I began to read Maria Bamford’s ‘Sure I’ll Join Your Cult’ and found them to be reliable bookends to a summer self-help / biography reading pair.

[Hồ Thanh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helpful. Not only in working environment but also in daily life.

[Mayte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entretenido y educativo