Unleashing Your Brilliance: Tools & Techniques to Achieve Personal, Professional & Academic Success

It is hard to summarize the flood of self-help technologies of the past 20 years. Either you can view them as a literal smorgasbord of intriguing opportunities or a cacophony of methodologies just waiting for organization. Unleashing Your Brilliance: Tools & Techniques to Achieve Personal, Professional & Academic Success by Brian E. Walsh, PhD, is probably the layman's best summary for the wide range of effective tools available for transformation. In a brilliantly composed, easy-to-read volume Dr. Walsh provides a clear and comprehensive explanation of the multitude of ideas that were popularized in the 1990s and early years of this decade.

Ever since President George H.W. Bush declared the final ten years of the last century as the "Decade of the Brain" interest in mentally-based methods have reached a resurgence of interest. Concepts such as whole-brain learning, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, hypnosis, accelerated learning, Emotional Freedom Technique, multiple intelligences have moved from merely being buzz-words to being regarded as clichés as they have been experienced by individuals and clinicians who quickly began accepting their efficacy for a wide range of presenting issues – even for medical healing.

When I read this book – in a couple of settings – I quickly started to enjoy the combination of his clear writing style, entertaining illustrations, and his garnishing the pages with frequent quotations from a wide range of notable thinkers. What I was left with was an appreciation of the breadth of the self-help ideas – which also have a role in clinical applications.

While this book serves as a great introduction for any clinician who needs a broad-brush review of integrative modalities of the past decade or so, its major benefit is the layman interested in self-help or professional development. However, as presented this buffet serves more to titillate the appetite for more. On the other hand, as a stand-alone work, I feel that the logical next step should be a workbook or some other device that allows a step-by-step protocol that takes these options and turns them into a program designed for specific concerns. Nevertheless, it is enjoyable and well-presented book that expertly encapsulates a tremendous amount of knowledge into a couple of hundred pages.