Try Softer
A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode--and into a Life of Connection and Joy
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4.5 • 38 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Over 100,000 copies sold!
In the wise and soulful tradition of teachers like Shauna Niequist and Brene Brown, therapist Aundi Kolber debuts with Try Softerhelping us align our mind, body, and soul to live the life God created for us.
In a world that preaches a "try harder" gospel―just keep going, keep hustling, keep pretending we're all fine―we're left exhausted, overwhelmed, anxious, and numb to our lives. If we're honest, we've been overfunctioning and hurtling toward burnout for so long, we can't even imagine another way. How else will things get done? How else will we survive?
It doesn't have to be this way.
Aundi Kolber believes we don't have to white-knuckle our way through life, stuck in survival mode and stressed. In her debut book, Try Softer, she'll show us how God specifically designed our bodies and minds to work together to process our stories and work through obstacles. Through the latest psychology, practical clinical exercises, and her own personal story, Aundi equips and empowers us to connect us to our truest self and truly live. This is the "try softer" life.
In Try Softer you'll learn how to:
• Know and set emotional and relational boundaries
• Make sense of the difficult experiences you've had
• Identify your attachment style―and how that affects your relationships today
• Move through emotions rather than get stuck by them
• Grow in self-compassion and talk back to your inner critic
Trying softer is sacred work. And while the healing journey won't be perfect or easy, it will be worth it. Because this is what we were made for: a living, breathing, moving, feeling, connected, beautifully incarnational life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Therapist Kolber (Relevant) targets the "overextended, overburdened, and overwrought" in this persuasive take on adopting a happy (and easy) lifestyle. "Trying softer," she writes, "is the path that leads to true connection and joy," and asks readers who feel they are "white-knuckling" their way through life to look back upon their own personal histories with more compassion. Explaining that the brain and nervous system become adjusted to certain behaviors in others over time, she asks readers to examine past and present relationships in order to distinguish between safe and unhealthy attachments and to discover one's "window of tolerance." For example, she explains different types of attachment styles people have to their parents, and delivers role playing examples to help readers determine their own attachment type. Kolber offers practices that enable a life of "trying softer," among them scripts for better communication, exercises for getting in tune with emotions, and tips for reasoning with one's "internal critic" such as concentrating on "mindfulness, self-kindfulness, and common humanity" to allay self-judgment. Kolber provides steady, helpful guidance for "the parts of your soul screaming to be loved in extravagant ways." Mental health professionals and general readers dealing with anxiety will find many serviceable exercises in Kolber's useful guide.
Customer Reviews
Heartfelt. Amazing.
This will likely be one that I come back to again and again. So good. So deep. So enlightening. So validating. Touched my heart big time. Thank you author.
What reading a warm embrace feels like…
This book was tremendously refreshing and life-giving. With a courageous and vulnerable spirit, Kolber invites her readers to become aware of the areas in our lives where past hurt and trauma haunt. She offers a tender voice for those of us in the habit of “white-knuckling” our way through life’s hard spaces. With steadfast compassion and patient intentionality she first reveals then moves us away from patterns of self-shame toward patterns of self-love. Highly recommend.