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

Traditionally, teachers have relegated students into two camps: those who show potential and those who teachers pass up as being unfit for the academic track. Many schools employ the rout method of learning, and while this serves some students well, for others, this approach leaves them lost in the corridors of our educational system. In comes Brian E. Walsh's, "Unleashing your Brilliance" a book that shows us that with the right tools and ingenuity all students can excel. Walsh exhibits a breath of knowledge in a text that covers every subject from how your brain learns (left and right hemisphere) to different types of intelligence, such as verbal, emotional, musical and naturalistic. After a thorough explanation of the thought process, Walsh offers examples of various learning techniques that can improve our skills, everything from taking short breaks while studying to jump start our thinking, to what types of background music stimulate our thoughts. Explaining everything from hypnosis to positive thinking, we are asked to change our early assumptions of how we were taught to learn. Mr. Walsh makes many compelling arguments, the first being that schools adhere to conventional teaching methods that do not meet the needs of all students. He stresses that teachers need to understand the different personality types to bring the best out of each student. Tools to enhance learning can be as simple as making certain that students get plenty of physical exercise, to employing varied teaching techniques in the classroom. For instance, if tension arises in the classroom setting, Mr. Walsh suggests that a teacher..."defuse conflicts by balancing structured and unstructured activities through both inductive and deductive course material." Another topic covered is word-association brainstorming, an exercise that encourages a student to tap their creative energies. Walsh praises techniques like hypnosis and positive thinking. Being a perpetual skeptic, I actually had the opportunity to test this method last week when faced with a daunting project at work. I repeated to myself, "I have the ability to do this job and I will excel." At first I had absolutely no confidence in myself, but as I continued my mantra I actually found the self-assurance to accomplish the project to my complete satisfaction. Walsh offers the reader these as well as a myriad of other skills to stimulate and enhance learning. The book is mapped out in logical order, beginning with the physiological and ending with practical techniques for learning. Every chapter has topic headings, and each section is broken up with quotes and/or cartoons that reinforce the material and help the reader remember the content. After each theory is explained, Walsh provides a website address, if the reader wishes to pursue the material further. At the conclusion of each chapter is a crossword puzzle with review questions. This is an extraordinarily enjoyable method to help jolt your memory and retain t

"Unleashing Your Brilliance" by Brian Walsh is a well-written, well-researched book about the great potential each of us has within us. It's fascinating the way in which we absorb and process information. Brian's book gives a thorough, simple and comprehensible explanation of how we learn. I'm drawn to self-help books that explore the human mind. I think the science of human understanding is vastly changing. Brian points out in his book that more progress has been made in understanding the human brain in the past five years than we had in the preceding decades. Imagine what we will know in five more years. The techniques Brian introduces to stimulate thinking, creativity and learning are helpful. I used several of them before writing this review. I pinched my right nostril to get more oxygen to my creative, right brain. I cross-crawled (left elbow to right knee, right elbow to left knee) to improve my focus and concentration. I tapped my K 27 to increase the blood flow to my brain. The book is targeted for teachers, parents and students wanting to improve performance. It is also designed for corporate HR personnel wanting to better understand how employees learn in the workplace. I recommend this book for anybody who has an interest in the human mind and its potential.

Brian Walsh's book, "Unleashing Your Brilliance", has everything you need to get on the way to achieving more, in less time, with less effort, and have more fun doing while doing it. The author gives you the tools you need to explore everything from NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) to Photoreading to Hypnosis and much more. This book is a road map to accelerated learning. The top twelve (I tried to limit it to ten, but could not) things I learned from reading this book twice (yes, you read that correctly) are: 1. "I tried" is a cop-out. It is an escape hatch. "Try" is one word you should work on removing from your vocabulary. 2. "I will" tells the subconscious mind to not act on something since it only operates in the "NOW". Remember that when you are making affirmations or writing goal statements. 3. Exercise enhances memory, improves reaction times and aids in the generation of unique and spontaneous ideas. 4. Self-master is a lot like poker, you need to know when to learn new skills, when to hold on to beliefs that serve you and when to let go of beliefs that do not serve you. 5. People with high self-efficacy choose tasks that are more demanding. They set higher goals, put in more effort and persist longer than those who are low in self-efficacy. 6. Emotional Intelligence is a completely learned phenomenon that helps people excel in life and have flourishing relationships and careers. 7. The words "always" or "never" indicate a false statement. 8. Whatever is strongly believed becomes reality. 9. Anything can be learned if it is broken down into smaller units. There are no mistakes, only outcomes and no failures, only lessons. 10. If something can be learned by anyone else in the world, it is possible for you to learn (something my Grandmother always told me). 11. Photoreading is something more people should explore and put effort into learning. 12. The Vivaldi I played when my son was very young may have improved his recall by at least 25 percent. If you think these twelve things are valuable, you should see the things in this book that I did not include in the list. Overall, "Unleashing Your Brilliance" offers a clearinghouse of information and is enough to get you started and to whet your appetite for more. This book, written in language simple enough for the average person to understand, gives enough information for even those already practicing many of the topics to find it valuable.

I am coming from the side of performance enhancement, especially in sports. Having read numerous books on learning and the mind, I found Unleashing Your Brilliance to be a refreshing book that brings many disciplines together under one roof for so many applications other than teaching and education. The real value as I see it is in Mr. Walsh's style and format that is understandable and and even entertaining for the average person. The fact that it contains updated, cutting-edge concepts gathered from many sources has spurred me on to more possibities I wasn't previously aware of. I will be recommending it to my clients as homework.

Dr. Walsh has provided us with a remarkable resource here. Unleashing Your Brilliance combines the lessons from many different disciplines of how to use your mind and body to accomplish more. You will read about mind mapping, how your brain operates, accelerated learning methods, the many dimensions of intelligence, how emotions and feelings can affect learning, different thinking processes, learning styles, the benefits of mind-body integration, how hypnosis helps, the key principles of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the photoreading process and learning a second language. Dr. Walsh has a gift for simplicity. While any of these subjects normally fills many books, he manages to gracefully capture the gist in a few pages. It's a talent I envy. He also provides you with extensive references so you can dive in to learn more in any of these areas that attracts your interest. The book has one of the most entertaining chapter review mechanisms I have ever seen. You fill out a crossword puzzle at the end of each one to see if you recall key phrases, terms and ideas. Seeing what you missed naturally causes you to want to reread the chapter for greater mastery. I was impressed that the material is very up-to-date. If you are going to read this book, do it now. Our knowledge of perception, learning and thinking are advancing so rapidly that this book will inevitably become obsolete in a few years. I hope Dr. Walsh will provide us with an updated edition when that's the case. If you only read one self-improvement book in 2006, Unleashing Your Brilliance would be a good choice. Nice work, Dr. Walsh!