Your Best You: Discovering and Developing the Strengths God Gave You

I was so glad to pick up this book. It has been what I have been looking for. We don't have to be perfect in every area and it is helpful to have someone acknowledge that. But more importantly, I am so grateful to be shown how to take my strengths and use them to help me in my weak areas. I think Bonnie Grove does this really well with this book. I'm so glad I found it.

What an encouraging book about change! Written to those who see some aspects of their lives that need change (isn't that every single one of us), Bonnie Grove's Your Best You: Discovering and Developing the Strengths God Gave you, begins from a different prespective. She offers what she calls a 'strength based approach' to making meaningful changes in your life. The focus, however, is not a pessimistic view of what needs to be changed. The focus is on developing one's gifts and strengths and the revelation that walking in your individual gifts is an offering of worship. I say Hallelujah and are we not so very tired of hearing, reading or seeing the `10 steps to _________' (you fill in the blank). I discovered that viewing strengths as a form of worship reveals the object of the worship. We don't need to know now to excel in areas in which we are not gifted simply for popularity or prosperity. What we need is an evaluation of what God has blessed us with and a plan to develop those gifts and talents. One can easily become discouraged attempting to excel in areas in which we have no talent but nothing compares to the satisfaction from first recognizing and then achieving in areas in which we were created to excel and then living it out as worship to our Creator. This book helped me to centralized my thinking on defining, developing and apply my gifts and talents as well as listing and identifying areas I need to change. It contains fifteen chapters that begins with evaluations and ends with encouragement. Included are questionnaires for personnel inventories, worksheets for exploring discovering areas of change, and journals for recording results. Sections begins with a sample answers to various issues that need changing (smoking, overeating, etc) helping the reader further to focus their answers. This book is an excellent choice for an individual study or a group bible study. I recommend it highly. I suggest you visit her website (subtitled: Life is Messy. God is Love) and read more about her books. Keiki Hendrix Vessel Project Book Reviewer [...]

How do you really find out what you're really good at? "Your Best You: Discovering and Developing the Strengths God Gave You" is a guide to finding these talents. Author Bonnie Grove hopes to help readers cut right to the chase and start to live life as they want to. A realistic manual that realizes not everyone can do everything, "Your Best You" is a faith-based approach to self-help, executed quite well.

If you've looked at your life and thought, "I need to make some changes," 'Your Best You' is for you. Not to worry if there is a secret addiction, a hurtful past or even a history of failed attempts at change. Author Bonnie Grove, a program developer and trainer, covers all those angles in this compact but complete self-help manual Grove starts out by explaining her strength-based approach and how it differs from the commonly used method of bringing change by working on weaknesses. Using questionnaires, quizzes, self-tests, personal inventories, and journals she guides the reader in the discovery of personal strengths and then shows how to use those to make changes. The program described in 'Your Best You' is Bible-based. Grove explains how acknowledging and using one's strengths is a form of worship. She demonstrates the place of prayer and encourages the reader to be aware of God's presence in every aspect of the change process. Her own transparency in describing her relationship with God is inspiring and encouraging. My one small quibble is with the book's physical design. The book is meant to be written in (blank lines, charts, and tables all over the place). However, the tight paperback binding makes that awkward and the small boxes in the tables and charts are too tiny to hold all that's required. A workbook-sized coil-bound book would have been more practical for such a hands-on program. From the already successful person who wants to maximize his/her potential to the one who desires to change destructive lifestyle patterns, 'Your Best You' is a detailed road map to a fulfilling tomorrow.