Thursday, September 21, 2017

Self-Help/Pop Psychology Review: The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin's latest self-help book, The Four Tendencies, follows on the heels of Better Than Before and The Happiness Project.  With The Four Tendencies, Rubin has written another book that approaches popular psychology from an outside perspective, although at this point, Rubin is not that much of an outsider to self-help.  She is a journalist, and brings less jargon and more practical application and explanation to the genre.  Here, Rubin has come up with a new and very simple set of personality categories.  Her book includes a very short quiz that will sort readers into one of four personality categories: Upholder, Obliger, Rebel, or Questioner.  After readers figure out their category, they can go on to read the two chapters that apply to their type, one called "Understanding the X" and the other called "Dealing with a X."  After these sections, Rubin includes a few chapters on how to date or speak to the different types.  I appreciated the stream-lined approach that Rubin brings to the overstuffed self-help personality type bookshelf.  It's refreshing to take a personality quiz that takes less than 10 minutes, and the brilliance of Rubin's categories is that they focus on how people respond to inner and outer expectations, thus making it possible to figure out your type with just a few questions.  As with all of her books, this one is well-written, clear, and straight-forward, and I enjoyed her insights. 
(I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.)

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