The Negativity Remedy by Nicole J. Phillips

 

Has your day ever started out with a seemingly inconsiderate driver cutting you off in traffic? Or dealt with someone who pushed ahead of you in the grocery line? Those little things can not only be frustrating, but can add stress to our whole day if we take them personally. However, Nicole J. Phillips has a lot of good ideas to handle things differently in The Negativity Remedy--for your own peace of mind. 

The Negativity Remedy  starts out with Phillips sharing her personal story of having a bad day and how someone turned it around for her with a simple positive comment. Then throughout the book, she shares a lot of her personal stories, as well as other people's stories, about how kindness has changed their day--and maybe even someone else's day. She also encourages readers to be kind to your family members at home to start with. And she shares about the harder challenge of being nice to those who have hurt us. At other times, Phillips acknowledges that kindness probably won't fix a problem--however, it may help someone feel loved while they deal with something difficult like a cancer diagnosis. She also acknowledges that sometimes acts of kindness don't go as planned--just so you know that in real life things may not always work out like you hope, even though many times they do. At the end of the book she has a list of 365 acts of kindness to consider doing.

I enjoyed Phillips conversational style in The Negativity Remedy. I felt like we were just sitting together sharing ideas over a hot beverage. She shares from the perspective of a real person who has had struggles and challenges of her own. She seems to cover all the bases in regards to kindness, which is understandable since she has written a newspaper column on kindness for several years along with the other kindness-inspiring-related work she currently does. I found a lot of good ideas in this book to put in to action in my own life. My book is full of page markers of things to look at again. The Negativity Remedy is a keeper for my bookshelf and one that I think I would refer to again.

I received a copy of this book from Baker Publishing Group through JustRead Tours. All opinions within this review are my own.