50 Ways to Create Great Relationships
 Steve Chandler
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2000 Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ USA
  ISBN: 1564145107


(How to Stop Taking & Start Giving helps you gain a brand-new sense of ownership for all your relationships. Learn how great relationships offer unlimited opportunities for support & sharing.

I do enjoy motivational books, especially when they're written with humor & brevity & Steve Chandler is a master at both. Not that he's thigh-slappingly comedic nor that he's terse - it's that he wastes no time on eternally fancy narrative while he tells is parables & slips humor in on the fly.

In his Introduction, Steve muses on a song from a musical of the Camelot Years in which he remembers listening to Richard Burton sing (yes, he did & exquisitely too - I remember it well!) about “How to Handle a Woman.” It took Steve many years to adopt the formula to all his relationships, not just his relationship with women.

In Chapter #1 we are invited to think back through our lives on what are the best gifts we ever received. What did they have in common? The Element of Surprise, right? In your relationships this element of surprise works wonders. Try it & see!

Want to know how to Release your Butterflies? Go to a seminar & participate in that first exercise. Sure it's embarrassing, sure it's nerve-racking - what happens though when a few score strangers say hello? It's magic!

Now this isn't something I'd have expected from Mahatma Gandhi, even though he is one of my heroes: “If I had no sense of humor, I should long ago have committed suicide.” I missed that in all my serious readings. Victor Borge who I loved gave that most serious of art forms - the concert piano performance - the rare gift of humor which only enhanced his mastery. So learn how to Break Someone Up.

Steve Chandler offers us a light touch, a common thread of common sense; takes us on a tour of how we live our relationships - both intimate & formal - & allows us to get an idea of who we really are; how others see us & ultimately, how we affect our relationship to our own lives. The ripples are given names like: Magnetize Yourself; Rise Above Yourself; Give the Gift of Silence; Bring It With You When You Come; Satisfy a Deep Craving; Relax With Money; Think and Thank; Be a Servant; Build the Love In; Make a Difference; Eliminate Prejudice; Learn to Say No; Give from the Spirit & many, many more.

Eminently readable, profoundly life-changing, engaging & authentic, 50 Ways to Create Great Relationships could just as easily have been 50 Ways to Love Your Life or 50 Ways to Build a Happy Business or 50 Ways to a Enjoy Your Friends, even 50 Ways to Confound Your Enemies.

Nothing new yet Steve Chandler does have a way with words & ideas. He offers us healthy mental exercises as vital as any we perform with our body to keep ourselves flexible, lose the fat of fate, strengthen the muscles of our minds & allow humor & affection their rightful quota in this thing we call Life.

I think what I like most about Steve Chandler's presence in my life is how much lighter he encourages me to feel; how much nicer he asserts I can be; how much more I can do for to my loved-ones & how much more loving I really am. I like having exclamation points in my life! I relish the happy details of a job well done, or a gift suddenly given or a joke deftly made, at no one's expense, not even mine!

If you can't catch Steve Chandler's seminars, then grab his books! Give them to every one of your friends. They will surely make a difference to you & your relationship to everyone in your life, from the person in the Complaint Department to your boss to your children to your spouse to your parents to their parents to the policeman who just pulled you over or the messenger with your pink slip!

More from Steve Chandler: 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself & also reviewed: 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back.

Do check out my Interview with Steve Chandler - it's quite enlightening!)
(03/18/01)

Rebecca