The Invisible Mentor

A Book Review: The Vowels of Personal Power: 5+1 Ways to liberate Your Creative Energy by Bob McCulloch & Julia Gluck

July 21st, 2009 |

Author: Avil Beckford

Book Review

The Vowels of Personal Power: 5 + 1 Ways to Liberate Your Creativity

by Bob McCulloch & Julia Gluck

I have been reflecting a lot on my life, and with reflections you revisit things you did and how you did them. So, I have looked at my newsletter to see if some of the work that I did is still relevant today. You will notice that I have been splattering this blog with book reviews and interviews that I conducted a few years go. The review of The Vowels of Personal Power is still relevant today.

Even though The Vowels of Personal Power contains a lot of information that I have been exposed to before, I liked it because it was presented in a “fresh” manner. It’s taking old ideas and giving them a new spin. The book is filled with many examples to help you grasp the concepts. One criticism that I have, and it’s just my personal preference and may not be the same for you, is that there were too many examples, and the majority of them were about the authors’ personal experiences. Is it possible to have too many examples? I would have preferred it if there were less examples and more of them about other people.

According to the authors, the premise of the book is that “we are all born bundles of creative energy… We’re born with the capacity for awareness, engagement, openness and understanding.” The “I” from the vowels is for Integrity and what McCulloch and Gluck refer to as the “Thoughtful I,” which integrates all the other practices in the vowels.

Below are listed the five vowels of personal power and the 12 practice areas – presented in the book -to unleash your creativity.

I: Integrity and the Thoughtful I
A: Awareness
i. Stay Mindfully Aware
ii. Capture and Cherish Your Lightness
iii. Be Thoughtfully Authentic
E: Engagement
i. Get and Stay Engaged
ii. Stay Resolved Without Attachment
iii. Accept and Support Your Mutuality
O: Openness
i. Accept Every Idea’s Inevitable Relevance
ii. Allow and Fully Appreciate Fresh Associations
iii. Perceive the Positives
U: Understanding
i. Acknowledge and Suspend Judgment
ii. Confirm Your Understanding
iii. Embrace the Power of the Both/And

Glancing at the list you may think that “oh I already know this,” but knowing something and practicing it are two very different things. This book is a good reminder to be positive, appreciative, focused, fully engaged in whatever it is you’re doing, not be attached to how you get to your destination (outcome), and to give things a chance before you decide to “nix” them. The book helps you to integrate the 12 practices into your life.

Five + 1 Great Ideas

You have lots of things standing in the way of the flow of your personal creative energy, all anchored in your thoughts and beliefs about the way the world works. So to get out of the rut of automatic thoughts, you need to mobilize your conscious thinking
Equilibrium seems safe to us. It is still, unchanging, knowable, and predictable. However, it stops us from growing. It stops us from being open to new possibilities
What happens to you, what you achieve in your life, is dictated less by your abilities than by the choices you make, including choices to do nothing
By not becoming attached to one particular way of doing things, you liberate people’s creative energy. You liberate them to use whatever talents they have in order to achieve the desired outcome – even a difficult one
Carry a notebook and pen at all times… Whenever an interesting thought comes to you – even one with no apparent application in the present – write it down. When you find your energy blocked regarding an idea or a situation, consulting your ideas book may just give you the inspiration to move forward
Solutions will not always present themselves to you right away. Sometimes they need to be coaxed out, and sometimes you need to sneak up on them from behind

I recommend this book, and it’s one that you should read more than once, just to remind yourself about what you already know.

Application