The Self-Coaching Toolbox: Six Tools for Personal and Professional Growth and Development

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher and an event coordinator, with a
background in linguistics and education in Okanagan, B.C.

An odd addition to the self-help genre, The Self-Coaching Toolbox
combines idealistic New Age mumbo-jumbo and down-to-earth
practicalities. The six tools—Awareness, Know Yourself, Beliefs,
Setting Goals and Creating Plans, Energy Management, and
Self-Mastery—are a simple entry-level path to more in-depth works.

Although it promotes self-mastery, the book presents a limited range of
activities, including weird visualizations like “Visualize your belief
as a small, round ball with sticky prongs attached on all sides.”
Whatever skills Tremblay possesses as a speaker do not translate to the
page. The simplicity of the ideas (“Housed within each person are
characteristics”), the reliance on clichés (“To paraphrase
Shakespeare, people are creative beings. We write our own scripts,
direct ourselves, and are the main character actors within our own
dramas”), the overuse of quotations (“When you accept the ‘centre
of your reality’ concept as an understanding, you will gain
clarity”) and many needless redundancies make for a book that does not
live up to its possibilities.