highly sensitive power

At the library recently, while browsing the stacks, my eyes were drawn to the red spine of a book whose title made be laugh out loud: How To Live With An Idiot, by Dr. John Hoover. I yanked it out and saw the subtitle: Clueless Creatures and the People Who Love Them. Because I am imperfect, there are times when my different, highly sensitive way of looking at the world seems better and right rather than merely different, as it actually is. In those lapses of perspective, it can feel as though I’m surrounded by idiots. I grabbed the book, checked it out, and raced home. Best decision I’ve made in a long time, as it turns out.

“Blaming the receiver for taking the message the wrong way or misinterpreting my intentions is a tacit admission that I need to become a better communicator.”

~ John Hoover, How To Live With An Idiot

I’ve read a lot of self-help books. This one gets stacked with a few others at the top of the heap, for two inter-connected reasons. Dr. John (as he calls himself) made a bold move to write a self-help book that’s silly, giving section headings titles like “Big Decisions, Little Brains” and “Putting Away the Hammer.”

Humour alone wouldn’t work for me, though, so I’m glad Dr. John packed the book with insights and real tools – that’s the second reason the book wowed me. The humour was sneaky, as it turns out, because it made the tough stuff go down easier. By creating amusing categories of people (amoeba, beaver, jaguar, etc.) to describe how we operate in the world, Dr. John has diminished the sting of much of what he’s astutely revealing about living with idiots, allowing the revelations to penetrate more deeply.

It didn’t take much reading to realize that the biggest idiot I live with is myself. That I finished the book anyway tells you how compellingly presented and genuinely useful Dr. John’s solutions are.

“Motivated by my desire to be in control and feel more secure in a relationship, I tripped up the people I was ostensibly trying to ‘help.’ Their focus and energy was turned from solving the problem to resisting me. Bad beaver.”

~ John Hoover, How To Live With An Idiot

If your workplace is a hive of idiocy, you might be interested to know that Dr. John also wrote How to Work for an Idiot: Survive & Thrive…Without Killing Your Boss. Dr. John has written a host of other books. See his Website at www.idiotworld.org for further information.