THE MOTIVATION MANIFESTO

In his endorsement of this book, the novelist Paulo Coelho remarks that it is a poetic and powerful call to reclaim our lives and find our own personal freedom. This is a good description of the energy of the book, following on from his previous one The Charged Life, which I also reviewed in these pages. Brendon Burchard is one of the leading personal development trainers in the world (www.brendonburchard.com), who started from nothing less than a decade ago and has based his work on his response to three questions arising from a car accident at the age of 19: did I live, did I love, did I matter? In the quantified world of what he calls busywork where we spend our time responding to everything and trying to catch up, he reminds us that our life's work is much more important and that if we respond to everything, we will accomplish nothing. Just last week, I received a quote from Stephen Covey encouraging me to schedule my priorities rather than prioritise my schedule.

One of the quotations at the beginning of the book is a well-known one from John F. Kennedy: 'conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.' The book begins stirringly with a summary of the nine declarations of personal power: we shall meet life with full presence and power, reclaim our agenda, defeat our demons, advance with abandon, practise joy and gratitude, not break integrity, amplify love, inspire greatness and slow time - so that we can feel alive and sense fully in the present. These are all expounded in the second part of the book, while the first part on human nature discusses freedom, fear and motivation. Freedom is both freedom to and freedom from, as famously discussed by Sir Isaiah Berlin in his Two Concepts of Liberty. A major issue is the way we can so easily trade our integrity for the security of conformity based on a fear of disapproval that can lead to not living our own authentic life. Brendon puts it starkly: fear wins or freedom wins, but we have to choose freedom repeatedly.

Brendon himself practises what he preaches in terms of sustained motivation and ambitiously working towards self-mastery - choosing to be, have, do, or experience something greater in our lives through attention and effort translated into action. This is a willed choice. Two of the nine declarations have a spiritual underpinning in the present: 'all that we love of life can be accessed only now' - just this evening I spent time contemplating the beauty of some primroses shaking gently in the breeze with some small blue flowers just nearby and a fragrant smell coming from other white flowers. This was a precious moment that I might easily have missed. Brendon also suggests that we must enter fully into our various roles as observer, director, guardian, warrior, lover and leader. Among the demons we must defeat are doubt and delay, taking positive and decisive action with clarity and intent; we do not need to seek permission, and have all the resources within ourselves. His chapter on joy and gratitude is particularly inspiring and in it he suggests many things we can be grateful for. The chapter on integrity begins with a quotation from Epictetus: 'first say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do' - a succinct injunction. This requires character, and he proposes six practices of integrity: thinking before we act, never committing to anything where we lack passion, keeping our word, treating others with respect, telling the truth and always favouring action; then there are corresponding temptations to overcome. I liked his phrase that wisdom is knowing who to be and what to do in a given situation; virtue is acting on that wisdom. Brendon encourages us to open the heart and let the energy of life flow through us in connecting with one another.

He believes that inspiring greatness demands action and excellence and lists a number of virtues for greatness. Here I felt that vision might have been added vision to such qualities as courage, responsibility and respect. It also struck me that the book is written largely from a masculine energy and I wondered how more feminine readers would react to its sheer eloquent drive. Some questions, however, are important to all of us such as asking who we are and what is really important to us. Brendon suggests that we write our own manifesto in terms of our mission, plan of action and steps to be taken, which we should constantly reread and refine. As a whole, the book is a blueprint for a more intense as well as successful and worthwhile life where we learn to savour the moment, define our mission and make a contribution - well worth a read.