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"If you're like most people, you have a voice in your head telling you to work harder, be better, make more friends, and screw up less. It frowns at your mistakes, warns you that your list needs tending, and questions your attractiveness. It's a bully. And you don't actually need it. The path to personal nirvana is routed through your inner critic. Better Days will help you confront and immobilize the superego ~ that nagging little voice in your head that sneers at your mistakes, questions your worth, and whose snarky commentary keeps you stuck in a childish cycle of reward and punishment. The method is simple, fun, and riveting: First you meet your inner critic. Then you talk to it. Then you speak up whenever it pokes in. Eventually it gets the picture that you don't need it, and it shuts up. Along the way you'll learn a dozen specific techniques anyone can use to move it to the side and reduce anxiety, increase satisfaction, and find your own freedom."--
List of contents
Chapter 1 - Hello, Parasite
Chapter 2 - First Grade: Paradise Lost
Chapter 3 - Meet Your Inner Critic
Chapter 4 - Confront Your Inner Critic
Chapter 5- Take Charge
Chapter 6 - Grow Up and Relax
Chapter 7 - Tame the Parasite
Chapter 8 - Follow Your Nose to Freedom
Chapter 9 - Civilization and Its Discontents
Chapter 10 - What Me Worry?
Chapter 11 - Enjoy Being Ordinary
Chapter 12 - I See You, Superego
Chapter 13 - Repeating Questions
Chapter 14 - Identify Your Defenses
Chapter 15 - Waste Your Time
Chapter 16 - God and Religion
Chapter 17 - Love
Chapter 18 - Better Days
Appendix: Reading Group Guide
About the author
Neal Allen is a writer, spiritual coach and speaker whose chief interest is removing obstacles of the ego. He is the author of
Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You (Self Published, 2021), and
Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic (Namaste Publishing, 2023). A former journalist and corporate executive, he earned master’s degrees in Political Science and Eastern Classics. He lives with his wife the writer, Anne Lamott, in Northern California.
Summary
In this life-changing book, writer and spiritual coach, Neal Allen, teaches us a stunning new method for quieting the inner critic.
“Better Days will help you get to know your inner critic, and quiet its yammering, and in so doing, get to know the person you were born to be.” - Anne Lamott, Author of Dusk Night Dawn, Bird by Bird and others
What if your superego has it wrong?
That snarky little bully in your head…you know the one.
You’ve lived under its weight for decades.
I’m a fraud, I’m lazy
I need to work harder
I need to be tougher, funnier, calmer…
I need to stay quiet, look pretty, stop showing off
I need to put others before me, I need to put myself first
I need to be perfect
I need to hide who I really am
Sound familiar?
You know that its scolding voice is harmful to you, but you can't will it away. You accept a life with short periods of peace and long stretches of stress and anxiety. But you don't have to.
In this revolutionary new book, Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, writer and spiritual coach, Neal Allen, examines a critical aspect of the human psyche that often gets ignored - the superego.
Building on Freud’s idea that the superego necessarily forms a person’s moral conscience, Neal explains how this voice in your head develops in childhood as a survival mechanism, but when no longer needed for protection, camps out in your mind like a personal parasite. A parasite that doesn’t belong.
Through simple and engaging exercises and explorations, Neal leads you into meeting, confronting, and ultimately quieting your own inner critic.
By shedding off the burden of the superego, you can overcome tired patterns of reward and punishment, reduce the self-talk that harms you, and ultimately clear an open space for the life you deserve, one that is gentler and more peaceful.
Just imagine…if all that nasty, negative chatter in your head just evaporated ... what would you do next?
Better days are just ahead.
Foreword
- Anne Lamott, bestselling author and speaker, will join Better Days
author, Neal Allen, at speaking and co-teaching engagements on the topic
of quieting the inner critic
- Multiple podcast appearances
- Professionally produced video content for promotion including book trailer
- Support content in the form of online video workshop
- Print and digital arcs, review campaigns through NetGalley, Goodreads
- Influencer outreach campaign
- Edelweiss and IPage advertising, Ingram Catalogue submission
