Book Review
Got family baggage? Then you need to lighten up your load with Libby Gill’s Traveling Hopefully: How To Lose Your Family Baggage and Jumpstart Your Life. This interesting and inspiring book covers every possible area of getting rid of the toxic family legacies and beliefs that drag you down and keep you from living your dreams. Much of our sense of disappointment and frustration comes from feeling as though we are living someone else’s life, and those feelings often have their root in the family dramas of our youth, according to the author.
Gill, a success strategist and executive coach, has had plenty of her own experience with heavy-duty family baggage, and she shares her personal experiences throughout the book, using them as examples of how to overcome the pressures and expectations of others. She also uses her skills as a coach and strategist, providing the reader with effective exercises and techniques for breaking out of old mindsets and freeing the real person within.
Much of the book focuses on family–of-origin dysfunctions that keep us from fully expressing who we are, but it also covers negative relationships with bosses, friends, colleagues and spouses. The transformative process Gill has created to break free of the past is outlined in her Five Steps to Jumpstart Your Life, allowing you to dissect the past in order to direct the future; create a powerful road map of your intentions; keep moving away from what no longer serves you and towards that which empowers you; finding your own “support squad” to keep you going; naming and taming your inner critical voices, and so much more.
Though some of the information sounds a lot like many other self-help books out there, Gill’s personal quest for her own happiness makes this book a bit more intimate and inspiring. Knowing what she has gone through, and how she survived and thrived, serves as proof that her concepts work, if you work them. The book takes on a spiritual quality many times, offering ways to get in touch with intuition and the inner voice, but always keeps a realistic and practical tone, making it the perfect self-help book for someone who shies away from New Age-y stuff.
Traveling Hopefully is a great jumping-off point for a whole new outlook on your life, if you take the time to do the exercises, examine the things that keep you grounded, then let go of them with faith and courage, and fly. This book will no doubt serve as the perfect road map for taking that flight. Go for it!
An entertainment industry veteran, Libby Gill spent fifteen years heading public relations and corporate communications at Universal Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Turner Broadcasting. She was also the branding brain behind the launch of the Dr. Phil Show.
Libby is now an internationally respected executive coach, speaker and bestselling author. She has shared her success strategies on the Today Show, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, CNN, NPR, Oprah & Friends Radio Network, Fox News, CBS Early Show, and in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, O Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Self and many more.