Go Suck a Lemon

Strategies for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence

By: Michael Cornwall

Narrated by: Michael Cornwall

Many of your emotional responses, regardless of how much strength you've given them, can be brought down, deconstructed, and reshaped. You will just have to learn how to give your knee-jerk response to emotional stimuli less strength - less of a jerk. To do that you will have to commit to reinventing the way you think and behave. With Go Suck a Lemon, you will approach that task by accepting and then adapting to a no-nonsense style of emotional problem solving. You will learn and use a process of level-headed decision-making. You will try to become more efficient, flexible, and open-minded when addressing your emotional problems.

You will learn that there is always another emotional option. You will learn to make fact-based observations, something most of us are unfamiliar with doing. You will also incorporate in vivo (in life) exposure, i.e., homework, to encourage you to independently act against your learned thoughts and behaviors. In the end, you will become more informed, increasingly more capable, and far more emotionally self-reliant. Instead of being your own worst enemy, you will become your own best friend - your own therapist.

We may be strengthened when we learn to be emotionally self-reliant, to free ourselves from emotional helplessness and our dependence on others for our emotional solutions.

©2012 Michael Cornwall (P)2014 Michael Cornwall

Music in background distracting

The music in the background was distracting and annoying on loop. Got through it though

powerful self management approach

important self empowerment method. practical and easy to learn for managing ourselves and correcting our self focused expereince with others

get rid of background music

the music drove me crazy. not a great choice for an audiobook. I would suggest removing it

Funny, wonderful book!

The author makes a great case for how to outwit our illogical magical thinking in such feelings as "he made me mad!" when no one 'made' you mad. He tells of his own career path and how he discovered how emotion works, including what he learned from therapists as part of his training, all the way to what he learned from his own patients. The author has some good insights. The ideas in the book will turn your world around, for the better. Loved it. Narration is excellent.

OK but seemed fairly basic.

My therapist asked me to read this but I just felt like it was a bit simple and told me things I already know about changing my self directed language. Also, I didn’t appreciate the music that played in the background the entire time. It was very distracting.

Good information, difficult listen.

The book is well-written and insightful. The audio is distracting. The reading is somewhat monotonous, and is backed (oddly) by a distracting musical loop that is nearly a lullaby, the combination making it difficult to stay focused on the material.

Performance took away from great message.

Excellent content. But, author should not have been the narrator. His flat voice and affected Brahmin accent distracted from the message. The music in the background was dreadful. Wish I’d just read it.

Distractingly bad recording, good content

This would have been a meaningfully better audiobook if two major things were fixed. First there is an insanely annoying soundtrack in the background throughout. The actual book reading was weakened because of the poor audio recording itself. Some chapters sound like they were recorded in a closet. I know these things sound petty but I found them both a constant distraction that made it often hard to fully focus on the actual contents.

Narrator was tough to listen to sometimes

The content is good, but the narrator was a bit monotone, making it hard to focus at times. Still a helpful book!

Love this book!

What did you love best about Go Suck a Lemon?

This is one of the best self-development books ever. Cornwall's humor, insight, and obvious understanding of rational emotive behavior therapy, which (despite being no stranger to the mental health profession) I'd never heard of, shine from every page. A major tenet of REBT is that a person’s problems and feelings are a product of internal beliefs about external events and not the external events themselves--let that one sink in; then consider the three major musts--I must do well; others must treat me well; life should be easy--and the problem is clear. Fortunately, Cornwall's book helps clear the path toward more rational beliefs and behaviors, and (hopefully) increased happiness . . .