Becoming the Warrior
Harnessing Your Inner Strength to Silence Self-Doubt
Leading by example, Becoming the Warrior is a supportive self-help text about learning to overcome the internal roadblocks that impede one’s success.
Drawing on a twenty-seven-year military career and personal experiences, Jenn Donahue’s Becoming the Warrior is a self-help book focused on harnessing inner strength and silencing self-doubt.
Across nine chapters, the book tackles subjects including so-called failures, setbacks, and naysayers, as well as ways to live with and silence internal voices. Helpful exercises, boxes highlighting and distilling key points, and useful tables and figures reinforce its salient topics. The detailed bibliography documents its sources for its highlighted research, studies, and statistics.
Its tone evoking coaching sessions, the book works to establish personal connections in each chapter. Phrases including “Do me a favor,” “Grab a piece of paper,” and “I got you” reinforce its conversational nature and fortify its efforts to offer patient support while guiding in the removal of troublesome roadblocks that interfere with the achievement of personal goals. Playful words including “braggadocios” add spirit and liveliness to the serious material, while instructive ones like “atychiphobia” are expansive. The eye-catching use of periods in “Take. Your. Time.” slows the reading process, discouraging audiences from rushing through the text and prompting them to process the book’s suggestions with care.
Intimate descriptions of Donahue confronting personal challenges while in the Navy and dealing with two critical bosses, backstabbing officers, and finger-pointing after a tragic incident have a grounding force. Positive stories about other protective military members, as well as a focus on training and discipline as “weapons” of choice, provide balance and hope. Some of the most uplifting tales, though, center her mother’s reverberating advice about refusing to let others “win” in difficult circumstances, inspiring Donahue long-term to embody strength, handling situations as the only woman in a room and dismissing belittling attempts to undermine her.
With equal force, the book suggests eliminating one’s internal blockades, including negative inner voices, through keen self-assessment. To illustrate this in action, Donahue assigns colorful, capitalized names to such mean, sneaky inner voices, seeking to understand them in full, all in order to unwind how they can sabotage people’s dreams. She suggests writing down small steps toward one’s goals and identifying and overcoming obstacles each week—concrete methods for crushing such inner enemies in the end. Her discussions of finding ways to sustain an initial business launch are useful too, as are the tools she suggests for fortifying new enterprises, all built on personal experience. With an imperative to avoid regret at the end of one’s life, the conclusion focusing on doing great work encourages immediate action.
Becoming the Warrior is an encouraging self-help book packed with practical tools for slaying defeatism and realizing one’s full potential.
Reviewed by
Andrea Hammer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
