Well hello there. Welcome back to my Getting to Know You series. I’m glad you popped in. I have quite the treat for you today!

Today, I have the great pleasure of introducing you to one of my favorite people. A person who has taught me many valuable lessons, who has taken the time to get to know me (truly know me) and whom I am blessed to call friend.

Now don’t go getting all anxious, this review will be one of honesty, after all, I wouldn’t want to lead you astray. I rarely share something if I don’t like what I see (or in most cases read)

Oh, lets go ahead and get this out of the way while I’m thinking of it:

*DISCLAIMER* – I am NOT receiving compensation of any kind, monetary, product, or other wise, for this review.  Nor will I gain anything, monetarily, product, or other wise, if you decide to purchase this book for your own personal library.

Whew! Now that that is our of the way.  Let’s get on with it, shall we?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet, G.E. Williams, author of

How to Use Your Heart: A Practical Guide to Loving Well .

“I’m writing this book for everyone who wants to learn how to love people well and create meaningful relationships”  G.E.Williams

I want that. Don’t you?  I mean seriously, I don’t believe any of us sit around thinking, nah, I don’t want any meaningful relationships. What a waste of time!! 😉

If you’re anything like me than I’m sure your relationships are very important to you.

I want my relationships to be great whether it’s with my spouse, kids, co-workers, neighbors, church family, boss, business partner, or whomever I happen to meet.

The truth is, most of the time, my relationships fall flat of my expectations. That’s not to say my relationships are bad. It’s just most times I have higher expectations than my relationships meet.

Enter, Mr. Williams and his book.

From the first sentence of this book your heart is going to sit up and take notice. It won’t be able to help itself. This book is powerful, engaging, and relevant to every human on the planet.

Within the pages your going to discover:

• How Your Heart Works:Emotions
• How we Invalidate Emotions and Why
• How and why we should be Paying Attention to Feelings
• How to Listen to Your Heart and Validate It
• Not to mention practical ways to Use Your heart through Empathy, Warmth, and Respect
• You’re going to learn about listening with Respect and Humility, and finding your “No”
• Finally, you’re going to discover how to Love and Be Loved Well in all your relationships, including your relationship with God.

Mr Williams talks in real and concrete ways about things we all experience. He addresses how we use our hearts and gives practical methods of improving how we use them. It doesn’t matter if you’re struggling or not in relations, you’re going to find better ways to be in those relationships.

At the end of each chapter you get to become a part of the lesson through practical exercises that are going to stretch you, grow you, and help you understand your heart and relationships. I’ve never seen anything like this book.

I’ve started putting many of the ideas from this book into practice and I can be a walking, breathing testament to its ability to make relationships better. 

One of the most profound things I took away from this book was

“The first shift is a shift in focus. Everyone you meet is a mixed bag. They have strong points and weak points. They do things that annoy you or put you off, and they do things that you appreciate and even admire. We can tend to focus on others’ negative behaviors and traits to the point that we don’t see their strengths. Worse, we can feel justified in not appreciating their strengths. In order to truly appreciate others, you may have to shift your focus to see both the weaknesses and the strengths. By the way, there is a side benefit to this: when you grow in your ability to appreciate others’ strengths despite their weaknesses, it will also help you appreciate your own strengths despite your many weaknesses.” (p.86)

Can you imagine? In learning to see others’ strengths despite their weaknesses we can get a BONUS!!! We then get to start seeing and appreciating our own strengths despite our many weaknesses and who doesn’t need that?

See if you can relate to this. I can become so focused on the negatives I forget to pay attention to the strengths. The more I focus in on those annoyances, the more I complain. The more I complain the more the relationship deteriorates. It’s like a great big ball of negative rolling faster and faster down hill and all the while it’s getting bigger and bigger and before I know it the relationship feels too far gone to salvage. Ever been there? Yeah, me too.

If I take Mr. William’s advice I begin shifting my focus just a bit to see all sides of a person and pretty soon I’m becoming a more positive person. You’ll never guess what that creates! It creates a life that is more positive! I know, hard to believe. It also helps create stronger, more positive relationships.

Imagine, that’s just ONE thing I took away and trust me there are many more!!

I’m not ever going to be perfect in my relationships, after all I am human, but I can tell you the take-aways from this book are many and will have a great impact on me and my relationships. I believe it will do the same for you.

Mr. Williams knows his stuff and shares all the little bitty details with us on ways we can be better at who we are in relationships. It’s sort of a trickle down effect. I learn, from this book, how to be better at using my heart, which in turn creates a better version of me, which in turn seeps into the relationships I have, which then allows me to value, validate, and grow those I am in relationships with making them into better stronger versions of who they are.

Do you want to be better in relationships? ME TOO!! Let’s grab a cuppa, kick our feet up and indulge our senses as we read How to Use Your Heart!