DNF

There is much to like about this book: The advantages of mindfulness and their applicability to personal and business life are well covered. The exercises strike a good balance between breadth and simplicity, and they avoid feeling too "out there" for a secular audience. The book would be a great introduction to mindfulness for someone interested in the topic but wanting to avoid the new age baggage that often comes with meditation.

My main reason for only giving this book three stars, is that for someone who is already familiar with mindfulness meditation, there is little new. It was still worth reading -- I am inconsistent enough at actually practicing meditation to make any reminders in that direction useful -- but it was definitely more of a refresher than anything else. ( )

Really dislike the casual sexism and the pervasive assumption that readers are all male. Sexist cartoons on pages 37, 94, and 147 are unnecessary. ( )

At first I was skeptical about this book which was for class. It turned out to be pretty decent. a lot of good techniques to employ at work and in daily life; who doesn't benefit from meditation practice? ( )

I like the idea behind the book, but ultimately I think it tries to cover too much, with too little.

I'm familiarized with meditation and mindfulness, but I had zero knowledge about Emotional Intelligence. Yes, I've heard about the term, I know it created a lot of fuzz, especially in the corporate world, a few years back, but I've never read anything about EI. This is important because the book tries to teach mindfulness using EI as a framework, so to speak. But in my opinion, it fails as an introduction to EI, for somebody (like me) that has no idea about it.

The first part of the book deals with meditation and mindfulness, and it's a nice read, albeit a little too simplistic. It's a practical approach to mindfulness, and it tries to explain the science behind it, and I'm totally cool with that, but somehow it felt... short. Oversimplified. Not deep enough. People already familiarized with meditation has little to gain from the first half of the book, and for completely newbies it might spike their curiosity, and give them a starting point... but little more.

And then we have the second part of the book, which is more related to Emotional Intelligence, the use of mindfulness in a social context (especially in the workplace). To me it tries to cover a lot of things, and sometimes it assumes some Emotional Intelligence background, which I don't have.

Finally, I'm not particularly happy with the author (too much about himself and how a nice guy he is), his (forced) sense of humor, and his praise for all-things-Google. I get that his work was possible because Google somehow sponsored it and gave the author time to work on this, and the program was born inside Google, but I don't feel comfortable being reminded of that every other page or so. ( )