So this is a little bit different than my typical post. I’m going to do a book review of Craft a Life You Love by Amy Tangerine. If you don’t know me as a human this is a short crash course:
I’m really, stupidly, unequivocally, hard on myself. Like an absurd number of people that I know and maybe you too.
End of crash course. Saturate Life and this chapter of my life all about my recovery (and maybe my dumb ways to get there). Cause, who wants to be that way. This post is going to talk about a method of my recovery it may work for you. It may not. If you don’t even want to deal with this sappy-pappy bull I completely understand. Just skip this post. If you’re the least bit curious about how you could possibly change all the negativity in your head maybe Amy Tangerine has the scoop for you in her book Craft a Life you Love through a non-sponsored post from me.
Hi Amy, this is not sponsored. This is just an honest review from a real person hanging out, living the fullest life they can. If you or anyone else needs to need to contact me privately to discuss possible collaboration my email is saturatelife@gmail.com
Doing the same exact thing but expecting different results is the definition of an idiot.
I was an idiot. I kept living my ho-drum existence and I kept thinking I didn’t have to do anything to help myself and I would magically improve my mental health? I don’t know. I was always told it would get better. Maybe I was stuck in a rut, maybe I was fighting change. I just kept doing the same things and obviously, my mental health was not improving. I kept feeling depressed, anxious, and generally hating my existence. I rolled my eyes at the self-help audiobooks Fitzi enjoys just playing in the background as he works. However, you know who is the most carefree happy-go-lucky person I know? It’s Fitzi. He was the one who found Amy Tangerine’s book Craft a Life You Love. He encouraged me to give it a shot. Intrigued by the delightful colors and the fact that “Craft” was in the title I did give it a go and this is a brief synopsis and review.
You can find Craft a Life You Love by Amy Tangerine on Amazon here
You can discover more about Amy Tangerine’s brand and blog here
Craft a Life You Love: Synopsis
At the core, Craft a Life You Love by Amy Tangerine is a self-help book. She broke her book down into 6 Parts describing ways to get down to the root of the problem: You… and the habits you have developed over the years. Each chapter has a different theme from Crafting your Mindset to Crafting your Soul. She encourages you to be the best, most true version of yourself. At the end of each chapter of the book, there is a small prompt or activity to engage the reader in relation to what that chapter was over. There are bold images of calligraphic inspirational quotes from the book sprinkled throughout. The book itself has a lovely color scheme (nothing in the book is actually black) and the texture of the pages are of a high-quality paper which makes it feel wonderful in the hands. (Yes Amy, I appreciate this type of effort) In each section Amy shares anecdotes on her past and how she handled them or how she could have handled them better which really is a bonus to her character.
Craft a Life You Love: The Parts
There are 6 parts that Amy focuses on in her book Craft a Life You Love.
- Crafting the Soul
- Crafting the Right Mindset
- Crafting the Right Environment
- Crafting Happiness through Habits
- Crafting Your Way Back
- Crafting Your Passions
Craft a Life You Love: Crafting the Soul
In this part of the book, Amy encourages you to “Feed your Soul.” Before you roll your eyes there is no talk of any deity. In essence, she encourages you to tap into the spiritual side of yourself and find what brings peace to your soul. She mostly speaks to the crafters. The people who find “the zone” in making things. The way she expresses her encouragement focusing on the spiritual side is not preachy, only inspiring. She gives a permission slip for people to practice their calling (i.e. crafts) rather than allow it to go by the wayside in lieu of a busy life and day. This way you took care of your own self so you can better take care of others.
Craft a Life You Love: Crafting the Right Mindset
This is the portion of Craft a Life You Love that really resonated with me. I realized all the nasty, demeaning thoughts I was thinking, which I assumed were normal (spoiler: they aren’t, or at least they don’t have to be). Amy Tangerine encourages you to really pay attention to what you are doing, what you are thinking, and actively countering those thoughts. While that’s easy enough to tell someone, she also helpfully includes some prompts that help you pause and examine your normal habits. She advises people to also take a moment to have some gratitude for what you have, to not stress out by comparing yourself to others constantly, and enjoy the little moments in life.
Craft a Life You Love: Crafting the Right Environment
Amy Tangerine stresses the importance of 3 things to make an adequate environment to cultivate better ideas (You’ll have to read the book to get the three things). Which all have their merit. In this part of the book, she focuses on how to identify and cultivate these three things to bring out the best of you and what you want to achieve in life. She encourages you to keep a positive mindset, don’t fall back on the ever popular excuse of “not enough time”, and encourages you to outsource everything that doesn’t fulfill the question “Does this activity feed my soul?” (pg 93 Craft a Life You Love by Amy Tangerine).
Craft a Life You Love: Crafting Happiness through Habits
This chapter in Craft a Life You Love is all about breaking ourselves down… in a good way. Amy points out that we were not always these miserable sacks of sad lumpy flesh. At one point, probably in childhood, we did things just for pure joy. She encourages us to return to that time, think about those things we did, and do them again. Her exercises include some journaling prompts to get back there. Amy encourages the practice of good healthy rituals while at the same time breaking the ho-drum monotony of the rituals we have slipped into, even if it is just taking a different route to work. She encourages getting yourself exposed to new ideas because if you keep looking in the same spots you’ll never find what you’re actually looking for.
Craft a Life You Love: Crafting your way Back
This is a doozy that I am so happy Amy Tangerine addressed. So what happens if you fail or things don’t go as planned? She tells the story of getting a new job in LA, a moving across the country, only for them to give her an ultimatum that she couldn’t accept which lead to them not actually hiring her. Now she’s across the country jobless with a newly leased apartment and car. That sounds like one of my worst nightmares. Amy Tangerine didn’t fall into a depression spiral and instead took it as an opportunity to grow. She discussed the prospect of disappointing family or friends with abandoning the expectations held on you in order to follow your passion. She also advises what to do if you accidentally fall out of love with your original passion, which is terrifying in its own right.
Craft a Life You Love: Crafting your Passions
In this section of Craft a Life You Love, Amy Tangerine suggests for us to return to child-like passion where we were proud our butterfly that probably didn’t really look like a butterfly. She wants us to plunge into the deep end. At the same time, she also encourages us to take a moment to take a step back and try to experience and appreciate things like we were doing them for the first time. Take a moment to disconnect with external stimuli (phones, tv, internet) and turn the focus inward. In the end, she then points out that life is ever-changing and to be excited about the change. No one should dread the question “What’s next?” (pg 171 Craft a Life you Love by Amy Tangerine) it’s new opportunities and new experiences that you can fall in love with all over again.
Overall Conclusions of Craft a Life You Love
I really enjoyed this book. I think that it has some excellent points to help with creating a more positive mindset as well as including some exercises to get there. I find Amy Tangerine’s passions exciting, invigorated, and relatable. When she reveals some hard decisions in regards to her initial choices in schooling in life it really hit home for me. Her passion for her brand inspires me to do better. I found some things incredibly repetitive when listening to the audiobook. I was irritated with how repetitive it was, however, that does drive the important points more home. I loved going through the suggested journaling prompts and it did give me pause to reexamine my life.
I found her writing style provocative but gentle. Amy Tangerine makes you want to be the best person you can be. She makes you believe you can do what she encourages you to do through positive reinforcement. I had to go through short bursts of listening to her audiobook when I was working on things that were outside of my craft because I started itching to just run out and create!
Doing the same thing with small improvments and expecting different results is the definition of practice.
Craft a Life You Love gave me the guidance to practice a healthy mindset. Although I don’t expect this book to change who I am overnight it has given me guidance to practice something different. Someone has finally told me that my silly passions for the creation of the seemingly small and mundane were actually really important and I should stress to make them more of a priority rather than an afterthought. Because in turn, I was essentially telling the world that I was an afterthought rather than a priority. Thank you Amy Tangerine for writing your book Craft a Life You Love.
Thank you for reading my review of Amy Tangerine’s Book Craft a Life You Love. You can get the book Here from Amazon as well as learn more about Amy Tangerine Here. Thank you again!
