Relationship Mastery by Stephen Van Basten

Relationship Mastery
 

From not reading self-help at all to reading two in a row, oh what has become of me 😉

I read and reviewed So you’re married, now what? By Stephen and was informed that Relationship Mastery was THE most important one to read. So, I dove straight in while I was still on a roll.

I found several interesting discussions and as I now expect of Stephen – exercises in RM. Unfortunately, I believe these books are published for his seminars and there was a lot of repetition from So you’re married in RM too. This went beyond the actual teachings and extended into figures of speech used, examples etc.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Face Pattern Recognition as this was something I actually had no idea even existed. It’s been interesting for me, learning that a lot of what people first see – being our face – gives away what type of people we are and how we would act or react.

I would recommend some more editing and formatting be done, for example Dr Demartini’s Value Determination exercise being placed as an earlier chapter – it’s referenced a few times throughout the book and I think it’d be a lot more pertinent to the reader is they were able to understand the exercise before additional discussions on it are done. Some images could be better sized and there are a number of spelling or grammatical errors which eventually got too numerous to ignore.

I won’t say that Stephen has sparked any love in me for self-help and guidance books, but I will say I don’t consider them as tedious as I once used to. I believe his work will benefit many individuals looking for a friendly but effective guide on mastering the balance, fulfilment and understanding of their own relationships, but that they will need to be invested in making a change. As a ‘nice to read’ this wasn’t for me.