cover image Ten-Second Miracle

Ten-Second Miracle

Gay Hendricks. HarperOne, $23 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-06-251489-9

Beginning with the question, ""Does any great change in our lives ever take longer than ten seconds?"" Hendricks (Conscious Loving) spends much of the rest of this relationship manual attempting to prove his negative answer. He describes five-step ""Miracle Moves"" to create a ""mind-body shift"" that he guarantees will dissolve conflict. Fully feeling and speaking the emotions people often suppress is the basis of his method, and the simple exercise Hendricks advocates seems a useful tool for momentarily breaking out of old patterns of behavior. Applied to the ""seven biggest relationship mistakes"" people make, the ""Key Moves"" are shown to be effective in personal examples from his ""thousands"" of workshop participants. Unfortunately, Hendricks has so much enthusiasm for his technique that his claims for instant major life and relationship changes stretch the boundaries of credibility. ""The Ten-Second Miracles are... effortless,"" he says, and ""[i]t doesn't matter if you have been unhappy for decades, you are still only seconds away from the miracle""--which, he seems to assert, can cure migraines or addictions and resolve conflicts instantaneously. In his workshops and personal therapy sessions, Hendricks may achieve the amazing results he claims, but whether readers of his book will achieve the same success is doubtful. Author tour. (June)