cover image Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking

Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking

Jon Acuff. Baker, $26.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-5409-0080-7

Motivational speaker Acuff (Finish) offers an energetic if trite guide to shutting down the naysayers in one’s head. Virtually everyone overthinks, he writes, yet few people know how to get out of their own heads long enough to pursue—let alone achieve—their goals. As a result, overthinking becomes constant background noise. To turn this around, he proposes three steps—“Retire your broken soundtracks,” “Replace them with new ones,” and “Repeat them until they’re as automatic as the old ones”—and shares stories of how he changed his own self-defeating habits. In order to become an author and inspirational speaker, he writes, he “chose to play [his] new soundtrack at full blast: ‘YOU CAN BE A PUBLIC SPEAKER AND AUTHOR!’ ” Acuff cites lessons from psychology and neuroscience to bolster his take on turning “overthinking from a super problem into a superpower,” but the ideas are little more than repetitive riffs on basic pep talks about creating a positive internal monologue. Acuff’s passion is undeniable, but this has the feeling of a pamphlet padded out to book-length. Agent: Mike Salisbury and Curtis Yates, Yates & Yates. (Apr.)