How to Make People Like You by Nick Boothman is a popular book about being popular. I think having personal charisma and cultivating charm is so important there should be a degree in it. Or at least a High School course. Having friends and understanding social situations is so important in being happy.
Nick Boothman talks about why you need to make an impression. It’s about love, sex, connection, popularity, fun, community and joy. It’s also important for work, and feeling fulfilled or self actualized.

Boothman says, “In face to face communication, it’s not enough to command the other person’s attention. You must also be able to hold on to it long enough to deliver your message or intention. It comes down to three things:
1. your presence, i.e. what you look like and how you move
2. your attitude, i.e. what you say, how you say it, and how interesting you are;
3. how you make people feel.

He goes on to talk about eye contact, flirting, mirroring (you lean in when they lean in etc), being well read, and understanding those “connective languages”.

I talk about them in session all of the time.

What I mean by that is gearing your conversation to how the other person processes information. For example, as a talk show host I am completely verbal. For me it’s about sound. I am an auditory learner, and I need you to HEAR me.

Other people are visual and need to be SEEN. They need conversation lead ins like How did you see that? Or what did that situation look like”.

Finally there are the physical learners. These are mainly men who need you to SHOW them before they understand. An example would be “How did that feel?” We are going to be discussing other ways to become more charismatic as I finish the interviews with the top 10 most charismatic people I can get on the phone. Unfortunately Bill Clinton and Brian Mulroney haven’t yet returned my calls. Stay tuned for more ideas on getting people to like you (really like you) very quickly.

The New York Times best selling book about the new girlie-girl culture called [U]Cinderella Ate my daughter[/U] by Peggy Orenstein made it to the top of my summer reading pile. Subtitled “Dispatches from the front lines of the new girlie-girl culture” it’s a manifesto of princesses, pink and why our girls have become hyper-feminine. It was an interesting time for me to be reading this. I have a 3 year old niece that I’m hanging with who is Dora mad, embracing the princess movement and is dressed in rose pastels from head to toe. My own 10 year old daughter is already in the tween stage of urban clothes, cool earrings and the colour green. However she feeds her cousin into the princess obsession.

Orenstein writes exceptionally well. She’s funny, clear and uses specific examples from her own young daughter. She writes about the phenomenon of the Disney Princesses in her interview with Disney executive Andy Mooney. He decided to market the princesses as an entity after watching young girls in homemade princess dresses at a showing of Disney on Ice. Those brands now rake in 4 billion dollars a year. And it shows no sign of slowing down. At a trip to Epcot (the least princess of the theme parks) a mere six weeks ago in Florida I was nearly run over by little girls in sequins getting between me and Pochahontas.

And with princess Kate (or the new Duchess of Cambridge) visiting Ottawa this week it feeds into the culture of special, pretty and privileged. The couple was at Rideau Hall (home of the Canadian Governor General) where a number of my friends and colleagues went to see the future King and his new bride. It seems 40 year old women have an obsession with Royalty too. In complementing a young girl on her flouncy, pink dress the child in question turned to Kate and stated “I’m glad you like it and think it is the right dress as I’m going to be a princess too”.

You can’t talk about socializing girls to like pink without opening the nature/nurture debate even a little. Orenstein points out that there are innate differences. Any parent who has had their son make a gun out of a stick or watch their daughter pretending to change the diaper of her stuffed dog knows that there is something inbred about toy preferences. The 2002 study showed that male and female monkeys will pick up specific gender toys time and time again if given the opportunity. Orenstein makes her most compelling argument about encouraging inter gender friendships. Those inter gender friendships help girls cope when they are involved in romantic relationships later in life. it also helps expand her horizons.

“A little girl who only plays with girls and learns gender behaviour and interaction of little girls…well, what they do together is limited. Same with little boys”. If you can encourage your daughter to be all she can be – even through the pink and sparkly stage it can help her come out the other side and find her way in an increasingly sexualized and mature world. Despite our desires to keep our daughters innocent and sweet as long as possible.

I’ve been reading a few books on weight as part of my new change-the-tape-in-my-head weight loss regime. The first is the Rebel Diet by Dr. Melissa Hersherg. She has some great suggestions of foods (no just obscure ones in health food stores) and offers a great understanding of why too much weight is bad for your blood stream.
“When we gain too much weight, we overwhelm our fat cells. Because we have a relatively stable number of fat cells, we simply store more and more in each cell, until pop-the contents spill into our blood stream and pollute it. Fat cell contents include hormones,triglycerides, ad toxins and when they spill, they cause all sorts of problems. Things like an increased estrogen level (causing a greater risk for cancer and man boobs), heart disease problems and general inflammation.

It’s really important to understand that your body doesn’t make more fat cells. They stay around and just become bigger (unless you have liposuction). In Brad King’s book called Fat Wars, he talks about how Human Growth Hormone impacts fat cells.

HGH is built up when we get enough sleep and when we do weight or resistance training. HGH only hangs around for a few minutes after it`s pumped into our bloodstream. The HGH goes to the fat cells where it latches onto specific growth hormone receptors , activating the release of stored energy from fat.

This is one of the key reasons we need to get enough sleep.

I`ve been reading and writing and putting together an understanding of what are the rules for our new 180 day challenge. Follow this blog as we re-sculpt our bodies together. More to come….

Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray is the story of a middle aged woman named Ruth and her need to bake. I loved this novel. Given that I haven’t reviewed much fiction, I wanted to offer up a few great books that have hit my summer reading table.

It’s the compulsion to feed those around us. I come from a family that believes that as long as we have yummy food everything is great.

In this story our heroine Ruth dreams of cake. She’s an accomplished baker whose family moans when another magnificent confection graces the table. I especially loved how she deals with stress. When she’s alone she imagines herself inside the warm, comforting center of a giant bundt cake. Preferable gingerbread.

If there is a crisis Ruth bakes, if there is a celebration, there is cake. In my house my family knows that something is really wrong when they come home and see the counters lined up with baking. “Ruth sees it as an outward manifestation of an inner need to nurture her family.”

I know that feeding and caring for my family, just like bitching to my girlfriends raises my oxytocin level and calms me down. Men need to fix things, have solitude or watch sports to re-kindle their testosterone, but nurturing works for women. Hence the cake baking.

In Eat Cake Ruth has her lifelong divorced parents move in with her (and her recently unemployed husband and two teenagers). Her parents who haven’t said a civil word to each other in decades both need help. Especially her father who has shattered both wrists and needs help feeding himself and going to the bathroom.

So Ruth gets up at 3 am to bake. So do i if my week is especially bad. Both Ruth and I buy expensive vanilla paste, and have a 48 inch cake pan. I so get Ruth. I think you will too. It’s a story about courage and re-invention. It’s also about “believable, likable characters engaged in the large and small dramas and amusements of life.”

Find it at your book store and know it is the perfect, thought provoking summer chick lit.

I’m reading Hallowell’s bok Married to Distraction for this week’s Love and Lipstick (www.love and lipstick.com) show. What struck me was the importance of attention.
I constantly tell my patients that positive attention from you is what your spouse is craving.

I asked my sister-in-law the coolest divorce lawyer around about reasons for splits. She talks about facebook, infidelity and workaholics. The idea is that you get married to spend your life with someone and they may never be home weighs heavily on any relationship. Your relationship needs time and attention.

Here are the take aways from the book:
The important things are that your partner knows that you think highly of them.
2. That you care deeply for them
3. Think they are proficient at something.

The authors go on to say that the things we absolutely need are:

1. the aforementioned attention
2. Time
3. Empathy (I see things from your side, walk in yor shoes)
4. Connection – we are similar in our values and see the world in the same way
5. Play – when was the last time you had laugh-out-loud fun?

This is the age of interuption. To love you must slow down, pause and attend the other person. Factor that into your blackberry.

Steve Harvey, he black American talk show host and comedian wrote the book on what men are looking for in relationships.

I have the hots for Andy Kessler. Not that I’ve ever met him, and the back flap picture I’m sure doesn’t do him justice, but his writing is smart, funny, incredibly astute, and articulate. Something I find sexy every time in a man.  I’m sure he also has that boyish charm thing going on as well.   Hear that Andy? This sex therapist thinks you’re sexy.

I’m reading his book about the end of medicine.let me know if you find a better picture…:)  His line about "how technology will do to doctors what ATM’s have done to bank tellers" sums it up brilliantly.  He’s looking for a scalable way to use imaging, nanotechnology, or Star Teck tricorders, to look inside the body and prevent your own personal big bang -way in advance.  He’s an investment banker and engineer (don’t hold that against him, the boy can write), and he’s looking for the health/medical dot com equivalent for which to invest his mad money.

I see patients every day with clogged blood vessels to their penises, (small blood vessels, remember it’s all that nasty plaque that is keeping Mr. Happy down), and beyond Viagra, Cialis and Levetra (what your doctor reccomends), and surgery (what your urologist usually endorses), I’m left generating alternative solutions to keep those guys boffing. I think the technology -be it pumps, rings, toys, gagets, herbs whatever- are going to find a way to all those deflated, but still willing penises, but I too keep looking for the Holy Grail of sex solutions.

I also love his blog. I’m wetting myself about his media, web 2.0 description   I’ve long been defining media as controlling the pipes, (really, I said it first), since the days when I wrote and got the national broadcast licence for Passion TV, a government regulated digital TV channel meant to play cool sex programming like HBO’s Real Sex, and those fun Sammy Sperm documentaries all day long.  Hell, I would have been able to run all Sue content all the time (oh yes, I want to be a media mogul – me me, and more me), but got beat up by the big boys in television when they saw it would be successful. It was my Mr. Burns moment, I could have been a feminist Hugh Heffner. sigh.  A story about bad big business for another day, but have a look at what Andy says about controlling access to new content. For people who like to blog (and the 4 or 5 of you how may actually read mine), his argument is the bomb.

I read a business book a week. I can’t remember the last one I not only thought was super smart, but made me laugh out loud too. Hey Andy, do you want to come over and see my etchings?