Review: Mindscaping by Donovon Jenson

Posted June 14, 2021 by Stephanie in Nonfiction, Review, Self-Help / 10 Comments

Title: Mindscaping: A Practical Guide For How To Be Happier
Author: Donovon Jenson
Publication: January 25th 2021
Genre: Nonfiction, Self-Help
Find it on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository
Rating: 4/5

Are you happier now than you were last year?
Most people haphazardly chase happiness, guided by vague, empty platitudes like:

  • Choose happiness.
  • Happiness can only be found when you stop looking for it.
  • Happiness is always within you.

These sound profound, but lack clear action steps. Results are inconsistent. How do I choose happiness? Where is happiness within me? This book shows exactly how to shape your mind for happiness, health, and wellbeing.

Readers can expect to:

  • Understand happiness, how it’s produced, and how to increase it
  • Discover a simple metaphor for how shaping your mind is similar to landscaping
  • Master techniques for managing troublesome thoughts, negative feelings, and challenging situations.
  • Learn how to link actions with happiness and purpose, then execute them
  • Explore 100+ reflection questions and 40+ exercises targeted at increasing happiness

Mindscaping is not the one true path to happiness; it’s a framework for designing your path to happiness, based on well-researched and proven techniques. Happiness is too important to leave to chance. What’s stopping you from investing a few hours into learning the lifelong process for producing happiness?

For almost two years now I’ve been working on bettering myself and to be happier. It’s been a slow but sure process and it’s something I’m still working on because mental health is very important and rome wasn’t build in a day. At the start of the book the author said that he doesn’t have a natural disposition toward happiness. And something about that sentence resonated with me because that’s how I am too. I never have been able to put that into words but that’s exactly what I’ve always felt. I loved that.

First of all I want to say that I highlighted the hell out of this book on my Kindle. Like really! I will leave some quotes below to give you all a little taste but I will for sure go back and reread some of the quotes and passages because they’re very useful to me and I definitely wanted to remember them.

One thing that I loved that other self help type books don’t always have is the excercises. Reading about happiness is fine and all but without actual having some excercises to do I don’t think it would be as helpful. I also loved the whole metaphor of how your mind is a landscape that you can work on. I thought that was actually pretty brilliant to think about it that way. And it totally works for me, I must say. It really made sense!

Mindscaping: A Practical Guide For How To Be Happier by Donovon Jenson was a great read. I’m sure the various tools presented in the book will be beneficial and applicable for people who struggle with happiness. I definitely thought the book, the tools and excercises were very interesting and also very useful. Would highly recommend!

Memorable Quotes:

“Instant unshakable happiness, a perfect, problem-free life, and infinite productivity aren’t realistic goals. There are no shortcuts to a meaningful, pleasant life. It takes time and effort. You can’t be happy all the time, but you can absolutely be happy more often.”

“Our first task is normalizing a definition of happiness from first principles, starting with a fairly safe premise: If happiness means anything at all, it’s desirable and preferable to being unhappy.”

“Most strong, repetitive feelings of worthlessness are rooted in habit or trauma rather than rationality. Breaking these patterns typically takes time and practice.”

“Accepting mistakes as an expected and inevitable part of the process allows for a faster release of the associated negative emotions.”

10 responses to “Review: Mindscaping by Donovon Jenson

  1. verushka

    I don’t have a natural disposition to happiness either; those are some interesting quotes — food for thought.

  2. Mindscaping looks to be totally my kind of book! I’ll confess self-help books are like catnip to me. This one reminds me of Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project, which I recommend highly if you’re interested in this field. 🙂

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