The Short Road to Mental Strength 
Reviewed by Stewart Forsyth MA Psychology, Post Grad. Diploma Clinical Psychology, Joint winner of the NZ Psychology Organisation Tony Taylor Award in 2024 with Dr. Iain McCormick.

Jamie Ford’s Mental Strength book has a road trip theme. The title for example. The picture of Jamie negotiating a race track corner on his Triumph Daytona on the back cover. What I most noticed while reading was the flavour of Jamie’s seminars on mental strength. I haven’t been to one, but I got a real feel for how Jamie communicates his message.

Jamie’s book is not a lecture on attribution theory. His is a road-tested and successful approach to helping people get their heads around thinking skills. And of making the practice of useful self-talk part of how they live their lives.

Part of his ability to help people connect with his message are the stories he tells.
From the moving story of his father’s early death to the birth of his profoundly handicapped daughter. The pronouncements of public figures illustrate the impossibility of injecting emotions into others. He describes the antics of seminar participants throwing Velcro balls at others in jackets which the balls either slide off or stick on.

For me this is the superpower of the book. Jamie’s approach to building mental strength is based on serious science of helping people re-think their thinking. There is real substance to his points about framing success as permanent, pervasive and personal, and correspondingly, seeing and talking to oneself about failures as transient, specific and external.

I recently watched Inside-Out 2. Wasn’t Joy such a joy! The Pixar crew got their points across so deftly. How memories become habitual thoughts and so beliefs. All in the format of a funny and moving story about a girl trying to fit in. It looked good too – the mountains of multi-coloured memory balls, the bright shiny snowflake-like self-concept. This is the point that Jamie makes when he describes how we accidentally learn near-random stuff from what life throws at us. Many times for many of us, these beliefs set us up to be hopeless and helpless in the face of future challenges.

A recent review describes the evidence for the model as “overwhelming”. This is an approach that helps people change their lives – whether that’s getting over depression or lifting their performance.

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The Short Road to Mental Strength
Reviewed by Heather Levack NZROT (Ret), ANZPA Cert. Role Trainer. 

In this book, Jamie does not hide the fact that his own personal life story is what has motivated him to find a way to deal with and overcome the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Seeking answers by reading widely, he has drawn many threads together to formulate a pathway that will lead to better interpersonal relationships and greater self-awareness and self-esteem.

The result is a synthesis of Eastern and Western teachings that confirms this writers belief that there is more than one road to a good life and happiness. There are universal truths that are reflected in Religious, Stoic and Buddhist teachings, which can lead to a happier life, and these are well researched and documented in books of psychologists such as highly esteemed Martin Seligman.

What Jamie has done is too synthesise these teachings into a number of easily remembered "rules" around which he has developed a learning programme which he has been teaching for twenty five years, and which has enabled his students to live more contented and more productive lives.

Perhaps the most revolutionary "truth" that Jamie teaches is that contrary to “received wisdom”, others do not have the power to hurt your feelings. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent".

Jamie has found a way to help people learn how not to become prey to other people's words.

This is a Self Help book which is short and easy to read and will benefit those who take the trouble to apply themselves to its concepts.

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