Book Review: ‘Becoming Ridiculously Awesome: Who Doesn’t Want That?’ by Meredith Herrenbruck

In Becoming Ridiculously Awesome: Who Doesn’t Want That?, Meredith Herrenbruck takes readers on a wild rocketship journey, helping them overcome past obstacles, reshape their current lives, and plan for their futures.

As the book’s title suggests, we all would like to become ridiculously awesome, but too often, life gets in the way. We may have experienced traumatic events that have held us back or wounds to our self-esteem that keep us from going forward. We may not believe we can succeed at what we want, and yet we still can’t let go of that yearning. Meredith has been there; she has done years of work healing her own past and studying various methods to unblock what holds her back. As she shares early in the book, she was herself sexually abused as a child and had to learn to overcome those obstacles. Now she wants to share everything she has learned with her readers. She lays out her goals for helping others in the introduction by saying:

In this book, I will help you unblock what stops you from moving forward in life and achieving the success you always wanted. I will share with you stories that will inspire you to know that you are not alone in your pain and that people can have more success than they imagined. I will teach you how to get unstuck from recurring patterns, triggers, and even nightmares. I will show you that you have all the resources you need to take your next steps in the direction you want.

Those steps include some deep inner work, looking at our pasts and healing old wounds, and also learning that we can’t control or change other people. We need to separate ourselves from the need to get other people to do what we think they should and the need to win other people’s approval when we choose to do something they disagree with. Meredith explains, “Getting mad at them and being disappointed in them doesn’t help. Honestly, how has that worked for you in the past? What works more effectively is to shift your feelings about that person, relationship, or behavior so you can be more balanced and at ease. What do you want to experience in yourself?”

Meredith then walks readers through various aspects of the human experience so that we can learn to be a balanced whole. She divides the book up into three sections on the Mental and Physical, the Emotional, and the Spiritual. She offers new tools and exercises in each of these sections to help us work through our pasts and gain focus on what we want for the future. She empowers readers by helping us see how many options are available to us when we exercise the power of choice. We do have the ability to choose and we can learn to make better decisions when we take the time to analyze how those decisions will work out for us. Meredith states:

You have made the best choices you could with the resources you had, so why are you still beating yourself up? Acknowledge and feel empowered by the fact that you are already doing the best you can. Know that the next choice might be better for you. If the choices are not getting you where you want to go, and someone else is benefitting from those choices, ask yourself: What good comes to me when I choose that? There is a reason—deep down, there always is. Look deeper and be honest with yourself. Honesty with yourself will get you far, and it will clear out those cobwebs of uncertainty and fear.

Once we realize we have the power to make different choices, we then have the power to change. Meredith helps us to understand why we have chosen certain behaviors in the past—certain survival skills—and how those skills may have served us then but do not serve us now. She helps us overcome the resistance to change and to becoming ridiculously awesome in new ways we might have been afraid to pursue previously. She teaches us to stand on our own, no longer letting other people decide our destinies. I love when she says, “Stopping yourself from being awesome for the sake of someone else does no one any good.”

While much of what Meredith discusses may seem like common sense, it is still something we all need to be reminded of. But what I found most powerful and surprising about this book were the later chapters about embracing our spiritual side. Here Meredith discusses some of the different methods she has used to help people clear negative energy from their lives, understand why they are feeling emotional or physical pain, and stop engaging in dysfunctional behaviors. Two of the methods she uses she goes in depth with, including a separate chapter on Family Constellations and also on Huna.

Family Constellations was not a term I knew, but I found it fascinating. It is about how people replicate old patterns in their families that they may not be aware of, all in an effort to say I love you. Meredith shows how sometimes negative energy or traumatic events from a family’s past can continue to affect the family for generations to come if they are not resolved. In one of her client’s cases, an incident that happened to a great-great-great grandmother was affecting the way the client and her family operated with one another. How Meredith helps people in such situations is remarkable. I truly believe that dysfunction does get carried down from one generation to another so such healing could help countless people. I’ll let Meredith speak for herself about one other way this method helps people:

What we have found in the past with Family Constellations is that schizophrenia occurs because the client is trying to heal the stuck relationship (from long ago and far away in the family tree) between the victim and perpetrator within himself. The victim and perpetrator both have a rightful place in the family system, even if one is outside the family tree. In some rare cases, entanglements with two very diverse people who may or may not be attached can create warring factors inside the person’s mind.

Huna was also a method I wasn’t familiar with, although I was aware of the concept. Meredith reveals that we humans are not the only ones on this planet. There are often unseen forces that may influence our behavior. She also reveals that we are co-creators of our worlds. Everything that happens to us we attract to some degree. At other times, we might actually have an entity or some sort of negative energy influencing us. Meredith has done a lot of work with Huna and other methods that help to clear negative energy and release people from being influenced by spiritual forces that may be holding them back from becoming ridiculously awesome.

There is so much more in this book that is helpful, fascinating, healing, and empowering. Ultimately, you will come away from it feeling enlightened about who you are, the universe, your place within the universe, and the rocket you want to ride into your future. You really need to read it for yourself.

For more information about Becoming Ridiculously Awesome and Meredith Herrenbruck, visit the author’s website.