WTF just happened by Martin Goodyer, reviewed

By @SimonCocking. Available from Amazon here, written by Martin Goodyer Author ‘How to be a Great Coach’#greatcoach Director of Coaching Development http://www.iabct.org  Works in both the UK and Tenerife.

How great would it be to learn from other peoples mistakes rather than having to make our own? In WTF Just Happened? Martin Goodyer presents a compilation of catastrophes to help readers do just this. Drawing on his experience as a psychologist and taking the perspective of a behavioural change coach, Martin offers insights into peoples often irrational behaviour and suggests ways to avoid such behaviour ourselves. Reading this book won’t stop bad things from happening but it can prevent you from making it worse if they do.

This is an interesting book. First up, it’s a great cover, and that’s not always a given, so good marks for that. Next is the question of if learning from other people’s f@@kups is necessarily the best way to proceed. There are some useful insights, horror stories, and silly things that people did that messed up things for themselves. You can draw some useful insights from some of the things that people did, and aim to apply that wisdom to your own decisions. For some people this could be a really useful book.

Personally the longer I read it, the more it felt like a slightly negative way of doing things. Goodyer does offer the caveat “This is not a self-help book. The self-help bit is up to you. Here is why: self-help books are OK, but many are not great. They normally tell you to do this or that and then you ll be fine but real life isn t usually that simple and good advice is only useful if you can remember to use it. Stories, on the other hand, stick with you, and these cautionary tales could help you avoid your own WTF moments. ” Thing is, I begun to wonder if living by a series of ‘don’t do this or that’ lists might be a bit of a fearful and negative way to live. In some of the evaluations of the people who did ‘WTF’ things, you did wonder if some scores were being settled in relation to the characters described too -> but maybe that’s the privilege you get if you write the book!

Goodyer might be right though, perhaps it takes a horror story to burn the lesson into your memory. We’ve all encountered those rude, brash, horrible people too, so if this book helps to enable some of them to realise they are about to encounter their own WTF moment, then perhaps the book will have helped someone at the right time.

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