What’s up wellness warriors? I’ve got a little something different for you today. A book review. Yep, like in the fifth grade. Reading is a huge part of who I am. It makes me happy and if I can learn something while doing something I love, even better. Reading, at least in my humble opinion, is also a part of self care. So I thought I’d share a bit about a book I recently finished.
I was scrolling through Amazon several weeks ago, and I’m not sure how it happened, but The Pie Life by Samantha Ettus somehow ended up on my screen. I took one look at the cover and clicked on the full product link. And the book summary was enough to have me hooked, so I dumped it in my cart and then awaited delivery.
In The Pie Life, Samantha describes a way of visualizing our time to achieve harmony in both our professional and personal lives. She eschews the label work-life balance by inviting the reader to understand that a life is more than just those two pieces. She uses the metaphor of a pie. We have the ingredients and the recipe to bake up our own happiness. And Samantha encourages us to view our pies by their individual slices. She asks us to divide our pies into many slices, including career, health, relationship, kids, community, friends, and hobbies. Then she asks us to make the incredible shift of not focusing on the slices that are causing struggles, but to look at the slices that came out well.
Samantha uses the remaining chapters of the book to outline exactly what ingredients go with which slice of our pie. For example, the health slice includes sleep, sex, fitness, medical care, beauty, nutrition, and relaxation. And so on for the other slices. After delineating the broad categories, Samantha uses examples from her own life and the lives of many women she has worked with to describe successes with each slice. To be clear, most of the anecdotes begin by showing some sort of struggle. And that is the whole point she is trying to make. How we approach the struggles determines if we are able to bake up success.
What I Enjoyed
This book was an easy read. It is self-help without being preachy or pedantic. I obviously enjoy the idea of looking at overall wellness from the standpoint of different dimensions or slices. I have certainly found this method to be helpful in my own life. Many of the tips are useful and easy to implement. Samantha is talking about mini-makeovers not complete life overhauls. She has handy worksheets throughout the book which help identify gaps or strategies, several of these I have already put to use in my own life/house. The labels for her pie slices are also intuitive. These are areas most of us can easily relate to in our own lives, which makes her stories and strategies even more applicable.
What I Didn’t Enjoy
Samantha writes for a clearly female audience, and while that isn’t necessarily bad, I believe that these slices would apply equally as well to men. She also assumes that the reader has a job somewhat similar to hers or her clients, meaning a more “corporate” lifestyle with business travel. Additionally, she doesn’t address the idea of the stay at home parent as a job, which for many it is. Many of her anecdotes involve a level of affluence that most of us haven’t achieved. So it is hard to relate to the woman bemoaning a skiing trip where the family’s au pair broke her leg and was less able to help care for the kids.
Bottom Line
If you are looking for a way to view the slices of your wellness that comes with a side of tips and tricks to implement, I say pick this one up. Just beware that not every story is super relatable.
Until next time, be well friends!
