Stewart Emery - Whos in Your Room?, Revised and Updated: The Question That Will Change Your Life

The Question That Will Change Your Life

SECOND EDITION

STEWART EMERY AND IVAN MISNER WITH DOUG HARDY

Whos in Your Room?, Revised and Updated

Copyright 2023 by Stewart Emery and Ivan Misner

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Second Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-0212-2

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-0213-9

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-0214-6

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-0215-3

2022-1

Book producer: PeopleSpeak. Text designer: Reider Books. Cover designer: Adam Johnson. Doug Hardys photo: Pierre Chiha.

To all of you who embrace self-authorship of your life. Living the quest for the best version of yourself in the company of others who are likewise engaged is the purpose of this book.

IMAGINE THAT you live your entire life in just one room.

We have introduced this idea to thousands of people over the years, and they have been amazed at the power such a simple concept has for reshaping their lives. Many immediately have an OMG moment as they visualize their rooms. Some peoples rooms are spacious and welcoming, while others are ominous and chaotic. Some people launch into flashback mode and say that for them the idea feels like watching a high-speed rerun of their entire lives. Some see a metaphorical train wreck; others see the need for a bit more clarity to focus on the best parts of their rooms. After that first visualization, nearly everyone asks us how they can expand the initial idea into a practical framework for improving their lives.

Our relationships are our lives, and in a very real sense, you become whom you are with. Your feelings, interactions, beliefs, inward life, and outward ambitions are shaped by the people you invite into your life. Just as important, the quality of your relationships depends on how you manage them, for better and worse.

Whos in Your Room? offers a method for understanding all the relationships in your life with clarity and courage. Although the question is simplein fact, because the question is simpleit possesses an unlimited capacity to be applied to the details of anyones life, including yours.

By consciously choosing which people occupy your psychological room and where they are, you gain tremendous power to create the life you want. Merging the discoveries of brain science with the insights of modern psychology and ancient philosophy, Whos in Your Room? is a tool of unlimited usefulness for taking control of your life.

In this book, you will learn the following skills:

How to see all the relationships in your life as your conscious and unconscious minds view them

How to create a definition of relationship that is meaningful to you

How to detect the ways people with whom you have relationshipsliving or dead, physically near and farinfluence your thoughts, emotions, and actions

How to understand the ways people interact in your room

How to choose who gets in, what they bring with them, and who stays out

How to direct people to the right places in your room, whether near or far from you

How to handle the people who are already in your room and the people who want to enter

How to deal with difficult people forcing their way toward you

How to say no without sounding like a jerk

This book presents a highly effective process for choosing who is in your room. Weve included practical exercises (marked by an arrow ) for shaping the best room for your own values and your lifes purposein other words, living the life youve always wanted. Throughout the book well share stories of people who have used the question at critical moments in their lives to clarify their situations about love, friendship, money, business, difficult people, and how they spend, in the words of a friend, all the breaths they have left. At the end of each chapter, well include a longer story of a person we know who asked, Whos in my room? to great effect in different situations. (For the sake of simplicity, we will adopt the copyeditor Benjamin Dreyers suggestion to embrace the twenty-first-century they to refer to nonspecific people. Like Dreyer, we grew up using the universal he. Like him, were not too old to change.)

In each chapter youll also find quick tips and observations weve made through many years of working with people to help them take control of their rooms. Those are labeled Rules of the Room.

The question Whos in your room? has been used by people from all walks of life who have different goals, values, dreams, and ambitions. Its been used by new graduates and retirees and people of every age in between. Its helped people achieve better emotional and mental health, greater clarity about their goals, and healthier relationships of all kinds. People tell us they relate and adapt the stories in this book to their own life circumstances, and it has made their lives better in too many ways to count.

This method works from this moment forward. You will begin to treat constraining elements from your past with a new understanding of how to relate to people in the future.

Yes, its that powerful.

We know the effectiveness of this simple metaphor because we have spent our lives helping people make better choices. Stewart Emery is one of the founders of the modern human potential movement. For decades he has helped people take back their power. He is an entrepreneur, executive coach, and leader who has led thousands of employees and hundreds of managers through the vision, values, strategy, and leadership initiatives based on research from the international bestsellers