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.