Kiss that frog!

There is a fairy tale buried inside almost everyone's adult life, and it usually has nothing to do with castles. A spiteful witch turns a handsome prince into a frog. The curse lifts only when a princess works up the nerve to kiss something slimy. She doesn't want to. She does it anyway, because the alternative is going home alone and explaining to herself, again, why she keeps doing that. The frog becomes a prince. They live happily ever after, which is how fairy tales end and how self-help books begin.

Brian Tracy and his daughter Christina Tracy Stein take that story literally, then take it apart. The frog, they argue, is every grudge you nurse, every fear you dodge, every memory of a parent who didn't say the right thing when you were nine, every quiet conviction that you aren't quite the person other people think they're talking to. The kiss is the willingness to face the thing instead of swimming around it. *Kiss That Frog: 12 Great Ways to Turn Negatives into Positives in Your Life and Work* was published in 2012 by Berrett-Koehler, runs about a hundred and sixty-six pages, and pulls its authority from two odd directions at once: Brian's five thousand talks to more than five million people across fifty-eight countries, and Christina's clinical hours as a psychotherapist who specializes in performance coaching. The result is shorter, calmer, and more practical than most books in the motivation aisle, which is partly what makes it interesting and partly what makes critics impatient with it. Shakespeare gets the epigraph: there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. The book is a long argument that he meant it.