In You Matter, Matthew Emerzian has a major goal of assisting readers into realizing that they matter. The book is divided into three sections, I Matter, You Matter, and We Matter. He opened up in the introduction about how he hit rock bottom. He suffered from a deep trauma and had difficult seeing. He was sweating and breathing heavily. He decided to try and drive to his doctor’s. He told him it was mental and not physically. He instructed him to go home and rest and to ask himself touch questions. He needed to discover his purpose and significance. He diagnosed him with depression and chronic anxiety disorder.


In the book, he opened up about how he began working for Robert Kardashian and helped him manage artists. They produced DVD’s, music, live shows, music videos, and much more. He worked with Tim McGraw, Black Eyed Peas, U2, Coldplay, and many more. He fell into the after parties and started drinking, partying, smoking, and objectifying women. This is what led him into falling into his depression. He eventually got a therapist and she helped him to see how it’s not about him. She helped him to see the importance of serving others and this led him into finding out his significance.



One of my favorites stories was about how he played water polo and loved the sport. He shared how critical it is to have a community in which you fit into. As we age and get older, we lose our sense of building relationships and friendship. We all have felt the void. He shared how he had a special friend who randomly asked him for his phone number while they were swimming. The man remembered his number and never wrote it down! It turned out he had autism who has a photograph memory. He watched him make friends with everyone he met and asked them to be his friend. He even braided his hair. Unfortunately, in the writing of his book, he lost touch with him and it’s been about three years. Most of the people have moved away from that pool. He shared how authentic Chris was and he would freely live his life and not be pressed by the judgments of others. He strongly suggests that we answer the difficult question on what is holding us back. He tries to assist us in becoming more authentic and genuine. He revealed the hidden truth of self-fulfilling prophecy and how we tend to always judges others and others and this is preventing us from truly being ourselves. Many of us wouldn’t have the confidence to sing or dance or do anything freely without the fear of us feeling like we will be judged for it. The lesson of the day was for us to choose one song that we can dance or sing to and it can become our official song of the day and make it our song. We need to identify what is holding us back in each area of our lives and write down the reasons why using the 5-why’s strategy and keep asking until we get to the real reason that none of it makes sense.


I would recommend this life changing book to anyone who is wanting to understand the concept of why they matter and how importance they are in the world and how they can reach out to others. This book is a wonderful example on serving others and taking the focus off our ourselves. I immensely loved the stories presented in this book and how turned each chapter into a big lesson we can all learn something from. I also loved how the lessons enclosed helpful prompts to write down in our journal and to have conversation starters and to also take action to live it out. I really enjoyed the positive spins he enclosed in this book to help readers to understand why they matter.






"I received this book free from the publisher, St. Martin's Essentials my honest review.”

I love nonfiction personal development with a memoir aspect to the story. I like reading people's stories and understanding where they're coming from. I always like when I actually learn something new!

This book was so wholesome:) .

I don't typically read self help books, but read the blurb and absolutely was hooked because mental health Is such a real issue that many people including myself struggle with.
This book is broken into three main "sections" which I found very helpful because reading too much all at once can be a lot and the author spaced the book very well. I don't want to give away too much of content wise, but this book definitely made me change my outlook on myself and giving myself a little more grace.

I have read a lot of self-help books this year. 2020 seems to be the year of reflecting on ourselves, our communities, and our world. In some ways, the books often say similar things and share similar talking points. The difference, for me then, is in the way these messages are delivered, and how well I can relate to the content. I liked the idea that Emerzian’s book also asked readers to reflect and write about their own experiences by providing readers with conversation points and journal reflection prompts.

I received a review copy of Matthew Emerzian’s book through Netgalley, and I was happy to read it and see what it was about. It has had some mixed reviews, with some people not even finishing the book to others loving it. So today, I want to talk to you about the good and the bad of You Matter – what I think was great, and what needs to be addressed more critically if Emerzian wants to write another self-help book.

So, here we go. The good:
Find Your Community

Emerzian asks readers to find their community. When he does this, I believe he is questioning the very staunch neoliberal ideals of the U.S. were hyperindivdualism rules above all else. He asks people to reach out, find and participate in their community – in new communities too. We are not all tiny islands floating in the ocean cut off from one another, yet we hardly know our neighbour’s names. Since COVID has hit, community has also taken on new forms and a lot of community is now expressed and celebrated online. No matter what the world is throwing at us, we need our community.
To Have a Friend, You Have to Be a Friend

Building new relationships is tough. Many self-help and self-improvement books talk about how difficult it is to make friends when you are an adult. We get so caught up in our small worlds and our worlds grow smaller and smaller. And suddenly, we can look around and realise we have very few friends. Big Friendship is a great book specifically targeted at friendships, which I really enjoyed (in case you want to explore this further). Emerzian talks about the importance of being a friend to have friends. We often want the friendships and relationships without the hard work, the vulnerability, and the showing up for crises. But if you want to have friends, you are going to have to put yourself out there, and be vulnerable.
Be Generous When You Can

Be generous, when you can. Volunteer, show love, give support, time, and likes. There are so many ways you can be generous. Generosity also means not expecting anything back in return. Emerzian talks about his routine of picking up rubbish in his neighbourhood and his non-for-profit organisation as ways that he tries to be generous.

Okay. Now that we have had the good, I also wanted to touch on some of the bad. Emerzian wrote You Matter, I believe, from a place of good intentions. However he gets a lot wrong. Firstly, his discussions on suicide are very clumsy and insensitive. He talks about it being ‘committed’ which is out-dated as it refers to the act as a crime. That kind of language blames the sufferer. Secondly, Emerzian uses a lot of examples of disabled and neuro-diverse people as a kind of ‘disability porn’. Like look, I made friends with an autistic person and they helped me realise how lucky I am… Do I think that was his actual intention? (Gosh, I hope not) But it is definitely how it comes across in his writing. And lastly, Emerzian makes a rather quick remark about how women love to go to the bathroom together because they just love to socialise, and men don’t do that because they don’t see bathroom time as social time. And I just had to wonder if Emerzian had ever had an honest conversation with a woman, ever? I like, pretty much every woman I know goes to a bathroom in a group, or at least in twos, because of safety. Especially if this is at a bar or club. Sure we might talk and share while we are in there, but I don’t think it is about sharing lipstick and gossip.

I love a good self-help book. What books have you read that have helped you see things differently about yourself or the world around? As always, share the reading love.

Note: this book was accessed through Netgalley for review purposes. All opinions are my own.

I enjoy reading self-help books especially when they are geared toward middle-aged adults. Although touted as a self-help book, You Matter read more like a biography. The stories and antidotes seemed more like a journey through the author's life and what worked for him, rather than showing how these life events can work for the reader.

I like the premise of the book but to me the delivery was not for me. The way it came across was not as a self help book but as a memoir and the author going on about how wonderful he is. If you go into it knowing it reads like a memoir, you might enjoy it. I might just not be the audience for this book. I enjoy self help books, but this author and Rachel Hollis rub me the wrong way in their delivery. I would not recommend it to anyone I know, but there might be some people for whom this type of personality works. Thank you for the opportunity to review.

DNF @ 31%

It may be that I went into this expecting more basic self-help book, something in the vain of You Are A Badass by Jennifer Sincero, but this one sometimes reads rather like a memoir than a self-help book. It's not that I would mind it considering my usual reading preferences, but I feel like I simply wasn't in a mood to read this book.

Some of the author's stories didn't resonate with me and I found it's more of the same over time. It felt repetitive and, as an anxious person, I often mind myself quite motivated and inspired by self-help books. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with this one at all.

I'm sorry I had to dnt this, but I feel like this one was simply not suitable for me. I'll gladly check out some of this author's other works in the future, but for now, it's safe to say I wasn't impressed with this one.

You matter. Not because of what you earn or how you look or what you've achieved, but because you are inherently valuable.

Ok self-help book.

Some people will connect well with this book and take much from it, whilst others will find it irritating and not as much a self help book but a biography of sorts. I am a mixture of both and found it at times helpful and uplifting and at others misguided and assumptive.
Overall it is worth a read but not necessarily hitting all the right notes for me.

You Matter was a much needed reminder! I really enjoyed the chapter Be Present and needed to read the reminder of “One of our greatest gifts we can give to one another is our undivided attention.” This book has reminded me to make the time for those that are most important. The end of the chapters were so helpful to be able to take a deeper dive into what we just read. I would definitely recommend this book to others as I learned a lot about myself also in reading it.

Honestly, I was utterly bored by this book. Perhaps I could try again but so much was just anecdotes of this rich and famous man’s amazing life and how I could apply his lessons to my life. It wasn’t meaningful for me and following a reading of the wedding dress anecdote, I just wanted to scoff. He set in place a marriage by his wife offering a wedding dress...no consideration that his three trips to Costa Rica could have paid for the entire wedding, no doubt. Entitlement. I couldn’t get past the entitlement.

You matter looks at the way you can build on your self worth to make a better life. It's a really great self-help book, that covers a lot of the basics that can encourage yourself to deal with your worries and create a bit of self-esteem to build on.
It does touch on journalling and talks about murder and suicide and more and there are some jarring areas in the book itself, but that's ok. Overall it was good.

This book just didn't do it for me. Maybe I¨m not its target audience. I don't know. I found it spent too much time talking about his life in California and not enough on talking to the reader. And the tone it was written in jarred with me.

You Matter is a self-help book that would be a good recourse for those stuck and doubting their own self-worth. Matthew Emerzian shares what he's learned in practical and applicable ways so the reader can start making changes and see the ripple effect grow into a richer life for themself. =-------

Many thanks to the Netgalley & Shambhala Publications for the advance copy.

This was a quick read, but I found myself feeling irritated the entire time. This book seemed like more of a memoir with an opportunity to name drop and emphasize his status than it did to communicate to people their worth. It read like a series of blog posts or a transcript from a cheesy expensive seminar under the guise to better yourself. I recognize that this is a harsh review, but I don't think there is anything about this book that stands apart from what is not only already out there, but what has been repeated over and over again. I think it is great that he found principles and values to live his life by, but this genre is becoming incredibly saturated with the same information. I won't be recommending this.

If Santa wrote self-help, he would sound like this book. Lucky for us, Matthew Emerzian wrote this book instead and I can't love it enough! This book starts off ordinary enough and I thought it sounded charming. But as Emerzian proceeds to tell his story, he has the most amazing experiences and outlook on life. This guy has obviously worked hard and found himself in situations that would make most of us feel uncertain and possibly terrified. Yet it's so clear that Emerzian is living from his deep core values of honesty, respect, and kindness that you can't help but wonder what crazy situation he's going to talk about next and how he is going to model being the best human he can be.
I usually quibble with inspirational books that don't spell out how to apply what's discussed in the book, but not this one. While the author is clearly an amazing person, he has given me enough inspiration for me to want to try even harder to live by such a strong moral code.
This book is no preachy: it's for any person to pick and help them remember who they really are inside.
I have already sent it to a couple of friends and it's already on my Best Books of 2020!

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. A full review will be posted on Amazon and Goodreads

I received an ARC through NetGalley, provided by the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
Transform the way you live your life with a message of unexpected hope, radical joy, and deep connection.

You matter. Not because of what you earn or how you look or what you've achieved, but because you are inherently valuable. Author Matthew Emerzian takes this seemingly simple premise and shows readers how truly understanding their own worth will change every aspect of their lives. You Matter is a call to empathy and a joyous celebration of the value of each and every person.

The book is structured into three sections, each of which expands the concept in ever widening ripples. In the first section, "I Matter," readers come to terms with their own worth, in "You Matter" that awareness expands to acknowledge and celebrate the value of the people around us, and finally in "We Matter" Emerzian explores the power of a thriving community with those around us. Each chapter features exercises, journal prompts, and conversation starters to help readers dive deeper.

Author Matt Emerzian is the founder of Every Monday Matters, a not-for-profit dedicated to spreading the message of self-worth and compassion to people throughout the world. Every week 1.2 million people--from elementary school children to employees at national corporations--engage with ideas and concepts from Every Monday Matters.

You Matter is a manifesto of self-esteem and call to action for people to find their meaning and live fully--and change the world while doing so.

Review:
I have been studying psychology for 6 years. As a graduate student, this book was right up my alley. It isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea but it was mine. The book to some may read like essays but it was very informative on a subject that is near and dear to my heart - letting everyone know that they do, in fact, matter. The author encourages readers to look at themselves, look at their own experiences, and realize their worth. I can see reading this one again and/or having others read this one!

You Matter is a memoir, self pat on the back, by a man who says he wants to help others learn how to pat themselves on the back as well (thus its inclusion in the self-help genre).

Matthew Emerzian may in fact have genuinely turned his life around, and if so, I'm very happy for him. I also understand his excitement and zeal in wanting to help others. But in reading this book, I felt it had a strong tone of self-aggrandizing, and that grew to be really irritating. For me, this definitely skewed the balance of the book, making it more about Emerzian's story than about helping others. Not what I was looking for.

My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for allowing me to read a copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. Opinions stated here are my own.

I wasn't able to get fully into this book and kept meaning to read more. What I have read is very uplifting and I loved it. I can see this being a great gift to buy yourself to help yourself out or gifting to a friend.