The Cow in the Parking Lot Audiobook By Leonard Scheff, Susan Edmiston cover art

The Cow in the Parking Lot

A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger

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The Cow in the Parking Lot

By: Leonard Scheff, Susan Edmiston
Narrated by: Bill Mendieta
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About this listen

Imagine you're circling a crowded parking lot. Just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. In a world of road rage, domestic violence, and professionally angry TV and radio commentators, your likely response is anger, even fury. Now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. Your anger dissolves into bemusement. What has changed? Not just the occupant of the space but your perspective on the situation.

We're a society swimming in anger, always about to snap. Using simple, understandable Buddhist principles, Scheff and Edmiston explain how to replace anger with happiness. They introduce the four most common types of anger (Important and Reasonable, Reasonable but Unimportant, Irrational, and Impossible), then show how to identify our real unmet demands, dissolve our anger, and change what happens when our buttons are pushed. We learn to laugh at ourselves, a powerful early step, and realize that others don't make us angry. Only we can make ourselves angry.

©2010 Leonard Scheff and Susan Edmiston (P)2010 HighBridge Company
Anger Management Personal Development Personal Success Rage Inspiring Feel Better Zen Anger
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Practical Anger Management • Insightful Buddhist Teachings • Soothing Voice • Relatable Personal Experiences
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When I first read the title of this book, images of angry people with bulging forehead veins came to mind, but really this book is for everyone. Anger and frustration are part of the human condition - to ignore it is wrong and to indulge it is wrong too - so what can we do? This book attempts to tell you.

Overall this book was pretty good but obvious - lacking philosophical depth. I liked the parables and quotes from Buddhist teachers, but I didn't find the author's own experiences very compelling. The chapter on how to handle angry people was, I thought, the weakest in this regard. e.g., see things from their perspective - don't jump to conclusions - try not to get angry back. Not bad messages but really - who doesn't know these things? I would have appreciated more Buddhist philosophy and less weekend-seminar style anger management.

The narrator talked slowly and sometimes his accents sounded funny but he was not terrible.

Overall not bad. Helpful to an extent - especially if you are prone to anger or frustration.

Good lessons for anyone to learn.

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Would you try another book from Leonard Scheff and Susan Edmiston and/or Bill Mendieta?

yes

Would you be willing to try another book from Leonard Scheff and Susan Edmiston ? Why or why not?

yes

Did Bill Mendieta do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

no

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

no

Any additional comments?

Although the zen method for handling anger was presented the actual application seemed to be missing.It would be better to give actual ways to use this method.

A Zen Review

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This books material is well written, offering good insight. However the narration includes strange stereotyped voices when relating quotes from individuals who are of diverse backgrounds. It is the same voice as the rest of the book but with an affected accent.

Good principles but poor performance

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The reader was distracting from the very important message. Here’s why. His attempt at “ accents” for the people he was quoting was horrible and was racist at best. However, I looked past that and found the message important and helpful.

I had issues with the reader

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I recently admitted to myself that I have an anger problem and not liking how this made me feel I vowed to change. This audiobook gave me several insights into the source of my anger and how to deal with it properly. I have listened to this book a couple times now and find it very useful to go back to when I find myself getting angry. It's a great listen and I highly recommend it to anyone who finds themselves struggling with anger.

Great advise for those troubled by anger

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I thought the book had great content, flow, pace - everything you could ask for. If, like me, you occasionally lose your cool and live to regret it, this should be a good book for you.

As for the narration, here's a trick I learned: If you have a player that allows it (iphone, newer ipods do) speed the narration up to 1.5. The book's still fine to understand, and the narrator-itis disappears completely. Try it!

(If you can't, you may wanna think twice, because that poor, sweet guy did try a little too hard and it is pretty annoying.)

Helpful!

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This guy reading this book is doing these phony Asian accents which are borderline problematic and regardless quite annoying and absolutely unnecessary. You can read the quote from the Asian guy without doing a fake Asian accent. it is frankly bonkers.

Good book, Read it again without the accents

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I have already decided I don’t want anger in my life so I was looking for more skills to help when I feel anger. There are some peppered throughout the book, but this is more about why anger is bad for your life.

Great, if you are trying to change your mind about anger

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The book itself provides very good and useful information that I found very relevant to my situation. While it isn't necessarily groundbreaking, it puts a lot of good, common sense teachings into bite-sized pieces that are easy to understand and apply. My only complaint with the book itself is that, despite the author's disclaimer that this book is not about teaching a religion, it focuses very heavily on Buddhism, to the point that "This is how Buddhists do it" tends to distract from the central point of anger management that this book is written for. The teachings are good, just a bit tilted, IMO.

As for the performance, it was quite inconsistent. You can clearly hear frequent edit points and re-recordings, where the narrator's voice changes sometimes dramatically in the middle of a sentence or paragraph (in places where such a change doesn't make sense, e.g. when personifying different characters in a dialogue). Background noises and zero space are distracting when listening on headphones. Despite this, I was able to absorb the material quite well.

Good and profound, but inconsistent performance

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life giving
insightful
well done
only read if looking to improve yourself
life changing
beautiful

read again and again

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