Given the title of her latest book, LIPSTICK FOOTBALL (8 Game-Changing Principles to Bust Through Limitations and Achieve the Impossible While Learning the Game of Football), it will come as no surprise that Diana Weynand loves the game of football (the American version, that is). In addition to her lifelong fandom, the prolific author (some fifteen self-help books and counting) draws upon a bevy of experiences on and off the field as both a player and manager (for the LA Lasers of the Women’s Professional Football League). As she points out during the book’s opening pages, the game of football has long served as a source of inspiration for Weynand, pushing her to “play like a quarterback, think like a coach, and never give up.” Her time with the WPFL may have been fleeting, but the lessons she learned continue to resonate to this day. According to Weynand, she’s crafted a “new field and space where football meets life, where knowledge from one can be used to frame the other.”
Key to this is something Weynand calls ‘cracking a marble,’ a learning technique that involves taking a long-term goal and reducing it to a series of simple, achievable steps. The success of this incredibly effective approach is rooted in its simplicity. The premise behind LIPSTICK FOOTBALL is simple: Weynand channels her personal experience on and off the gridiron into a life-affirming call to action. Key to this is the acronym ‘LIPSTICK,’ which stands for the following principles: Leap, Immerse, Play, Shine, Track, Initiate, Condition, Kick. Throughout the pages of LIPSTICK FOOTBALL, Weynand takes a deep dive into each of these eight principles, tethering tomes of hard-earned wisdom and generic (albeit actionable) advice to a myriad of football-themed metaphors. Along the way, readers will learn all sorts of facts about the game, including the basic rules and a treasure-trove of NFL trivia. In the hands of a lesser author, the whole ‘football’ angle might have come off like a ham-fisted gimmick, but Weynand’s passion for the sport shines through from cover to cover.
Initially, the book’s layout feels haphazard, but a subtle game plan begins to emerge by the final page. Admittedly, there’s little here that doesn’t fall under ‘common sense,’ but every now and then, one will find a brilliant piece of advice (such as the idea of habit as the foundation of mastery). That said, the substantial page count devoted to explaining the ins and outs of football feels like a misstep. Obviously, a little context is necessary for anyone unfamiliar with the NFL to fully appreciate Weynand’s methods. Still, one can’t help but wonder if the reader would be better served by relegating the novice-level explanations to a separate section of the book. After all, does anyone with even a passing interest in football (this book’s presumed audience) need an explanation of how many teams are in the NFL or a multi-page review of how the playoffs are structured? With a glut of ‘how to be your best self’ books on the market, the greatest challenge facing authors is the need to distinguish ‘theirs’ from the rest. In this regard, Weynand ultimately succeeds in finding a new and novel approach to the self-help genre.
While NFL aficionados may struggle with the over-reliance on rudimentary explanations, Diana Weynand’s LIPSTICK FOOTBALL (8 Game-Changing Principles to Bust Through Limitations and Achieve the Impossible While Learning the Game of Football) offers a fresh take on the traditional self-help premise.
~James Weiskittel for IndieReader