Book Review: Option B by Sheryl Sandberg

The last few weeks we’ve been talking about critical thinking, and today is a new theme: resilience! In that spirit, I wanted to do a book review on a book called Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy [affiliate link]. I wanted to share this with you this week because it’s about building resilience in yourself and others, and I really enjoyed it. It’s by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

Please note that there are links in this post that will give me a commission if you use them to purchase something, at no extra cost to you. Please rest assured that I will never recommend anything that I don’t trust and believe will be of value to you. See my affiliates page for more details.

About the Author

I found this book when searching for another personal development book, and the “finding joy” part of the subtitle drew me in. I had heard of Sheryl Sandberg before, and her previous book called Lean In (which is also excellent, by the way). She is currently the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook and has spent much of her life working hard to empower women.

Not that this book is only applicable to women; it’s applicable to anyone that is facing adversity or trauma and trying to put the pieces of their lives back together.

Option B opens strong: Sheryl shares how she lost her husband. At the time I read this, I hadn’t yet read Lean In, which she wrote prior to Option B. In Lean In, she talks a lot about her husband and their relationship. When I read Lean In, it made me doubly sensitive to what she went through when losing him.

Building Resilience

Option B leads you through grief as experienced by Sheryl and others she interviewed as part of its writing. She gets really real, too. I think it’s really cool to read a book by someone who is willing to be so vulnerable. She doesn’t just talk about grief though – she talks about what it’s like on the other side, and what it looks like when you begin to heal. If not recover.

One of my favorite things about this book is that Sheryl is very quotable. It helps what she writes about to stay with me. She also focuses on concrete ways to help: it’s not just a long story about loss and something that makes you depressed just to read it.

How to Support Others

Something else about this book that I appreciated is it helps give you ways to interact with someone who has experienced trauma in a way that doesn’t avoid the subject. I don’t know about you, but I frequently have a hard time expressing sympathy or empathy successfully to someone that has experienced a major hardship or loss. I seem to never know what to say. Sheryl says a lot about what it feels like to be in the shoes of that person, and ways in which she wished people had interacted with her. It really helped me think of new ways I could talk to people that had experienced something traumatic. At least in a better way than I was, which was to completely avoid the topic.

Lastly, I appreciated how many nuggets of wisdom there are scattered throughout that help you understand new ways to build resilience within yourself, your kids, and at work. Resilience is such a key factor in overcoming obstacles and recovering from trauma – even tragedies that don’t involve a personal loss. Building resilience can help us in many, many aspects of life.

Give Option B a shot! I think there will be at least some benefit to you, even if you haven’t experienced a major loss. I learned a lot about resilience in general, how to support people who are going through a trauma, and how to support my family and kids in building their own resilience. Let me know what you think!