How to Walk Into a Room - Print

How to Walk Into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away

By Emily P. Freeman

Hard cover 240pp
2.1cm H x 23.4cm L x 16.0cm W (0.36 kgs)
ISBN 9780063328822
HarperOne (2024)

[Allow 4 weeks]

How to Walk into a Room is a courageous, kind, and pastoral book which helps readers navigate the inevitable beginnings and endings in our lives, and it is very much like having a spiritual director by your side, if one reads slowly and carefully.

Drawing deeply from her training and experience as a spiritual director, Freeman peppers this book with thoughtful and spacious questions that open the door for reflection, while very generously sharing from her own life.

She invites readers to journey with her through an incredibly difficult period in her own life as she discerned whether to stay at her church or to leave. Her vulnerability and wisdom are tools that help the reader to learn to do the same work of discernment.

Freeman uses the analogy of different rooms in our lives and invites the reader to consider whether or not it is time to move to a new room, or to discern if you are simply in the hallway befuddled by an array of doors.

• If life were a house, then every room holds a story. What do we do when a room we’re in is no longer a room where we belong?
• What do you do when you start to feel a shift and must decide if it’s time to make a change?
• When it comes to navigating big decisions about when to stay and go, how can we know for sure when the time is right?

Though we enter and exit many rooms over the course of our life – jobs, relationships, communities, life stages – knowing how and when it’s time to leave is a decision that rarely has a clear answer.

Freeman offers guidance to help us recognise when it’s time to move on from situations that no longer fit, allowing us to find new spaces where we can flourish and grow.

This book is a balm for anyone standing at a crossroads, offering clarity and peace in the midst of uncertainty.

“From the first page, Emily’s gentle guidance will wrap you in clarity and peace as you navigate tricky questions like: Do I belong here? • What now? • Is it even safe to be myself? • If you’ve ever wondered what to do next, if you should stay or go, or how to walk in your purpose, How to Walk into a Room is for you. This book felt like a balm to a battered soul.”  –  Sharon McMahon, creator of Sharon Says So