This is an excellent book. In short it book explains how and why the chimp (in other words our limbic brain) works, how and why it can end up derailing what we want to do and how we want to behave as humans. It also makes it clear that this is not a good thing or a bad thing, but that it exists and we need to know how to deal with it.

It is a simplified version of some more complex pyschological science, but that is because it is meant to be accessible to anyone. In my view it is far more difficult to make complex concepts sounds simple than the other way round, and so presenting such ideas through of metaphors is fine, and indeed may well be helpful for many people. It might feel a little simplistic to some, but people's intelligence will only be insulted if they are not actaully bright enough to understand the complexities behind the apparently simple images used.

For me it helped me to understand how I behave under stress, why I can lack confidence while somehow still knowing I can do difficult things, and how fixed ideas and beliefs can end up destabilising me. Just understanding such things is helpful, but there are also suggestions for ways to work with this, not simply my mind-over-matter, or mindless positive thinking but by recognising how the brain works and dealing with that. It is also very helpful to realise that a lot of this is simply physiology and chemistry and nothing to do with failings of character or anything to beat yourself up about.

Of course this is not, and cannot be, the exact training programme that gold-medal winning athletes get. Firstly I'm sure that personal attention must help in terms of diognosis of exactly what's hindering their performance, and secondly because only an idiot would give away secrets that will give those athletes competitive advantage. Thus I think this is big-picture stuff, but for those of us who will never have the privilege of working with Peters himself, it is still very beneficial.