This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Untamed" by Glennon Doyle. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What can emotions teach us about engaging with the larger world? What is the best version of your life you can imagine?
The main themes of Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed are parenting, spirituality, empowering women, rejecting patriarchy and oppression, feminism, and sexuality. Book club questions for Untamed will want to draw on these concepts for readers to discuss and share.
Read on for a complete guide to Glennon Doyle’s Untamed book club questions and come away with a better understanding of this influential book.
Introduction to Glennon Doyle
Glennon Doyle is a public speaker, author, and activist. She is known for her three bestselling books—Untamed, Carry On, Warrior, and Love Warrior. The main themes of her work are parenting, spirituality, empowering women, rejecting patriarchy and oppression, feminism, and sexuality.
All of Doyle’s books are memoirs, based primarily on experiences from her personal life. Carry On, Warrior, published in 2013, explores her life as a mother of young children and features some of her most popular blog posts. Love Warrior, published in 2016, is a memoir about her marriage and her husband’s infidelity.
In addition to writing, Doyle is a popular motivational speaker and hosts a weekly podcast called “We Can Do Hard Things” in which she discusses empowerment and interviews influential authors and celebrities. She is also the founder of Together Rising, a non-profit focused on causes relating to women and families in crisis.
Doyle also has a large following on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. She is culturally and politically influential because of her connection with her fanbase and her ability to communicate with her audience.
Book Club Questions on Conditioning
Doyle received messages from society that told her what to be—pleasing and agreeable, self-sacrificing, attractive to men, able to repress emotions and desires, and deferential to the opinions of others. To begin your Untamed book club questions, you can reflect on your experiences and compare them with Doyle’s.
- What kinds of social conditioning did you experience as a child? How were these messages communicated to you?
- How have these messages affected you?
- How have you changed yourself in order to fit into other people’s ideas of who you should be? (Example: You felt pressure to achieve academically—as a result, you went from being a relatively carefree child to an anxious teenager who feared failure.)
Book Club Questions on Emotion
Doyle says that you can learn a lot from anger—such as where your boundaries are or what your core beliefs are—if you approach it with curiosity. For these Untamed book club questions, reflect on an angry experience with curiosity to see what you can learn.
- Describe the last time you felt angry at someone.
- Reflect on why you felt this anger—how were your boundaries or core beliefs challenged?
- How did you react to this anger?
- If you had approached your anger with curiosity, how might you have reacted differently, and what do you think you might have learned?
Exercise: Find Inspiration for Activism
Doyle says that identifying the issues and causes you care most about can be a method for directing your activism. Untamed discussion questions can look at some questions to help guide you toward action.
- Think of the many issues that are facing our world today. Make a list and choose one issue to focus on.
- What emotions do you feel when you think about this issue? How do these emotions inspire you to become more involved?
- What step can you take today to be more involved in these causes?
Book Club Questions on Intuition
Doyle developed an approach to self-reflection that involves connecting to a deeper version of herself and asking this inner self for guidance. Untamed book club questions can reflect on Doyle’s methods and consider how you might incorporate her practices into your moments of self-reflection.
- What kind of self-reflection methods have you used in the past (for example, journaling, prayer, meditation)?
- What about Doyle’s approach appeals to you? How do you think you might incorporate it into your life?
- What do you think this approach might teach you?
Book Club Questions on Imagination
Doyle recommends expressing your wildest dreams for your life and the world so that you can act on them. This exercise for your Untamed book club questions will help you identify and articulate these dreams for yourself.
- Write down your five wildest dreams for your future.
- Write down your five wildest dreams for the world.
- What is something you can do today that will set you on a path to making these dreams a reality?
Book Club Questions on Beliefs
Doyle achieved freedom from her captivity by systematically deconstructing her beliefs and assumptions. In this exercise, you will reflect upon the beliefs you’ve adopted and how they’ve changed over time—and you’ll identify which beliefs may need deconstructing.
- Choose one of the following topics: gender roles, parenting, religion, or race. What were you taught to believe about this topic?
- How have these beliefs changed over time? What caused this change?
- What beliefs do you have today that need to be deconstructed or reexamined?
Conclusion: Reconstruction and Rebirth
The four pathways we have discussed in these Untamed book club questions helped free Doyle from captivity. As these four paths converged, they empowered Doyle to reconstruct her life to reflect her truest self in four ways:
- The Pathway of Embracing Emotion: By feeling difficult emotions, she can face the future confidently knowing that her difficult emotions will help her grow into the person she needs to become. Doyle built a new purpose based on empathy and activism.
- The Pathway of Embracing Intuition: By accessing her intuition, she can understand herself more deeply and feel secure when making difficult decisions. Doyle formed a new understanding of her inner self.
- The Pathway of Embracing Imagination: By envisioning and articulating her deepest desires for the future, she can rewrite her story so that these imaginings can become her reality. Doyle built a new marriage based on imagination.
- The Pathway of Deconstruction: By deconstructing prior beliefs, she can separate herself from social structures and institutions that do not reflect who she is and what she believes. Doyle built a new family, faith, and worldview based on consciousness rather than complacency.
Doyle now lives according to her wildness—her primal self. This primal self was the person who had been there all along, waiting to be free. She has made a promise never again to abandon herself. She will practice self-love and always trust her instincts.
Final Untamed Book Club Questions
Doyle recommends that you write new messages about who you are and what you believe. In these final Untamed book club questions, you can identify the things you value most about yourself, your core beliefs, and the promises you can make to yourself going forward.
- What do you like about yourself? How can you honor these qualities and treat yourself with respect?
- What are your strongest beliefs? What are your core values?
- What are some changes you need to make in your life? What are some promises that you can make to yourself?
Now, combine all of your ideas to write a new message to yourself. Use the following structure: “I am a _________. I believe in __________. I promise never again to _________. Going forward, I promise I will __________.”
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Glennon Doyle's "Untamed" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Untamed summary :
- Glennon Doyle's story of freeing herself from society's rules and expectations
- Why you should rebuild your life using emotion, intuition, and imagination
- A look at how young women are taught to repress their emotions and desires
