An indispensable manual on all aspects of public speaking and a boon to those who may be anxious about it.
A new installment in the Non-Obvious Guide series provides a comprehensive plan for improving one’s performance in all kinds of presentations.
People may think of presentations as being confined to the world of businesses and PowerPoint, but their essence—delivering a message and some version of oneself to other people, including strangers—is something all of us do almost every day, and this has only become truer since the initial outbreak of Covid-19, when many people effectively became onscreen performers overnight. Professional coach Farrington draws on both her past as an actor and her long experience of helping clients with public speaking in order to make and reinforce her central point: that making any kind of presentation is giving a performance. It requires research, rehearsal, and backup plans in case of disaster. She organizes much of her advice around what she terms the “Three C’s” of a good presentation: confidence, conviction, and connection. Each chapter is designed for maximum utility, featuring chapter summaries, visuals, bulleted points, key takeaways, and links to further online resources. Many illustrations and charts accompany Farrington’s discussions of every aspect of giving a presentation, from nonverbal communication to aspects of one’s voice, including resonance, pitch, projection, and hellers—Farrington’s term for filler words and sounds, such as um, like, and y’know, which many people use during gaps in their speech.
Readers will likely be hard-pressed to decide which aspect of Farrington’s authority is more useful to them as they read: her background in public-speaking coaching or her background in acting. Fortunately, they don’t need to choose, as both are wonderfully represented throughout this book. Intriguingly, she tells tales of anonymized clients whose intelligence and authenticity seemed to vanish the moment they got in front of an audience, at which point they went mute or droned on like robots. She’s coached many such people to better results, but her theatrical background is equally vital to the advice she gives here—particularly when it comes to rehearsal, a key element that she warns is often neglected in an age of seemingly casual Zoom meetings. For instance, she mentions how actors divide their scripts into “beats” (“any time you have a change in emotion, a new thought, a new tactic, or a new engagement tool”) to help them to master the whole. Likewise, she provides readers with extensive tips on vocals, observing that “it’s a cruel betrayal when a highly intelligent person is sabotaged by the sound of their own voice.” She’s insightful and empathetic on a range of other topics, from audience engagement to the “ick factor” of using green screens during at-home video presentations. She always seems to be operating from the assumption that her readers are smart and capable of any improvement they want to make. In the undeniably vast crowd of books about public speaking, this one stands out for its intelligent, direct approach.
An indispensable manual on all aspects of public speaking and a boon to those who may be anxious about it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64687-046-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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