A well-reasoned guide to forming the mental habits that lead to success.
A debut manual offers advice on developing leadership through improved ways of thinking.
In this business book, Michael, a financial trader–turned–executive coach, takes readers through the process of improving their leadership skills by reshaping their thought processes. The guide explains that since the only thing individuals can control is their own thoughts and reactions, effective leaders must understand their physical and mental responses to stressors, forge a high level of self-awareness, and make sound decisions from a place of confidence. Michael uses stories from her own career and her coaching clients to demonstrate the concepts discussed in the text, and the anecdotes are often enlightening. The book explains how readers can use techniques borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy to transform problematic thought processes into more useful ones, allowing them to hold themselves and others accountable, evaluate situations accurately, and make decisions driven by logic rather than pain or fear. Chapters instruct readers in becoming aware of their bodies’ physical and mental reactions, developing control over them, and reframing responses for more productive outcomes, leading to personal satisfaction and professional success. There are portions of the guide that feel like an infomercial with the myriad mentions of Michael’s trademarked training method and its companion app. But the many informative sections that demonstrate the technique without naming it mean that on balance the volume is more an educational tool than a sales pitch, as in this example of how to deal with events outside your control: “Accepting ‘what is’ frees up more of your energy to actually deal with the parts of the situation over which you do have control.” The author is a strong writer and vivid storyteller who does an excellent job of showing how to put the manual’s concepts into practice. Her personal story—she shares details of a somewhat dysfunctional childhood—also serves to demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of the techniques she advocates, making an effective case for the book’s overall argument.
A well-reasoned guide to forming the mental habits that lead to success.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62634-899-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 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
IN THE NEWS
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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