A straightforward and compassionate guide to engaging in more effective conversation.
Consultant, coach, and speaker Gladieux offers a series of exercises and concepts designed to improve communication skills.
The author writes in the opening pages of this brief book that she intends it to be a “bravery manual”—one that will instruct readers on how to embrace risk in a wide array of circumstances and turn it to their advantage. She draws on her decades of professional experience as a communications specialist and an executive coach as she puts forward the concept of “brave communication.” This approach involves confronting what she calls the four “hidden challenges” that one encounters in personal and professional dialogues, which include “Hiding From Risk,” “Defining to be Right,” “Rationalizing the Negative,” and “Settling for ‘Good Enough.’” She expands on the nature of each idea in dedicated chapters. She also explores what she calls “Pro Moves,” or ways “to send or receive messages more deftly than the average bear.” Such moves include such practical tips as “Don’t wait for someone else to celebrate you—reward yourself” as you strive to meet new communication challenges. Each chapter includes an “Exercise” that’s designed to assist readers in implementing a specific type of risk-taking communication; one suggests that readers “ask a few open-ended questions to someone you perceive as different from you….This exercise requires courage to admit that you’ve got a limited perspective on many things in life.”
This combination of straight talk and personal challenges runs through the whole of Gladieux’s book. She not only champions aspects of direct communication but also practices them in the text; she frequently presents hard lessons she’s learned while facing her own limitations before launching into discussions of how readers may overcome the same obstacles. Readers are also likely to find her blunt assessments of the importance of her subject to be appealing throughout: “I’ve never stood at a memorial service and heard anyone fondly recall how the departed was great at going along to get along and managed to never make any waves,” she notes at one point. She’s refreshingly plainspoken about the inevitably uncomfortable elements of any important conversation, whether one is speaking with a colleague or with a family member, and she consistently peppers her broad discussions with small nuggets of practical advice to help readers find value in difficult talks. Her tips include recommendations to avoid using the phrases “you always” or “you never,” which are inherently confrontational and frequently inaccurate, and to “ask others for changes in behavior, not changes in their often long-held beliefs.” Gladieux skillfully works in her own stories of coaching clients, and she also offers inspiration from historical figures: “To call forth courage,” she writes at one such point, “I often think of how aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart framed it: ‘Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.’” Readers who’ve worried about tough dialogues of any kind will find many moments of useful wisdom here.
A straightforward and compassionate guide to engaging in more effective conversation.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781523003129
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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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