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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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IN THE NEWS
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