Here are 100 books that Awakening Compassion at Work fans have personally recommended if you like
Awakening Compassion at Work.
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I’ve finally realized that you can’t outwork yourself out of systemic problems and that so many of the messages we receive have got the problem wrong. Growing up, I was taught to respect my elders. To defer to those who know what they are talking about. But just because someone says something with conviction doesn’t mean they are right. What we’ve been told is imposter syndrome could actually be imposter treatment, and it messes deeply with our sense of self. So even if I’ve taught at brand name institutions, at corporate heavyweights, and on six continents, I’m always seeking to learn.
This book opened my eyes to see introversion as a strength rather than a weakness. But more so, it gave me the permission to question how things that we took as “just the way things are” might have been positioned incorrectly from the start.
If it wasn’t true that introversion is inherently worse than extroversion, what else might popular culture and mainstream workplace practices have gotten wrong? I felt seen by the book and hopeful of what more honest conversations about how people are wired might both reveal and help heal.
SUSAN CAIN'S NEW BOOK, BITTERSWEET, IS AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW
A SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE HOW YOU SEE INTROVERTS - AND YOURSELF - FOREVER.
Our lives are driven by a fact that most of us can't name and don't understand. It defines who our friends and lovers are, which careers we choose, and whether we blush when we're embarrassed.
That fact is whether we're an introvert or an extrovert.
The most fundamental dimension of personality, at least a third of us are introverts, and yet shyness, sensitivity and seriousness are often seen as…
In 2009, I opted out of a career in consulting to pursue a PhD in Sociology and to research women who opt out of successful careers to live and work on their own terms. I was convinced that it wasn’t a women’s issue but a contemporary one and I later went on to research men opting out. As I collect stories of people who opt out and in, it becomes clear that opting out is a symptom of contemporary organizational cultures and the way we are expected to work. I’m on a mission to change working life as we know it and these books have been enormously helpful to me.
I was impressed by this book because it so clearly explains why the way we think about business, work, and organizations has to change and it shows us how everything is connected.
The system we have known for as long as we can remember is no longer working. On the contrary, it’s harming us, our health, our wellbeing, our planet, and our future. Only by rethinking the way we lead and organize can we secure a future for ourselves and our planet.
The book is visually beautiful, it is life-affirming and full of examples of organizations that are already doing things differently, and it also works as a handbook for becoming a regenerative leader.
This book by leadership and sustainability experts Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm provides an exciting and comprehensive framework for building regenerative life-affirming businesses. It offers a multitude of business cases, fascinating examples from nature’s living systems, insights from the front-line pioneers and tools and techniques for leaders to succeed and thrive in the 21st century.
Regenerative Leadership draws inspiration from pioneering thinking within biomimicry, circular economy, adult developmental psychology, anthropology, biophilia, sociology, complexity theory and next-stage leadership development. It connects the dots between these fields through a powerful framework that enables leadership to become regenerative: in harmony with life, building…
In 2009, I opted out of a career in consulting to pursue a PhD in Sociology and to research women who opt out of successful careers to live and work on their own terms. I was convinced that it wasn’t a women’s issue but a contemporary one and I later went on to research men opting out. As I collect stories of people who opt out and in, it becomes clear that opting out is a symptom of contemporary organizational cultures and the way we are expected to work. I’m on a mission to change working life as we know it and these books have been enormously helpful to me.
This book is an entertaining read, but it is also to the point and spot on. It debunks nine so-called ‘truths’ about work, management, and organizations that are well-established practices and ways of thinking in the organizational sphere.
According to the authors these ‘lies’ are root causes of much of the dysfunction and frustration in organizations today (which I have seen a lot of in my work and research) and they suggest how we should think about these things instead in order for our organizations – and the people in them – to thrive.
You crave feedback. Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing.
These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies--distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking--that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact.…
I have been researching the changes in the workplace for 40 years now. The steady move over that time has been away from a situation where employers controlled the development of their “talent” and managed it carefully, especially for white-collar workers, toward arrangements that are much more arms-length where employees are on their own to develop their skills and manage their career. Most employees now see at least some management practices that just don’t make sense even for their own employer–casual approaches to hiring, using “leased employees” and contractors, who are paid more, to do the same work as employees, leaving vacancies open, and so forth.
Most of the discussion about whether jobs are good or bad focuses on wages. The sociologists add the concern about uncertainty–will my job last?
What gets far less attention is the fact that the way we manage employees has a direct and profound effect on their mental health and, in turn, on their physical health.
This is a new finding and an important one. We can see a direct effect of bad management practices on employee sickness and death. As documented here, stress kills.
In one survey, 61 percent of employees said that workplace stress had made them sick and 7 percent said they had actually been hospitalized. Job stress costs US employers more than $300 billion annually and may cause 120,000 excess deaths each year. In China, 1 million people a year may be dying from overwork. People are literally dying for a paycheck. And it needs to stop.
In this timely, provocative book, Jeffrey Pfeffer contends that many modern management commonalities such as long work hours, work-family conflict, and economic insecurity are toxic to employees—hurting engagement, increasing turnover, and destroying people’s physical…
As a consultant, author, and researcher, for several years I have been very passionate about the study of companies that are very successful in the marketplace, but that are also human-oriented. In other words, I am very interested in companies that are profitable, but at the same time, are kind, compassionate, and caring with their main stakeholders. I like that these companies continually aim to foster robust long-term relationships with these stakeholders, and look for win-win agreements with them. What I love about these companies is that they focus on the quantitative aspects of business (e.g., profitability, growth, etc.) but also in its qualitative aspects (empathy, support, gratitude, generosity, etc.).
I like that this book pinpoints the importance of compassion for the workplace in a very well-justified manner. I really love that not only does this book explain the main traits of compassion, but it also pinpoints the reasons why compassion is missing in many workplaces, for example, communication breakdown, lack of empathy, etc. I find it very insightful that this book provides the reader with easy-to-apply strategies to develop more compassion in the work environment. This book also provides some specific cases of real organisations which have developed compassionate workplaces.
We live in a world in crisis. Societies are becoming fractured, opinions polarized and people are increasingly isolated. In an attempt to seek out human connection, many people spend more time at work than they do with family members, yet few of us have someone at work who we trust enough to share our vulnerabilities. To be human is to suffer, yet our struggles can remain hidden from work.
This book argues that compassion is a core human value, which is too often overlooked in business. In these challenging and unprecedented times, workplaces have a crucial role to play in…
Two self-interested people will try to outperform each other. One will win, the other will lose. If they instead cooperate, both will win a bit, and lose a bit. Is this preferable? I say yes, because in the long term, winning a bit many times, is better than winning a lot, once. Choosing short-term gain at the expense of long-term benefit is a waste of potential for societies and individuals. Traditional morality works, sometimes, in some cases. Rational morality can fill the gaps, and expand the circle of morality so that when higher ideals fail or become too difficult to follow, rationality can be about more than just short-term self-interest.
Paul Bloom wants to persuade the reader to be against empathy, as he is, because morally we’re better off without empathy.
He is right, and I see his argument as similar to the argument made by Sugden, although its structure is very different. Bloome, rightly, says that we cannot rely on empathy to be moral – we need something more and something more tangible.
That something might be rationality, although Bloome himself prefers to speak of reason. Moral theories have for too long relied on unstable ground: empathy and moral character.
If we care about morality, we must ground it on more solid ground.
In a divided world, empathy is not the solution, it is the problem; a source of prejudice, not kindness.
We think of empathy - the ability to feel the suffering of others for ourselves - as the ultimate source of all good behaviour. But while it inspires care and protection in personal relationships, it has the opposite effect in the wider world. As the latest research in psychology and neuroscience shows, we feel empathy most for those we find attractive and who seem similar to us and not at all for those who are different, distant or anonymous. Empathy therefore…
I went through a particularly hard time several years ago and to get through it I was forced to dig deep into what I’d learned about compassion and self-compassion over three decades of meditating. Because I’m a meditation teacher, I wanted to share with my students everything I learned about being kind and supportive toward myself as I went through the toughest challenges I’d ever faced so that they could benefit as well. That’s why I wrote This Difficult Thing of Being Human. Self-compassion has become the core of everything I’ve taught since then, and one of the wonderful things about it is that once you’ve shown yourself compassion, you automatically find yourself treating others with compassion too.
Our final book offers more of an “old school” guide to developing kindness and compassion. By “old school” I mean that that the writings of Gunaratana, who is affectionately known by his fans as “Bhante G.” is firmly rooted in classic teachings from the Buddhist tradition. But he goes beyond that, drawing on his personal experience, quoting modern meditation teachers, and sharing the results of scientific studies of lovingkindness and compassion. And he does all this in a warm and kind way that makes reading this illuminating and practical book a true pleasure.
The bestselling author of Mindfulness in Plain English invites us to explore the joyful benefits of living with loving-kindness.
With his signature clarity and warmth, Bhante Gunaratana shares with us how we can cultivate loving-kindness to live a life of joyful harmony with others. Through personal anecdotes, step-by-step meditations, conversational renderings of the Buddha’s words in the suttas, and transformative insights into how we live in and relate to the world, we learn that peace here and now is possible—within ourselves and in all our relationships. Bhante G speaks directly to how we can cultivate loving-kindness to find emotional clarity,…
I’ve lived with anxiety for most of my life. Whether it’s been with emetophobia (a phobia of vomit) or an intense bout of panic attacks, I know the story well. Now, as a psychologist, I’ve seen up close what works and what doesn’t. I love helping my clients and the audiences that I work with learn how to accept their anxiety, rather than try to make it go away. This is often counterintuitive at first but we can still live an empowered life, even with the anxiety present. When we do this, we’ve unlocked a whole new level of liberation where we can show up fully, worries and all.
This book is a staple in the field of psychology and mental health and for very good reason.
So many of us struggle with being kind to our mind and we worry that we’ll truly fall apart if we are compassionate to ourselves. Dr. Neff brings the evidence-backed research to prove that self-compassion is the antidote to anxiety and it has incredibly restorative potential to help us not only get back to baseline, but truly feel better.
THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH A NEW FOREWORD FROM KRISTIN NEFF
'Kristin Neff offers practical, wise guidance on the path of emotional healing and deep inner transformation.' Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance
Kristin Neff PhD, is a professor in educational psychology, and the world's expert on self-compassion. A pioneer who established self-compassion as a field of study, Kristin offers a powerful solution for combating negativity and insecurity - the symptoms of living in a high-pressure world.
Through tried and tested exercises and audio downloads, readers learn the 3 core components that will help to heal destructive emotional patterns…
As a professor and scientist, using my Intentional Change Theory (ICT), I have studied sustained desired change of individuals, teams, organizations, communities, and countries since 1967. I have authored more than 200 articles and 9 books on leadership, competencies, emotional intelligence, competency development, coaching, neuroscience, and management education (including the international best-seller, Primal Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee and the recent Helping People Change with Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten). I run several Coursera MOOCs, including Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence which has over a million enrolled from 215 countries.
Of all of the competencies that repeatedly predict effective leadership and creating and maintaining of key relationships, is empathy. At the heart of any relationship and perhaps the only antidote to rampant narcissism in our society is empathy. As a prominent psychiatrist and scholar, Helen chronicles decades of research and explains the neural mechanisms that enable us to relate to others, build better relationships ad even inspire others. Her personal stories and those of patients and colleagues make the research come alive with compassion and meaning.
"We are all connected on a neurobiological level far more than we have previously realized. Consciously or not, we are in constant, natural resonance with one another's feelings. When we are engaged in shared mind awareness, the possibilities for mutual aid and collaborative problem solving abound." -Helen Riess, MD
A Revolutionary Guide for Understanding and Changing the Way We Connect
Empathy is undergoing a new evolution. In a global and interconnected culture, we can no longer afford to identify only with people who seem to be a part of our "tribe." As Dr. Helen Riess has learned, our capacity for…
I am a podcaster, author, and psychoeducator in the field of anxiety and anxiety disorders. I am also—as of 2022—a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling on the way to becoming a licensed psychotherapist. My own experience with anxiety and depression over 25+ years has fueled a passion for the theory and mechanics behind anxiety disorders and how they are treated. It would appear that my superpower is not only understanding these things, but also explaining them in a way that people can then understand for themselves. If that means I can help, then I’m happy to be doing what I do every day.
I love this book because Kim Quinlan takes a somewhat nebulous concept and explains it in very practical and engaging terms. People struggling to overcome OCD often wind up beating themselves up and treating themselves very un-kindly, making a difficult situation even more difficult. Kimberley strikes many chords in this book in the way she explains why being kind and compassionate to yourself is so important when working to overcome OCD. She doesn’t stop there. She offers many excellent, practical ways that one can explore and practice self-compassion. A must-read for anyone dealing with OCD.
A compassionate guide to help you manage OCD symptoms, overcome feelings of shame and stigma, and revitalize your life!
If you're one of millions who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), you're all-too-familiar with feelings of anxiety, panic, shame, and uncertainty. In addition, the stigma associated with OCD can make you feel unworthy of receiving the compassion and kindness you need and deserve. You may even experience unwanted intrusive thoughts that result in harsh self-judgment-which can actually hinder your recovery and lead to additional mental health problems. So, how can you break this destructive cycle and start feeling better?
