I’m drawn to the intersection of psychology, philosophy and pragmatism — a dynamic that can be found in the books I write, the conversations I enjoy, and the ways I choose to spend my down time. By getting in touch with my personal psychology (influenced by my brain chemistry, temperament and upbringing) and studying various philosophies (from the Stoics to Alain de Botton), I have begun to find my own truth and formulate my own best practices in life. I don’t always nail it — not by a long shot — but that’s why it’s called a practice. There are so many different ways to live a contented life. It can be awfully rewarding to locate your own.
Since discovering Religion for Atheists, while researching my first book, I have loved me some Alain de Botton, but I recommend this one because I think it offers the most in terms of practical wisdom across a host of categories. Alain has spent his life doing for others what I spend a lot of time doing for myself: Trying to discover universal truths that lead to a greater enjoyment of life without having to resort to religious dogma or magical thinking. He explains plainly how to love life for what it offers, wholly accept what it does not, and understand that we all, truly, are in this together.
I’m fascinated by the relationships component of leadership. I’ve worked for major service firms, taught MBAs for years, advised many teams and organizations, and educated millions via my courses on LinkedIn Learning. When I look at performance, I see the same issues popping up over and over: people issues! You can know a lot about how to run a team operationally or how to roll out a change step by step – but it’s all for nothing if you don’t know how to positively relate to and lead others. Communication, motivation, empathy, etc. – these are the essential people skills required to allow you to actually add value with your business knowledge.
Most leadership books are hyper-focused on one or two very finite and well-defined topics.
Dean’s book intentionally takes the opposite approach. It’s like someone came up to this person who has had huge sales and general executive success and asked them to name their top twenty tips for having an effective career. But instead, Dean explodes with a few hundred amazing tips.
From grand ideas such as “always be learning” and “fostering relationships” to very specific ones such as “be reliable” and “don’t show off or gloat,” this is an amalgamation of tried-and-true career wisdom delivered in an easy-to-digest manner.
I imagine anyone reading this book will come away with several new maxims to live by. Bottom line – this is fast, useful advice.
Are you limiting your potential because you haven't mastered workplace skills, office politics, and career development?
Do you ever feel pressured to learn the latest strategies just to stay ahead of your peers? Are there times when you feel intimidated by colleagues with fancy titles or advanced degrees who don't shy away from sharing their opinions? We can all fall into the trap of getting caught up in a competitive and stressful work environment and the result can negatively impact our confidence and ability to maximize our potential. Based on business lessons and techniques that Dean Karrel learned throughout his…
Hermann Simon is a world-renowned expert on price and profit management. He is the founder and honorary chairman of Simon-Kucher & Partners, the global leader in price and topline consulting with 1700 employees and 41 offices worldwide. He is the only German in the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame of the most influential management thinkers. In China a business school is named in his honor. Profit is at the core of Hermann’s writing and consulting activities.
This book takes an unusual, very modern approach by combining profit with sustainability and happiness. A current controversial discussion, after all, deals with the compatibility of sustainability and profitability. This compatibility is strongly advocated by the author. She also believes that a sustainably profitable offering makes the company and the customers happy. Overall, an enrichment of the discussion about profit orientation!
"In the book, Ines sets out the new path for businesses to follow to create workplaces of our future. She dives into the science behind each of these three business imperatives and follows this up with clear ABC’s and CBA’s on how to make the shift starting right now. Create real, sustainable change in their teams and organisations straight away." -- Sarah Metcalfe, Chief Happiness Officer & Co-Leader, Woohoo Unlimited
"This book will challenge you to combine collaboration, sustainability and emotional intelligence to create a better business. Ines’ experience in innovation makes her the perfect to explore how thinking…
I’ve always been drawn to babies and toddlers and fascinated by the development that happens in the early years of life. This fascination led me to become a teacher, parent, and emotional development expert with a master's degree in early childhood education. Eventually, my passion for this field led me to co-create the Collaborative Emotion Processing method and research it nationwide. The research results were compelling, and so began my mission to share it with the world.
I love this book because it’s unique in the parenting book sphere. It’s largely focused on kids with neurodiversity. I finished the book feeling like I had a new understanding of how to support neurodiverse children, how to help them regulate their emotions, and how to build emotional intelligence in ways that work for their unique nervous system and brain.
A simple, fail-proof roadmap for parents raising even the most challenging children from the founder of the life-changing Calm the Chaos methodology and the Lemon Lime Adventures blog.
Strong-willed, spirited, explosive, and highly sensitive are just a few of the most common labels for challenging kids. Whether your child has been diagnosed with a behavioral condition, labeled, or is just harder than other children you've met, you are in luck. Parenting expert, Dayna Abraham is here to help.
Calm the Chaos is a clearly organized, methodical approach to parenting. Dayna has created a road map to help parents find peace…
I’ve spent many years as a management consultant to a range of big, global corporations, smaller companies, and not-for-profits. I also headed up succession planning and management development at two major companies. I decided to go into this field based on a strong conviction, a conviction that continues today: that leadership counts. Strong leaders benefit people in their organizations and, ultimately, society itself. Having worked with many senior leaders and led organizations myself, I know the range of pressures executives face and how easy it is to fail. Companies need a supply of capable, well-equipped senior leaders, and those who aspire to top-level positions need guideposts about achieving their career aspirations.
In the course of researching my book, I spoke to a number of people responsible for selecting senior leaders in their organizations and asked what they looked for. A strong majority mentioned executive or leadership presence—although few could define or describe it with any degree of specificity. But an “I’ll know it if I see it” approach doesn’t cut it for people who want to reach the executive level.
This book is a compilation of highly practical articles that, taken together, not only define leadership presence but suggest tangible steps to develop and project it.
Many leaders consider "executive presence" a make-or-break factor in high-powered promotions. But what is this elusive quality, and how do you develop it?
This book explains how to build the charisma, confidence, and decisiveness that top leaders project. Whether you're delivering a critical presentation or managing a hectic meeting, you'll be inspired to approach the situation with new strength.
This volume includes the work of:
Deborah Tannen
Amy J. C. Cuddy
Amy Jen Su
This collection of articles includes "Deconstructing Executive Presence," by John Beeson; "How New Managers Can Send the Right Leadership Signals," by…
I am an academic at the University of Glasgow with a background in philosophy and psychology. My approach to critical thinking is broad and informed by several other teaching and research interests: emotional intelligence, the psychology of influence, interpersonal communication, and virtue ethics. Motivating much of what I do is the question: How are we to live well? With respect to critical thinking I don’t just deal with the nature and structure of arguments, but also with the role they play in constructive dialogues, and how poor reasoning is linked to psychological biases and the absence of certain virtues. The books I have chosen here are representative of these concerns.
Ostensibly a book about emotional intelligence, this is in effect an account of Epstein’s theory of the self (see Chapter 3 onwards). I am a strong advocate of ‘dual process’ theories, the idea that we have two minds or modes of thinking, one that is fast, automatic, and reliant on heuristics, and another that is slower, deliberative, and rational. The most famous example of this is in the work of Kahneman and Tversky, who have identified various biases we employ in quick decision making. This understanding is vital for effective critical thinking, but I find Epstein’s notion of an affect-driven ‘experiential’ system to have deeper and more wide-ranging explanatory power. This applies both to self-knowledge, and to how we can engage more constructively with others.
This is a book on how to gain control of one's emotions. It is a serious book that contains a theory of automatic processing it presents and its implications for controlling emotions. Epstein is a professor of personality psychology and a highly regarded research psychologist who has supported his theory with extensive research published in the most demanding professional journals. He was motivated to write the book by the success of a course he taught based on his theory. Students reported obtaining an understanding and control of their emotions that they never thought possible and that they said changed the…
I'm Matt Phelan, and I've always been fascinated by how people think and feel, especially in the workplace. That's why I co-founded The Happiness Index, where we use data to help organizations understand and improve their workplace culture. I love exploring the connection between happiness and performance, and I'm eager to share the insights I've gained along the way.
This book challenges traditional leadership models that solely focus on metrics, advocating for a more holistic approach. It explores the importance of emotional intelligence, ethical decision-making, and meaningful connections to cultivate a thriving workplace culture.
By prioritizing employee well-being and fostering a sense of purpose, leaders can inspire greater engagement and job satisfaction.
For centuries we have divided mind and body, valuing reason over emotion. But new research is fundamentally changing our understanding about how our brains and bodies work. What might be possible when we leverage both our reason AND emotion?
Explore the vital link between emotions and organizational performance. Knowing more about our body and brain and how we are interconnected and interrelated can positively impact people, performance and profit.
Leadership coach and experienced finance director Susan Ni Chriodain sits at the nexus of business and emotion and reveals how to reintroduce humanity into the…
Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, awarded an MBE for services to literature. Published in thirty-seven languages, she’s the recipient of numerous national and international awards. Her twenty-eight books include the critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley, and Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and she’s Emeritus Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton.
The granddaddy of literary autobiography and biography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions was written in 1769 but published posthumously in 1782. Rousseau, whose pioneering Romantic political philosophy was by then already influential, was setting out to do something equally new when he decided to study human nature, taking as his experimental model the human he knew best – himself. The rollicking result, sometimes self-flagellating, occasionally exhibitionist, deviates from its own model, St Augustine’s fourth-century religious-philosophical Confessions, in being chock-full of what nowadays we call emotional intelligence.
Widely regarded as the first modern autobiography, The Confessions is an astonishing work of acute psychological insight. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) argued passionately against the inequality he believed to be intrinsic to civilized society. In his Confessions he relives the first fifty-three years of his radical life with vivid immediacy - from his earliest years, where we can see the source of his belief in the innocence of childhood, through the development of his philosophical and political ideas, his struggle against the French authorities and exile from France following the publication of Emile. Depicting a life of adventure, persecution, paranoia, and…
I’m a picture book writer who struggles with anxiety. Some things that seem like no big deal to most people can become a very big worry for me (like Giraffe worries about Spider in It Will Be OK). I found that identifying and naming our emotions—in this case fear—makes it easier to address our feelings and work through them. I want to share my experience of being fearful of things, both big and small, with children to let them know they are not alone and they can have power over scary emotions.
As an expert worrier, I really related to this book about a spunky girl named Ruby who one day discovers a worry. What I love about this book is that the worry is illustrated, so we can see its intimidating facial expression and watch it grow in size. The worry follows Ruby to all her favorite places—the school bus, the swing set, the movies—and it prevents her from doing what she loves. But it’s not until she spots another worry sitting with a boy that she is able to face her fear about the worry and do the best thing ever – talk about it. I love how this story shows children that talking about our feelings gives us power and strength to work through them.
The beloved picture book about what to do when a worry won't leave you at alone -- perfect for reassuring young readers in times of stress.
Meet Ruby -- a happy, curious, imaginative young girl. But one day, she finds something unexpected: a Worry. It's not such a big Worry, at first. But every day, it grows a little bigger . . . and a little bigger . . . . Until eventually, the Worry is ENORMOUS and is all she can think about.
But when Ruby befriends a young boy, she discovers that everyone has worries, and not only…
As a mom of three girls, I taught my daughters to celebrate the differences in themselves and others. My older two girls were diagnosed with Celiac Disease prior to the trend of gluten-free foods being widely available. They had to bring their own food to birthday parties and food-based school events, and it was harder to be spontaneous and stay at a friends’ house for dinner or sleepover. Needless to say - they felt different. One of the things that helped them begin to appreciate their difference, was reading picture books that demonstrated that it is differences that make people special and keep life interesting. I am hopeful that my story will do the same for the kids who read it.
My favorite lines in this book are the last few lines. “He realized that there was no such thing as perfectly normal...But he was perfectly Norman. Which was just as it should be.”Norman is a perfectly normal little boy until he grows a pair of wings. Initially, he is afraid to take off his coat and share his new wings with his friends and family. But over the course of the book, Norman realizes that hiding his wings is making him unhappy. When he finally gets the courage to share his true self, he realizes there are lots of other kids just like him, who were also hiding themselves. His courage gave them the courage to be themselves as well. It is a great book for talking to your child about how something they may think makes them odd, may end up being just the thing that helps…
Be open, be honest, be you! Big Bright Feelings for little people.
Norman had always been perfectly normal . . . until the day he grew a pair of wings!
Norman loves his new wings, and has the most fun ever trying them out high in the sky. But then he has to go in for dinner. What will his parents think? What will everyone else think? Norman feels the safest plan is to cover his wings with a big coat.
But hiding the thing that makes you different proves tricky and upsetting. Can Norman ever truly be himself?
This…
