What I’ve Been Reading

With all our Conflict Leadership Group conversations about avoidance last month, I went back to this book because it has some really useful content about avoidance. Here are some of the key points about avoidance Mayer discusses in this book. People are endlessly inventive in how they avoid conflict. Sometimes avoiding conflict is wise and […]

This latest book by two transformative mediators provides a valuable addition to the transformative mediation bookshelf, with an in-depth look into the way that transformative mediators perceive self determination in mediation, and how they support it in practice. The book includes many case studies to demonstrate how this underlying principle works in various situations, including

This book is a very similar book to another book I reviewed recently, The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith. Like that book, this is a dictionary of emotions, with entries in alphabetical order, and includes all kinds of emotions terms from the distant past to the present day, and from many different

In my book Conflict Coaching Fundamentals: Working with conflict stories, I explain how one of the important shifts that people need to make in order to develop a constructive mindset towards conflict is the shift from certainty to uncertainty. The challenge is that uncertainty is an uncomfortable place to be, and certainty is comfortable, even

Regret. We’ve all experienced it. It’s not what you’d call a pleasant emotion. It also tends to promote rumination and going over and over what we wished we had done differently. This is a similar process of counterfactual thinking that is common with other emotions such as guilt and shame. For people who work in

As I was researching for our new Working With Emotions in Conflict online course, DeSteno’s name kept coming up in relation to the importance of emotions, and especially social emotions, for success. David DeSteno writes a lot on the concept of intertemporal choice (I wrote about this concept in conflict in one of my LinkedIn

This book includes a collection of very thoughtful essays that challenge us to think beyond coaching as a tool to improve performance within existing outdated, dysfunctional and even toxic systems. Einzig asks: Should the role of the coach evolve? What is the role of coaching today? Can coaches support leaders to transform the rules of

I have to agree with Adam Grant’s comment on the front of this book. It’s the smartest, clearest and funniest book I’ve ever read about the brain. This book is such a wonderful introduction to neuroscience and it is written in such an accessible way. There are chapters about how the left and right sides

NEW BOOK: Facilitating with stories: Ethics, Reflective Practice and Philosophies, edited by Andrew Rixon and Cathryn Lloyd I’m delighted to announce the release of a new book, to which I contributed a chapter! My chapter is called “The Ethics of Working with Someone to Change Their Story: Managing Power” This book provides a rich connection