An inviting and uplifting call for positivity and empathy in all kinds of communication.
A guide offers a comprehensive plan for improving communication.
Whether an interaction involves someone’s boss, family member, or friend, communication specialist LeCompte insists that the core issue is always the same: “How can you make sure you don’t end up with another painful relational conflict or loss?” In these pages, the author lays out the blueprint he’s developed from countless sessions with clients, and the central underlying idea is to remind his readers that they’re in control of their own thoughts and responses in any potential conflicts. Every one of those skirmishes, according to LeCompte, will involve a judge, a figure who’s setting the stakes, often wrongly: “It is a psychological fact that our judge always speaks first. He judges before we know it and his judgments are frequently inaccurate and negative.” The only way that most people become aware of the judge element in their interactions is when they realize it has made them angry, an undesirable outcome that could have been avoided. Discovering this point is crucial. As LeCompte puts it, “In this instant, we can become conscious.” This approach makes the author’s prized “conscious communication” possible, in which both parties learn to be more aware of what they’re actually saying and how it connects to what they’re feeling. Several of LeCompte’s contentions will strike some readers as odd (“When we say, ‘I feel abandoned,’ we are really saying, ‘It was your intention to abandon me.’ ‘Abandoned’ is not a feeling”). And many readers may doubt the optimism of his core claim: “Everybody has one hope that you can count on—to help other people get their hopes met. This generosity of spirit is hard-wired in each of us, part of being human.” But his repeated examples of breaking down specific interactions to get at the root of what’s really being said are unfailingly intriguing. They will cause readers to indulge in some bracing thinking about the nuts and bolts of how they talk to people.
An inviting and uplifting call for positivity and empathy in all kinds of communication.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798988748304
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Connections Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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