A short but powerfully uplifting guide to fostering mental fitness in the workplace.
Consultant and speaker Smolensky details a concise series of strategies for improving one’s mental health.
“The core of well-being is nurturing a strong, healthy, resilient mindset,” the author writes at the outset of her nonfiction debut. “I believe the only way to thrive at work is to prioritize mental well-being above anything else.” Smolensky writes that she’s worked with hundreds of companies, including Fortune500 firms, assisting them in devising strategies to help thousands of employees create mental fitness routines; these, she says, have helped them at work and in their home lives. The two main regions of the human brain, she says, are the “emotional brain,” which she associates with the amygdala, and the “thinking brain,” which she associates with the prefrontal cortex; over the course of her book, she lays out ways that emotion and thought can cooperate to reach what she calls “Energizer” status, which is “critical to achieving a higher level of well-being and accomplishing your goals at work.” For someone in Energizer mode, their “day is devoted more to showcasing your strengths and skills, instead of merely ticking off a to-do list,” she says. In a series of quick, well-designed chapters with plenty of bullet points and discussion prompts, she goes through both the benefits of reaching this level of mental clarity and the obstacles to doing so, such as workplace choices that emphasize speed and ease without considering their effectiveness. When she addresses such stumbling block, however, she always stresses that one can always change one’s mindset. Overall, Smolensky is a lively, friendly guide to all the concepts she offers in these pages, and readers will find it easy to see why she’s been hired by so many companies to help their employees. Notably, she doesn’t pull her punches in her assessments; she always holds her readers responsible for their own shortcomings, and she acknowledges the difficult realities of maintaining one’s daily mental health. At the same time, she frames her explanations with a bracing optimism that readers are sure to appreciate.
A short but powerfully uplifting guide to fostering mental fitness in the workplace.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781637556641
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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