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
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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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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