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
IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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