A well-crafted argument for treating sales as an integral part of coaching.
A business coach urges her colleagues to take a new approach to selling their services.
Rockwood makes it clear from the opening pages that her book’s audience is limited to one profession: her fellow coaches. “It’s not for those who are selling tangible goods, like books, trinkets, or toilet plungers,” she explains. For her intended readership, she offers a guide for applying the framework of coaching to the process of selling its services. Along the way, it allows coaches to lean into their skills—building connections, presenting opportunities for growth, helping clients to reach their own conclusions—instead of spending their energy trying to reach large numbers of people, many of whom aren’t potential candidates for coaching. Rockwood contrasts traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to sales and argues that people of all genders would benefit from aspects of both styles, noting the advantages of relying on emotional connection instead of massive lead generation. She offers numerous examples from her experience selling services and helpfully provides plenty of moments of putting the techniques she recommends into action. The book covers the practical aspects of pricing, taking payment, overcoming objections, and closing a sale, all within the contours of a coach-led experience. The book is comprehensive but not sprawling, concisely guiding the reader through the process of selling. (Rockwood mentions a paid course she offers that explores the topic in more detail and features additional resources on her website.) The information is actionable, easy to understand, and written in a clear, engaging style. As it is intended for trained coaches, its references to alignment, energy, transformation, and intentions are appropriate in a way they might not be for general readers. For its target audience, it will be an effective tool for developing selling skills, and other readers may still find some of its concepts useful.
A well-crafted argument for treating sales as an integral part of coaching.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781544531748
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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