An overlong but compassionate and optimistic psychological work.
Swedish psychologist Revstedt offers fellow therapists and counselors a self-empowering approach to dealing with supposedly hopeless cases.
It’s a vexing problem for a therapist: how to help the most destructive, least motivated clients. Revstedt believes the answer begins with the therapist’s mindset. Typical approaches are based on a client’s overt willingness to participate in the process. But Revstedt contends that this means that the people who most need help are the least likely to get it. Worse still, he writes, the professionals who are assigned the most difficult cases often get the least support. In this book, he aims to shake up these paradoxes with a theory of “motivational work” that emphasizes the relationship between the professional and the patient. Change can be effected, he says, through personal interaction. When “latently motivated” clients seem unreceptive, Revstedt writes, it’s really an indirect appeal for help from behind a defensive barrier. Rather than be discouraged, motivational workers should accept the challenge of deciphering the client’s “contact rebus”: a “masked attempt at making contact; it is an outstretched hand wrapped in barbed wire.” He then explores the idea of contact rebuses through vivid, often heart-rending case studies, which will give readers a deeper sense of empathy for people suffering from mental illness, substance abuse and psychological trauma. The book’s comprehensiveness, however, makes it exhaustive to the point of tedium. At nearly 700 pages—300 in Chapter Four alone—it’s an unwieldy tome that presents a daunting task for time-strapped professionals. It also lacks standard features to help students grasp abstract ideas, such as explanatory text boxes and takeaway lists. That said, these editorial shortcomings may not diminish the book’s potential for combating an urgent public health problem. Overall, Revstedt’s framework promises to turn around troubled lives, and give professionals a mental foundation to support their arduous work.
An overlong but compassionate and optimistic psychological work.Pub Date: June 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496181152
Page Count: 698
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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