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THE MENTALLY STRONG LEADER

BUILD THE HABITS TO PRODUCTIVELY REGULATE YOUR EMOTIONS, THOUGHTS, AND BEHAVIORS

A clearheaded guide to building the mental muscles needed to lead teams through adversity to success.

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Mautz offers a concise overview of best practices for confident, decisive, and effective business leadership.

In his fourth book, the author, a former Procter & Gamble senior executive, distills his principles of “mental strength” into a concise how-to guide for personal development. Drawing on experience and research, Mautz defines mentally strong leaders as those who have “the ability to regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to achieve exceptional outcomes, despite circumstances.” (He’s careful to differentiate this concept from general mental health.) The author provides a bit of background in a brief introduction, then dives into detailing what mental strength is, what it isn’t, its key traits, and why it matters, illustrating his points with brief stories. Mautz asks, “How mentally strong are you?” and presents a 50-question self-assessment to help readers identify existing strengths and areas for “leveling up.” (The text helpfully correlates the assessment questions section by section to inform specific habit-building tools in later chapters.) Chapters are dedicated to six leadership habits, including Fortitude, Confidence, Boldness, Messaging, Decision-Making, and Goal-Focus. In turn, each of these comprises several sub-habits that are paired with corresponding tools. (For example, the tool for the confidence habit “Exude Executive Presence” is the “Integrated Aura model.”) Each tool is explained in detail and includes an initial small step for getting started and a helpful tactic for bouncing back from the inevitable lapses. The final chapter features a “MAP (Mental Action Plan)” that guides readers toward maintaining a regular practice for building their own habits. Diagrams and charts illustrate many of the tools, and each chapter also includes a list of references. Templates for many of the suggested exercises and the MAP are available for download from the author’s website, both singly and collected in a workbook format.

The author’s insights into what makes leaders and their teams effective are astute and well explained, and his recommendations are eminently sensible. While the book may not break new ground, it presents useful ideas—such as identifying limiting beliefs, cultivating self-acceptance as an antidote to perfectionism, paying attention to what’s not being said, and reframing problems as challenges—accessibly and persuasively. The text is organized in a way that’s easy for readers to follow and refer back to as needed. Mautz’s prose style is crisp, direct, and down to earth, and his tone is consistently upbeat, empathetic, and encouraging: On procrastination, he writes, “Consider the pain of not completing the task. If there isn’t any, by the way, consider eliminating the task…the next time you catch yourself slipping back into procrastination, give yourself a pat on the back—you noticed it! No small feat.” The pithy advice on difficult conversations includes such nuggets as “Focus on the predicament, not the personality”; “The pain is temporary, the positive is permanent”; and “Am I just confusing ‘difficult’ with ‘different’?” In today’s fast-paced, constantly changing workplaces, “where adversity is becoming the norm more than ever, where the things that wear us down, professionally and personally, are in ever-increasing supply,” this book is a welcome addition to the professional development tool kit for thoughtful and ambitious business leaders.

A clearheaded guide to building the mental muscles needed to lead teams through adversity to success.

Pub Date: May 7, 2024

ISBN: 9781510780583

Page Count: 360

Publisher: Peakpoint Press

Review Posted Online: June 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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

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