The Invisible Mentor

Archive for the ‘Resources’ Category

Review of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most comes out of the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen define a difficult conversation as anything you find hard to talk about. The authors explore “what it is that makes conversations difficult, why we avoid them, and why we often handle them badly.” We all face difficult conversations, at home and at work, and each of us has to struggle with how to address them. Do we avoid or confront them? The authors provide a framework for understanding and conducting difficult conversations. One of the authors’ stated goal of Difficult Conversations is to ” help you turn difficult conversations into learning conversations by helping you handle each of the Three Conversations more productively and improving your ability to handle all three at once.”

Stone, Patton and Heen explain that each difficult conversation is really three different conversations – The “What Happened” Conversation, The Feelings Conversation and The Identity Conversation. The “what happened” conversation gets to the facts without placing blame or guessing the others’ intentions. Rarely do understanding the facts alone resolve the situation. Feelings are often at the core of a difficult situation. The feelings conversation helps to unravel the complexities of our emotions, while diffusing the negative effects. The identity conversation looks at how the event interacts with our identity. It helps us to see how our perceptions of ourselves may affect the position that we take.

Difficult Conversations is a lot longer than it needs to be, and bloated in some areas. Despite that, I learned and gained a lot from reading this book, and, as I read, I found myself getting a deeper understanding of the subject matter. All participants in a difficult conversation contribute to the outcome.

5 Great Ideas

1. When you are participating in a conversation, you need to understand not only what is said, but also what is not said. You also need to understand what the people involved are thinking and feeling but not saying to each other
2. The gap between what you’re really thinking and what you’re saying is part of what makes a conversation difficult
3. It’s always possible to define a problem without reference to feelings
4. Most difficult conversations involve the “blame game,” that is, who’s to blame for the mess we’re in
5. When you have to deliver bad news, whether it is to fire someone or tell the children that you are getting a divorce, go in with the purpose of giving them the news, of taking responsibility for your part in the outcome, of showing that you care about how they feel, and of trying to be helpful going forward

This is not a book you read for entertainment or mere information, but one you read to get a deeper understanding of the intricacies and complexities of difficult conversations. It’s packed with a lot of information, so there is no way that you can remember all the information in just one read. The checklist and roadmap at the end of the book is a great review. I recommend this book.

This review first appeared in April/May 2007 Ambeck Edge, and Difficult Conversations  is book that will always be relevant. It was great to re-read this review and be reminded of its content. As I read the review again, I was reminded of two of the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz: don’t take things personally and don’t make assumptions. These two agreements can help to diffuse heated conversations, or prevent conversations from escalating. This is a great lesson for us.

For those interested, the other two agreements are: Be impeccable with your word and always do your best.

Book List

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book, Don Miguel Ruiz

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• Seven Tips for Difficult Conversations (businessweek.com)
• 6 Steps to Better Communication (psychcentral.com)

Excerpt April/May 2007 Ambeck Edge

If you love to read books, challenging economics times should not be a reason for you not to enjoy your pastime. Listed below are websites where you can download free ebooks, from the classics to more contemporary works. Take some time to explore these websites because I am sure that you will find many books to please your literary palate.

Project Gutenberg

Scribd

Read Print

Wowio

Questia

YouPublish

Anova

Great Books and Classics

Get Free Ebooks

Ebook Mall

As a bonus, in the related posts and articles by Zemanta sections are additional places for you to find free ebooks. Feed your mind and let me know what you think. If you know of other places to find free books or other resources to expand your mind please let me know.

Related Posts

Best Places to Get Free Books – The Ultimate Guide

Five Best Places to Read and Download English Classic Books

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• Free eBooks (justgottasharethis.info)
• All Things Impossible by Dalton Reed – Free #eBook (manybooks.net)
• Top 10 Websites for Free eBooks (taragana.com)
• Top 25 Free e-books Sites, the Definitive List (rotorblog.com)

Photo Credits: Avil Beckford

Review of The PhotoReading Whole Mind System by Paul Scheele

PhotoReading, a term coined by Paul Scheele, is “mentally photographing” the printed page at rates exceeding 25,000 words per minute. According to Scheele, “The PhotoReading process bypasses the conscious mind and sends the information to storage bins in the other-than-conscious. This means that when you are PhotoReading you will have little or no conscious knowledge of the materials. It is all there some place, but consciously you may not know it. Don’t worry, as long as you can “activate” it to the conscious mind so that you can use the information however you use information.”

The PhotoReading System which is comprised of five steps: preparing, previewing, PhotoReading, activating, and rapid reading, are actually options that you can use depending on what your needs are.

Preparing
In the preparation stage, explicitly state your purpose for reading the material then enter into a state of relaxed alertness.

Previewing
Survey your reading material quickly, looking for about 20 trigger words, words that are repeated, in the sub-title, highlighted and so on. Decide if it’s necessary to read further.

PhotoReading
Ask yourself why you want to PhotoRead the material, relax your body, calm your mind and confidently flip through your reading material.

Activating
Allow time to elapse before you enter into the activation stage. Let the information incubate, then probe your mind by asking yourself questions about the material. Super read the parts that attract you.

Rapid Reading

Quickly move through your reading material from start to finish, at a speed comfortable to you. Zip quickly through the information that you’ve established to be unimportant and spend more time on more important information.

Scheele suggests that to manage your time effectively, you should sort all your reading material into levels of priority, handle paper only once, always have reading material with you – you never know when you’ll have a few minutes, and preview everything that’s important.

Five – 1 Great Ideas

1. When the best readers read, they do so in an active, purposeful, questioning and fully engaged manner
2. To effectively read, you must begin with a clear sense of purpose, why are you reading the material and what do you hope to accomplish?
3. Set specific reading goals
4. After you’ve read important information, create a visual diagram of the key ideas

The PhotoReading Whole Mind System has some very good information, but the concepts may be somewhat foreign to most people. I recommend that you read it, but I think that for you to understand and use the new concepts, you’ll need to follow-up with a seminar on the topic.

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Before you answer this question, you have to understand how I define Invisible Mentors. Here is my definition of Invisible Mentors from my concept paper.

“An Invisible Mentor is a training tool as well as a different way of thinking, to move professionals from one stage of their life to a higher one through the systematic use of books, interviews, conversations and articles.  An Invisible Mentor awakens the “sleeping” genius within. To achieve this goal requires reading the right books, listening to the right interviews and conversing with the right people.”

So, who are your Invisible Mentors? My Invisible Mentors are:

Julia Conn Watt (She taught me to be a better listener, which is a critical skill for success)

Jim Rohn ( I have learned a lot from his books and training programs)

Earl Nightingale (His training programs – Lead the Field and The Strangest Secret have inspired me)

Key to Yourself (This book by Venice Bloodworth profoundly impacted me)

The Magic of Thinking Big (This Book by Dr. David Schwartz is another that profoundly impacted me)

As I grow and evolve as a person, and unleash more of the genius within me, I suspect that my Invisible Mentors will change. At this point in time, who are your five Invisible Mentors and why? Let us learn from each other!

Photo Credits: Avil Beckford

"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge." Analects of Confucius

How do you become the person you were meant to be? How do you better your situation? How do you snag that promotion, when promotions are in short supply?

Simple!

You have to separate yourself from the rest.

One way to separate yourself is to expand your body of knowledge, know more than the next person. Knowledge isn’t power, contrary to what many may say or think, it’s what you do with the knowledge that gives you power.

And, being good at one thing is no longer enough, you have to be good at many things. The more you work on expanding your knowledge base, the better your ability to problem solve and make better decisions because you have more data to access.

And when you work hard at becoming more knowledgeable, suddenly you start to feel lucky because opportunity after opportunity presents itself. But, opportunities are everywhere if you just take the time to look. Slow down, and breathe in what’s around you, take time to reflect on everything and you will be amazed at what you see and feel.

The following three websites where knowledge rules are just waiting for you to discover and explore them.

Ted.org
How Stuff Works
Infed.org

Take a visit, open your mind and expect to be fed. For starters, you could listen to Jill Bolte Taylor talk about her Stroke of Insight, learn how your brain impacts your chances for survival in the wilderness, or read about Greek scientist and philosopher Aristotle. The possibilities are endless and invisible mentors are all around you. Let us know what gems you have discovered. How can you apply what you have learned to your life? 

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Photo credit: Avil Beckford