Self Help

A game-changing model for giving effective feedback to peers, employees, or even your boss–without offending or demotivating.

How are you supposed to tell someone that they’re not meeting expectations without crushing their spirit? Regular feedback, when delivered skillfully, can turn average performers into the hardest workers and stars into superstars. Yet many see it as an awkward chore: Recent studies have revealed 37% of managers dread giving feedback, and 65% of employees wish their managers gave more feedback.

This trail-blazing new model eliminates the guesswork. Dr. Therese Huston, the founding director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, discovered that the key to being listened to is to listen. First, find out what kind of feedback an employee wants most: appreciation, coaching, or evaluation. If they crave one, they’ll be more receptive once their need has been satisfied. Then Huston lays out counterintuitive strategies for delivering each type of feedback successfully, including:

Start by saying your good intentions out loud: it may feel unnecessary, but it makes all the difference.
Side with the person, not the problem: a bad habit or behavior is probably less entrenched than you think.
Give reports a chance to correct inaccurate feedback: they want an opportunity to talk more than they want you to be a good talker.

This handbook will make a once-stressful ordeal feel natural, and, by greasing the wheels of regular feedback conversations, help managers improve performance, trust, and mutual understanding.

Just as there is junk food, there is junk love. And like junk food, junk love is fast, convenient, attractively packaged, widely available, superficially tasty—and leaves you hungering for more. And both junk food and junk love require enormous amounts of willpower to resist.

Social media and online dating sites have become the supermarkets of our relationship lives. You have to wade through rows of cupcakes and potato chips to find the produce aisle, where those relationships grounded in intimacy and trust live—the ones worth your investment. A diet book for romantic relationships, Love Rules first asks women to re-assess the way they think about their relationships, and then helps them use that newfound awareness to navigate their love lives more successfully in this very modern, fast-paced—and often lonely—digital age.

In these pages leading media exec and former Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire Joanna Coles provides a series of simple guidelines for finding worthwhile love: fifteen rules—love “hacks.” She also explains how to use dating apps effectively to expand real world connections and how to avoid DADD—dating attention—deficit disorder, where the tantalizing promise of someone better appears to be only the next swipe away.

A revelatory book on rethinking change, creating a rugged and flexible mindset and identity, and developing habits for life’s intensifying flux.

From social disruptions like economic recessions, pandemics, and new technologies to individual disruptions like getting married, career transitions, and becoming a parent, we undergo change and transformation—both good and bad—regularly. Change is not the exception, it’s the rule. Yet we endlessly fight it, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self.

Master of Change flips this script on its head and offers a path for embracing and even growing from life’s constant instability.

Brad Stulberg, sustainable excellence expert, coach, and bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness,offers a new model that describes change as an ongoing cycle of order, disorder, and reorder—yes, we return to stability, but that stability is somewhere new. Drawing on modern science, ancient wisdom, and daily practice, Stulberg offers concrete principles for developing a mindset called rugged flexibility, along with habits and practices to implement it. Along the way, Stulberg reveals:

-How to be in conversation with change instead of it happening to you.
-The importance of expectations
-Why cultivating a rugged yet flexible sense of self is key to a strong identity.
-How to take productive action during a challenge.
-The paradox of both making meaning and moving forward.

In the end, Stulbergreshapes our entire perception of change and shows us how to grow in its midst—ultimately helping us move forward better, stronger, and wiser than we were before.

Should I move in with this person? Should I quit my job? When is the “right time” to have another child? All these life-altering questions at the juncture of money and love can be overwhelming. Often, we answer them either by staying overly rational or by only listening to our – at times fickle – hearts. Hardly ever, when faced with daunting questions, do we have the keys to combine both head and heart in a balanced and fulfilling way.

Labor economist and Stanford Professor Emerita Myra Strober and social innovation leader Abby Davisson know that in our daily lives money and love are interdependent. Whereas most decision-making guides focus only on one or the other, Money and Love shows us and our loved ones how to consider them jointly using the original, step-by-step 5Cs method:

– CLARIFY: Consider what you want vs. don’t through self-reflection.
– COMMUNICATE: Include input from those who will be impacted by your decisions in your decision-making process.
– CHOICES: Broaden your perspectives to open up your options.
– CHECK IN: Ask around for advice, guidance, and resources.
– CONSEQUENCES: Consider the effects of your decisions and how that may impact all aspects of your life.

At a time when we are experiencing the most significant shift in work-life balance in decades – marked by remote work, the Great Reshuffle, and a mass reconfiguring of family dynamics and social/professional networks – Strober and Davisson’s framework offers simple and effective steps to empower readers to make the best strategic decisions without having to sacrifice their careers or personal lives.