What I’ve Been Reading

This book is so much fun to read, not least because of the clever cartoons interspersed throughout to illustrate various points. It’s a very clear, common sense approach to working with emotions in the workplace. The chapters cover the topics of health, motivation, decision making, teams, communication, culture and leadership. While the book does reference […]

In this book, the authors Jean Poitras and Susan Raines, present a compilation of “best practices” from expert mediators across the world in dealing with common mediation challenges. They surveyed 186 experienced mediators across the world and from these results identified the most common challenges they faced in their practice. They then selected 101 of

Dr Donna Hicks is part of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has been involved in many large-scale international conflicts, working alongside people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Elders. In this book, she introduces her work on the role dignity plays in healing and reconciling relationships in conflict. She explains

With all our Conflict Leadership Group conversations about avoidance last month, I went back to this book because it has some really useful content about avoidance. Here are some of the key points about avoidance Mayer discusses in this book. People are endlessly inventive in how they avoid conflict. Sometimes avoiding conflict is wise and

This latest book by two transformative mediators provides a valuable addition to the transformative mediation bookshelf, with an in-depth look into the way that transformative mediators perceive self determination in mediation, and how they support it in practice. The book includes many case studies to demonstrate how this underlying principle works in various situations, including

This book is a very similar book to another book I reviewed recently, The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith. Like that book, this is a dictionary of emotions, with entries in alphabetical order, and includes all kinds of emotions terms from the distant past to the present day, and from many different

In my book Conflict Coaching Fundamentals: Working with conflict stories, I explain how one of the important shifts that people need to make in order to develop a constructive mindset towards conflict is the shift from certainty to uncertainty. The challenge is that uncertainty is an uncomfortable place to be, and certainty is comfortable, even

Regret. We’ve all experienced it. It’s not what you’d call a pleasant emotion. It also tends to promote rumination and going over and over what we wished we had done differently. This is a similar process of counterfactual thinking that is common with other emotions such as guilt and shame. For people who work in

As I was researching for our new Working With Emotions in Conflict online course, DeSteno’s name kept coming up in relation to the importance of emotions, and especially social emotions, for success. David DeSteno writes a lot on the concept of intertemporal choice (I wrote about this concept in conflict in one of my LinkedIn