Book Review: "Crucial Conversations"

"Crucial Conversations" is a book that helps you prepare for those discussions where the "stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong." These could be at work or at home and they are unfortunately often either handed poorly or simply avoided. But there is another way, which is to learn how to talk openly about high-stakes, emotional controversial topics. And to make sure that you gain something from this book they do something that most business/personal development book do not--they distill the key message down to one very easy-to-understand point: To be good at handling crucial conversations the one thing you must absolutely do is to "find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open."

That's it. The rest of the book is spent helping you understand how to do that--a learnable skill.

The book also covers what happens when things go wrong and adopt such behaviors and you face masking, avoiding, withdrawing, controlling, labeling, or attacking. These speak for themselves but I think it's safe that we all encounter these on a regular basis and truth be told we probably employ them ourselves.

Given the importance of communication in our lives, "Crucial Conversations" is a worthy addition to one's library.

Amazon link: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High