The World's Best Book Summaries
What is the fool’s choice in Crucial Conversations? How do you avoid making a fool’s choice in crucial conversations? A fool’s choice in crucial conversations refers to believing that you only have two bad choices in a conversation. Keep reading to learn how to avoid the fool’s choice in crucial conversations, and how to reframe your communication so you can make better choices.
What is a conversation style? How does a conversation style alter how you talk about difficult topics or have crucial conversations? During crucial conversations, conversation style can mean a significant difference in communication. But you can learn to take someone else’s conversation style into account, and learn to communicate better.
What are contrasting statements? Why do you need them to have healthy communication skills? Contrasting statements are a technique used in crucial conversations to help deal with misunderstandings. When used correctly, contrasting statements can help you repair trust and get back on track.
Humans have free will to decide how they will respond in any situation- also known as free will. But many people believe that they are bound to their past or their circumstances. This is called determinism. How does understanding free will vs determinism help us to make proactive decisions? Understanding the space between stimulus and response can slow down decision making, and enable you to choose how you respond to any situation.
All businesses need to motivate customers to do something, whether that’s buying a product or a service. Does manipulative advertising work? What are the most common strategies of manipulative advertising? If you’re a buyer, how do you spot them? If you’re a seller, should you use them? We’ll cover the six most common manipulative advertising tactics. We’ll look at their pros and cons and discuss whether they actually work, or if there’s a more effective way to advertise.
How do consumers make purchasing decisions? As a buyer, are you aware of your decision-making process when you decide to buy something? As a seller, how can you exploit the psychology of how consumers make buying decisions? We’ll cover how consumers make buying decisions and why, in order to sell your product, you need to connect with buyers at the gut level. Learn why buying decisions aren’t always rational.
What is Paul Ekman’s FACS (facial action coding system)? What can it teach you about how transparent our emotions really are? Can you read someone’s feelings on her face? We’ll cover how Paul Ekman’s FACS system works and why you shouldn’t always judge people’s feelings or intentions by their facial expressions.
Why do we make assumptions about people, especially strangers? What are the consequences of the assumptions we make? Can we retrain ourselves and our interactions with strangers? We’ll cover Malcolm Gladwell’s theory about why we make assumptions about people, from his book Talking to Strangers. As we’ll see, it’s not hard to correct this tendency.
The primary reason that most people can’t immediately detect a lie is that human beings default to assuming truth in others. Is it possible to learn how to detect a lie? We’ll cover the reasons it’s difficult to know how to detect a lie, and we’ll look at why you’ve evolved to assume the best in people.
Do you know how to tell when someone is lying? Do you think you’re good at it? What does science tell us about our ability to accurately tell when someone is lying? Science says we’re not very good at how to tell when someone is lying. Learn when you’re better at it, and what red herrings throw you off course.