Business Book Summaries

If you feel trapped in the same old issues in your personal life or your business and need to find a way out, this book will show you “how you do dat.” There is a common thread that runs through all creative techniques that can be used to master any situation. This book will show you how to find and use that common thread. The book also gives examples that demonstrate how to use creative techniques to master your business and personal life:

• How to use the blog in a collaborative group to solve problems and increase productivity
• How to use your intuition and imagination to get you where you want to go
• How to find the right job
• How to use cycles to time business expansions, contractions, the stock and commodity markets
• How to use simplicity to guide you to the best path
• How to select and function in a collaborative group

It doesn’t make any difference if you are a business executive, an entrepreneur, a stock and commodity trader, or an individual; the creative techniques will all work the same way. These creative techniques have been used by Albert Einstein and others throughout the ages to find answers to their questions and to create what they want.

This book makes available all the creative techniques you need to experience and incorporate into your real life to enable you to start stepping into a world of unlimited possibilities.

A summary of the executive business book “The Mighty Mesa”, A Tested Options Strategy Designed to Never Lose Money (and Just Might Make 36%), by author Dr. Terry F. Allen. Please visit BusinessSummaries.com.

Healing wounded relationships must start with communication. In all troubled relationships, especially in marriage and family, the issues involved can be numerous: children, finances, sex, in-laws, and even pets. Misunderstandings can be overwhelming and misinterpretations, frustrating. But no matter what may be the difficulties and experiences, the bottom line problem is usually the breakdown due to lack of communication. We are not connecting and are usually out of sync with one another. As a result, we can’t know each other.

The basic goal of communication is revelation, not resolution. If resolution is the primary goal of communication, then you’re bound to get nowhere. If revelation is the goal, then there is hope and the possibility of resolution. Most often, the resolution of the problem lies in the revelation one makes to another because, revelation leads to greater understanding of each other.

It is with such communication that we develop trust and build the foundation of relationships.

COMMUNICATION IN CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS

As we learn to communicate effectively, especially in our closer relationships, we will not only get to know each other better but also live together harmoniously by supporting each other deal with frustrations. What kills relationships is our tendency to avoid communication about the important issues and feelings of our daily lives. The system breaks down, and we become distant from one another.

WHERE CAN WE LEARN TO COMMUNICATE?

Practically, the only place we learn how to communicate is in our family of origin. We bring into our relationships the patterns of communicating we observed our parents practicing and that we practiced with them and our siblings.

HOW WE COMMUNICATE

How we communicate with one another is also of the utmost importance. The words we choose and our tone of voice can either hinder or enhance the message we would like to impart. Even the time and place of communicating can be significant factors. Remember, we must never fail to attach the appropriate feelings to a statement.

COMMUNICATING WITH “I” STATEMENTS

Communication studies show that speaking in “I” statements is always more effective than using “you” statements. People on the receiving end of “you” statements can feel under attack and become defensive. They tend to block out what they are hearing, take on a defensive tone or concentrate on preparing a rebuttal.

SELF-COMMUNICATION

If we are to be effective communicators, we must also be good with communicating with ourselves. We talk to ourselves a lot although we are not always aware of it. This is important in the process of getting to know ourselves.

Many of us feel uncomfortable revealing to others – and even to ourselves – what lies beneath the surface of our day-to-day consciousness. We get out of bed in the morning and begin again where we left off yesterday, attacking life as if we were waging a campaign of control and survival.

All the while, deep within us, flows an endless river of pure energy. It sings a low and rich song that hints of joy and liberation and peace. Up on top, as we make our way through life, we may sense the presence of the river. We may feel a subtle longing to connect with it.

But we are usually moving too fast, or we are distracted, or we fear disturbing the status quo of our surface thoughts and feelings. It can be unsettling to dip below the familiar and descend into the more mysterious realms of the soul.

We may not be able to hold it in our hands, but the soul is real. We may not know what form it will take when our bodies die, but I believe the soul lives on. If you are in the habit of negating the longings of the soul, or if the idea of having a soul makes you nervous, or if you regard the whole subject with raised eyebrows, you may want to consider this advice: When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

If we don’t listen to the voice of the soul, it sings a stranger tune. If we don’t go looking for what lies beneath the surface of our lives, the soul comes looking for us.

Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can hand us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It’s difficult though when you’re in the middle ofa painful transition, to mine the experience for inner growth. And when your life falls apart, it’s a lot easier to blame someone else, to rail against fate, or to the shutdown to the hopeful messages carried on the winds of change. Sometimes, when friends try to help by saying, “There’s a reason for everything,” or “It’s a blessing in disguise,” you just want to run away, or you want to say, “Yeah, if it’s such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?”

Everything that happens to us in life is a blessing – whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy. It is true: There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments. At the end of a dark night of the soul is the beginning of a new life. But it’s hard to accept that when you’re in pain, and it’s tiresome to hear about from someone who’s not.

Life is always changing: we are always changing. We live in a river of change, and a river of change lives within us. Every day, we are given a choice: we can relax and float in the direction that the water flows, or we can swim hard against it. If we go with the river, the energy of a thousand mountain streams will be with us, filling our hearts with courage and enthusiasm. If we resist the river, we will feel rankled and tired as we tread water, stuck in the same place.

“I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

BestSummaries.com is a book summary service that provides summaries of top self-help, motivational and inspirational books where you can learn–in minutes– what it takes to live life and live it well.BestSummaries sends out one book summary every week in PDF, PDA, audio and/or print formats.For more information, please go to http://www.bestsum.com

Emotions matter.

We cannot stop having emotions any more than we can stop having thoughts. The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions in those with whom we negotiate – an in ourselves.

You negotiate every day, whether about where to go for dinner, how much to pay for a secondhand bicycle, or when to terminate an employee. And you have emotions all the time. These may be positive emotions like joy or contentment, or negative emotions like anger, frustration and guilt.

Beyond Reason offers straightforward, powerful advice for dealing with emotions in your toughest negotiations, whether with a difficult colleague or your angry spouse. You will discover five “core concerns” that lie at the heart of most emotional challenges. And more important, you will learn how to address these concerns to improve your relationships and get the results you want. The advice builds on previous work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, the group that brought you the groundbreaking Getting to Yes. World-renowned negotiator Roger Fisher teams with psychologist Daniel Shapiro, an expert on the emotional dimension of negotiation, to bring you this indispensable new classic.

BestSummaries.com is a book summary service that provides summaries of top self-help, motivational and inspirational books where you can learn–in minutes– what it takes to live life and live it well. BestSummaries sends out one book summary every week in PDF, PDA, audio and/or print formats.For more information, please go to http://www.bestsum.com

Beyond Reason

Using Emotions as You Negotiate

By

Roger Fisher & Daniel Shapiro

The Big Idea

Emotions matter.

Beyond Reason offers straightforward, powerful advice for dealing with emotions in even your toughest negotiations, whether with a difficult colleague or your angry spouse. You will discover five “core concerns” that lie at the heart of most emotional challenges. The advice builds on previous work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, the group that brought you the groundbreaking Getting to Yes. World-renowned negotiator Roger Fisher teams with psychologist Daniel Shapiro, an expert on the emotional dimension of negotiation, to bring you this indispensable new classic.

Why You Need This Book

This book will help you discover how to use emotions to turn a disagreement, big or small, professional or personal, into an opportunity for mutual gain.

Emotions Can be Obstacles to Negotiations

None of us is spared the reality of emotions. They can ruin any possibility of a wise agreement. What makes emotions so troubling?

They can divert attention from substantive matters. Your attention shifts from reaching a satisfying agreement to protecting yourself or attacking the other.

They can damage a relationship. Strong emotions can overshadow your thinking, leaving you at risk of damaging your relationship.

Careful observers of your emotional reaction may learn how much you value proposals, issues, and your relationship with them. In an international or everyday negotiation, positive emotions can be essential.

Positive emotions can make it easier to meet substantive interests. With positive emotions, you are motivated to do more. Things get done more efficiently as you and others work jointly and with increased emotional commitment.

Positive emotions need not increase your risk of being exploited. Avoid inhibiting positive emotions; rather, check with your head and your gut before making decisions.

Address the Concern, Not the Emotion

The core concerns are human wants that are important to almost everyone in virtually every negotiation. Rather than trying to deal directly with scores of changing emotions affecting you and others, you can turn your attention to five core concerns: appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role.

You can use them as levers to stimulate positive emotions in yourself and in others. If you have time, you can also use them as a lens to understand which concern is unmet and to tailor your actions to address the unmet concern.

The core concerns are simple enough to use immediately, and sophisticated enough to utilize in complex situations. A negotiation that involves multiple parties and high stakes requires an advanced understanding of the five core concerns.

Express Appreciation

Appreciation is a core concern. If people feel honestly appreciated, they are more likely to work together and less likely to act hostile.

You can appreciate by:

Understanding a person’s point of view;

Communicating your understanding through words or actions.

Build Affiliation

With enhanced affiliation, working together becomes easier and more productive.

Structural connections. You can strengthen structural connections by finding links that you have in common with someone or by creating new links.

Personal connections. By talking about personal matters, you can reduce the personal distance between you.

Acknowledge Status

With a little self-preparation, you can identify your areas of high social and particular status and work to improve or develop new ones so that you can approach your negotiations with a sense of confidence.

Since every person has multiple areas of high status, there is no need to compete with others over status. Appreciate the high status of others where relevant and deserved, and feel proud of your own areas of expertise and achievement.

If you truly appreciate your own status, you need not worry about what others think of you. In turn, you can acknowledge the status of others without cost. and treating others with appropriate respect often makes them respect you.

Choose a Fulfilling Role

You are free to expand the activities within your conventional role. In almost any role, you can focus your attention on aspects that are boring, dull, frustrating, and time-consuming.

Time and again, you also are free to choose temporary roles that empower you and foster joint work.

Reshaping your role can take effort. Over time, you can modify your role to your liking.

Soothe Yourself: Cool Down Your Emotional Temperature

Here are some suggestions of things you can do to soothe escalating emotions:

Slowly count backward from ten.

Breathe deeply three times, in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Pause. During the break, relax. Think about how to move the negotiation forward.

Visualize a relaxing place like a sandy beach, a sunlit forest, or a symphony performance.

Change the subject, at least briefly.

Adopt a relaxed position: Sit back, cross your ankles, let your hands rest on your lap or the table.

Let upsetting or offensive comments fly by and hit the wall behind you.

Call to mind a good walk-away alternative that you have prepared.

On Being Prepared

Preparation improves the emotional climate of a negotiation. A well-prepared negotiator walks into a meeting with emotional confidence about the substantive and process issues, as well as with clarity about how to enlist each party’s positive emotions.

There are two important activities involved in effective preparation:

Establishing a routine structure of preparation. You want to prepare in terms of the process of the negotiation, the substantive issues, and the emotions of each party.

Learning from past negotiations. Experience is of little future value unless you learn from it. After a negotiation, review the interaction in terms of process, substance, and emotions.

Conclusion

We all have emotions all the time. We become so busy thinking that we let our emotions take care of themselves.

Most negotiators treat emotions as an obstacle to clear, rational thought. As a result, we do not realize the opportunity afforded by positive emotions.

Although the Declaration of Independence emphasizes the “pursuit of happiness,” there seems to be remarkably little organized common sense about that pursuit.

Using the core concerns wisely will improve the quality of your relationships at work and at home. You can turn a negotiation from a stressful, worrisome interaction into a side-by-side dialogue where each of you listens, learns, and respects the other.

You improve your outcome.

And instead of inspiring resentment, the process inspires hope.

BestSummaries.com is a book summary service that provides summaries of top self-help, motivational and inspirational books where you can learn–in minutes– what it takes to live life and live it well. BestSummaries sends out one book summary every week in PDF, PDA, audio and/or print formats.For more information, please go to http://www.bestsum.com

Making the wrong choices – now that would be tragic! Nevertheless, as dumb as it sounds, that’s exactly what we do. So often God shows us the consequences of making a bad choice or walking through life with a bad attitude, and yet we choose that attitude anyway. Then when relationships fail, when we lose friends or forfeit a great opportunity, it really should be no surprise.

Deposit into your heart the necessary ingredients to develop a life-changing attitude. Make that choice right now. It may come slowly at first, but don’t give up. The new attitude may feel awkward at first, but practice until it becomes natural.

You are only one attitude away from a great life, a successful marriage and a promising future!

Your attitude is the set of your sail. You must choose the direction you want your life to travel and set your heart accordingly. There will be storms, but it will be your attitude toward those storms that drives you in one direction or another, not the storm itself.

Each of us will be surrounded with problems at times, and we will often find ourselves steeped in hot water. But remember that the event will soon pass. The event is temporary, but the effects of how we respond in the midst of the event will last much longer. A poor attitude in the midst of the storm can cause the storm to rage inside for a lifetime.

You will see problems everywhere, but don’t allow your eyes to remain focused on them. Look for answers and that’s what you will see. Develop a new perspective – a fresh view of your problems. Solve them; don’t dwell on them. You’ll be tempted to remain in a slough of despair. It feels good, sometimes to be pitied, and many of us look for reasons to remain in our unhappy circumstances. But don’t do it.

Failure is note when you get knocked down. Failure is when you refuse to get back up. Don’t hang around the swamps of despair. They will only skew your attitude and impede your resilience. Learn to bounce back quickly.

So when you go through hell, don’t stop to take pictures.

Though we may have excelled in our approach to life, we must continue to develop every day. We need to practice having an excellent attitude in each and every endeavor, for it will always be true that we can improve the way we see problems, people and life.

Even if it’s only 1 percent each day, improve something about yourself. Sharpen something! If you can improve just 1 percent a day, that means over one year you will have improved more than 300 percent for your life. Just 1 percent a day!

Look for something to improve about yourself. It may be the way you stand or comb your hair or something to improve your hygiene. It could be the way you shake your hands or the way you look at people in the eye when you talk with them. It may be something about your posture or your speech. Instead of responding requests by muttering, “Yeah, okay,” say, “Sure I would love to!” When someone asks for your help, instead of replying, “I guess so,” say, “I would be more than honored to help!”

Raise the bar!

BestSummaries.com is a book summary service that provides summaries of top self-help, motivational and inspirational books where you can learn–in minutes– what it takes to live life and live it well.BestSummaries sends out one book summary every week in PDF, PDA, audio and/or print formats.For more information, please go to http://www.bestsum.com.

The value of vision cannot be overstated. Don’t allow this personally significant word to become something trite because of its overuse. Value the vision God desires to ignite in you because His vision provides a strategy that guarantees a journey of fulfillment and joy. Step into what is already designed for you.

Vision helps you envision the future as it releases you from your past and causes you to look beyond the present. Again, be reminded of Dr. David Yongi Cho’s powerful statement, “Show me your vision, and I’ll show you your future.”

Without vision, there will be no spark – just a status quo, maintenance lifestyle. You will end up doing what you think you should do instead of what you were created to do. Doing what you should do gets old quickly. Doing what you were created to do is exciting. Vision is the motivation; it’s the desire to do what God created you to do.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you’ve already mastered, you will never grow or live beyond where you are right now. Continual growth is the difference between winning and losing. A winner presses on to grow, change and expand, always stretching beyond the ordinary. Everyone knows you can’t win a race if you stop and stand still.

If you can’t think of uplifting, positive words to describe yourself, then you aren’t seeing yourself as God sees you or thinking the way God thinks. Sometimes our thinking becomes warped by limitations placed on us by other people, by their unbelief, their small ways of thinking, their doubts, borders, limits, and fears.

Sometimes we put limitations on ourselves and then close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist. Such limitations are really barriers between what you “see” you are able to accomplish and where you actually are. What you see may be factual, real, and true but, unreachable because of the invisible barrier either you or someone else has erected in front of you.

You can enjoy a rich life, full of satisfaction and joy, when you choose to live Life On Purpose. The discovery and pursuit of your calling gives meaning to your every day, purpose to your actions, and hope in the face of discouragement. It starts with a belief in divine intervention – because it cannot be done without God.

Art Sepulveda masterfully reveals new thinking and action strategies that will allow you to let go and let God move you forward into your destiny.

We are not to worry about tomorrow but it doesn’t mean that we need not plan for it. We all have a destiny to fulfill and a plan to carry it out. Take yourself upward, one level at a time. As you apply the principles in this book, it is the author’s wish that you will discover your destiny and press through every obstacle that may be holding you back.

Don’t be contented with where you currently are. Keep pushing and reaching forward to those things that are ahead.

All that God has for you to achieve is just out there waiting for you to make the effort to attain it. It won’t come to you automatically; you must strive, push forward and fight for it.

This book will inspire you to speak new words, believe new things, and go for all that life offers you. How you think, talk, and act will be changed by this book.

All these people were very different from one another. A good number of them were in business or other arenas of leadership, but they had different backgrounds, different personalities, different economic circumstances, and different abilities. However, they were the same in that they shared this particular way of handling life and work. And that commonality is the déjà vu experience.

For successful leaders, the invisible world is where the real life is. The same is true at all levels of leadership in the business world. Every blockbuster deal, every new rung on the corporate ladder, every project design, every company merger, and every successful sales campaign begins in the invisible soul of human beings. Leadership success is the process of digging up the treasures of the invisible soul in order to bring dreams, desires, and talents into the visible world.

Déjà vu leaders evaluate almost everything they do in this way. They see every behavior and decision as links in a larger chain, steps in a direction that has a destination. And they see these links in directions, the good and the bad. They think way to attain the good things they want in life and to avoid the bad things they don’t want. In short, they rarely do anything without thinking of the ultimate consequences. They play the whole movie, so to speak.

Déjà vu leaders tend to call on themselves as the first source to correct difficult situations. It doesn’t matter whether they think they are to blame or not. Even if someone else is at fault, they take initiative to address the problem and seek a solution. Whatever the answer may be, déjà vu leaders make a move.

Déjà vu leaders are different. They value the little increments, the tiny steps. Wanting it now keeps you from having it. Taking the long road, one tiny step at a time, will actually get you there faster because you will not lose time by trying shortcuts.

Déjà vu leaders have transcended the need for revenge. Their first goal is to make things better for the other person or group. The other’s benefit is their utmost concern. That does not mean they have no interest in their own benefits. It simply means that in their treatment of others, their goal is to do well by them regardless of how they are treated. They don’t play fair; they play right.

Déjà vu leaders go against the odds if the odds are against what is right. They are willing to be the odd one, risking loss of approval in order to do the right thing. They understand that the approval of others does not go very far in making one truly fulfilled. It may be nice for a moment, but getting up everyday and doing what you believe in is much more lasting.

The principles are available to everyone. Do not see leadership success as a goal that you cannot attain or a prize only for special or lucky people. Success is never embodied in a person, but in the ways of wisdom that transcend any one individual. What déjà vu leaders do is find those ways and practice them.

Be encouraged to embark on a path of putting them into practice into your own life and becoming a déjà vu leader.