“Common sense is not the property of any religion.” – Thubten Chodron

Anger is one of the most common emotions in our society. If we just look around at the current political climate in our country we can see that anger is the prevailing emotion. And on a personal level, many of us become angry far more often than we become joyful, or at the very least far more often than we would like.

Thubten Chodron, a Tibetin Buddhist Nun, addresses anger in her relatively short but highly effective book, Working with Anger. Chodron is actually an American who grew up in LA and was educated at UCLA before finding Buddhism, and thus brings a Western cultural perspective to the topic. As you would expect from a practicing Buddhist who studied under the Dali Lama directly, she expresses no judgment of the emotion of anger, but simply discusses its origins and some effective ways of eliminating anger.

Chodron’s approach to managing anger is, not surprisingly, based on the Buddhist understanding of emotion and the mind. The Buddhist tradition views anger as an inherently negative and destructive emotion.

Unlike the Western concept of anger, Buddhists never assign positive attributes to anger. This does not mean that Buddhists view anger as “wrong” or as a “sin.” Becoming angry is not a reflection on the person. Anger simply is what it is at the moment… which is always destructive from the Buddhist perspective. Anger damages relationships, promotes bitterness, and most importantly distorts reality because it amplifies or projects negative qualities onto the target of our anger.

The Buddhist way of working with anger is not to express it, or to suppress it, but to replace it with patience. Expressing and suppressing anger represent to extremes, and neither actually resolves the negative emotion. Only by learning patience, which implies tolerance, compassion, and acceptance, can we overcome anger and other negative or destructive emotions.

After describing the Buddhist concept of anger, and its antidote of patience, Chodron discusses several specific actions and activities we can use to develop patience and overcome anger. Many of these actions resemble the Western psychology approach of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, such as recognizing the thoughts and perceptions that drive anger and countering them with positive, compassionate thoughts and perceptions. Central to developing our senses of patience, compassion and acceptance is self reflection through mediation. In fact, while Chodron does not mention it in Working with Anger, the approach is eerily similar to that of Cognitive Based Mindfulness, which also incorporates mediation as a key to overcoming negative emotions and healing the psyche.

As a final note on the book, I want to clarify that this is not a book on Buddhism. While Chodron approaches the topic of anger management from a Buddhist perspective, she does not evangelize (which would be inherently non Buddhist, anyway!) Whether you are Christian, Pagan, Jewish, Muslim… whatever faith you are, you can take away some valuable lessons from Chodron’s writings. I highly recommend this, as well as her other, books.

Gottman does it again. In The Relationship Cure he combines the insights gained from over 30 years of relationship counseling with the outcomes of literally thousands of case studies and the resultant research data to clearly and plainly describe a fundamental element that defines the way our relationships work: the bid.

Bidding in relationships is the way we attempt to connect with others. Bids happen in every relationship we have, whether they are long term or short term, emotional or non-emotional, transactional or collaborative, or any other type. The way we bid, and respond to bids, determines whether the relationship will grow, or not.

Again, bidding occurs in marriages, in work relationships, friendships, and even when you check out at the grocery store. Failure to bid, or respond to bids, in a manner that shows you are interested in the relationship – whatever type it is – most often leads to collapse of the relationship.

Gottman discusses in depth how to bid, and respond to bids, in ways that develop and deepen relationships of all types. For instance, he devotes an entire chapter to the 6 bid busters and how to avoid them. He provides exercises that help you identify how you bid and react to bids, as well as how your emotional heritage affects your bidding style. He also provides a chapter on your brain’s emotional command systems to help you identify how your thinking and behaviors affect your bidding style.

The combination of these exercises, and the plain language Gottman uses to describe the ins and outs of bidding, are sure to help anybody learn more about themselves, their friends, parners, work colleagues, and how to develop better relationships.

In short, The Relationship Cure is all about the bid… and the bid is what makes or breaks relationships. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence is my favorite book on NLP so far. Given the dozens of books I have read on the topic, I consider this to be a real accomplishment!

What I like most about this book is that it is not simply a rehash of NLP techniques learned in the standard NLP Practitioner courses offered worldwide. While Merlebvede, Bridoux and Vandamme cover all of the basic principles and techniques of NLP in depth, they take a step further and apply them to developing Emotional Intelligence.

It did not take me long to realize that the authors of 7 Steps are not only well qualified as teachers and practitioners of NLP, but as helping professionals as well. Each has a background in therapy and cognitive science, which explains the depth of explanation of the concepts included in the book.

Despite the depth of knowledge each of these professionals has, they still manage to keep the writing simple and non-technical, relating the concepts of NLP and Emotional Intelligence in a way that the average reader can easily understand.

This is not only a book that I will reference again and again as a hypnotherapist and trainee therapist; it is also a book that I intend to make required reading for the core curriculum of my upcoming LifeSkills training series.

I cannot recommend 7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence highly enough. Get it today and read it cover to cover over the next couple of weeks. You will be glad you did.!

There are a lot of books on communication out there.  This is not surprising given the role communication plays in our lives.  Think about it:  whether it’s verbal or nonverbal, what could we possibly accomplish without effective communication? Our species owes our ability to organize, to learn, even to survive on our ability to convey our thoughts, ideas and facts.  Our ability to communicate with each other is why we are at the top of the food chain.

Nonviolent Communications: Language of Life is one of the best books on communication I have read.  For many readers it may seem to start out in the clouds, with all of the talk about feelings, compassion and empathy, but stick with it and the reasons for this emphasis become clear in a dynamic method of communication that works.

One of the premises of nonviolent communication (NVC) is that our daily communications are typically characterized by demands, judgments, and diagnoses.  Such communication separates us from recognizing our needs, and blocks our ability to empathize with and understand the needs of others.  The result is we tend to communicate in terms of what is “right” and what is “wrong.”  This form of communication usually leads to frustration, misunderstandings, anger, depression and even violence.

NVC seeks to remove judgments from our communications, and enhance empathy and understanding of our needs and of the needs of those we communicate with.  Dr. Rosenberg outlines a four part NVC process that focuses on our observations, feelings, needs and requests.  This process is facilitated by expressing ourselves honestly through the four part process, and receiving messages from our counterparts empathically through the process. 

After discussing the NVC process and its components in detail, and how using the process can enhance our communications with others, Dr. Rosenberg then turns to discussing how we can apply the same processes to our own internal talk, or thinking processes, to make significant personal changes. 

I must admit, even as a mental health professional in training, it took me a few pages to really see the practicality of the NVC process.  I could immediately see the applications of NVC in the therapy room, but some of the concepts seemed a bit “unreal” to me at first.  But as I continued to read I began to understand  how powerful NVC could be in our daily lives.  In a lot of ways, the NVC process follows the simple pattern introduced by Covey many years ago – “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”  The difference is, Dr. Rosenberg expands on this premise to provide an actual process and means of doing so. 

I highly recommend Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.

Mark Joyner is a great teacher. There is no doubt about it. He writes in a very simple (almost simplistic) sort of way that may leave many readers wondering “what is the point?” But at the end of the chapter, if you hang in there through his personal rhetoric, political views, and fictitious examples, the point ultimately becomes clear and all that preceded it suddenly makes sense.

The question is not so much whether or not Mark is a good teacher, but more so about the validity of what he is teaching. Simple•ology is the first and only book I have read by Mark, and I have to admit for much of it I really struggled to remain engaged. This is not to say that there are not some valid lessons in Simple•ology. There are.

For instance, Mark spends a fair amount of time discussing how our thoughts, beliefs, language and experiences combine to form our model of the world. I have researched and written on these topics extensively in this blog and elsewhere, and I for the most part agree with Mark’s ideas.

Mark eventually, after writing several chapters on topics such as neural networking, focus and trances, links the creation of these models as representations of our own realities, to the notion of belief and behavioral flexibility. His “Utilitarian Model Flexibility” concept is undeniably powerful. In essence, Mark suggests that by accepting that your model of the world, which represents your reality, is not a true representation of reality, you may maintain the flexibility to change the model. In doing so, you retain flexibility of behavior and can better achieve your goals “at that precise time.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this notion, which is actually mirrored in a number of NLP presuppositions:

• The map is not the territory
• Everyone’s unique model of the world is equally valid
• The most flexible part of the system controls the system

However, what Mark does not provide is a viable tool for creating and maintaining such flexibility… at least not in his book. To be fair, there is a companion website that may hold those answers.

So, would I recommend Simple•ology? Sure, but with the caveat that while reading Simple•ology the reader should look out for the very manipulations Mark warns about in the text. I could not help but feel that Mark spent a fair amount of time selling a product as he did a system for self-improvement and personal development. Maybe that is ok. As I stated I have not really investigated the web site (the product) so I cannot comment on the quality of the content and exercises.

I can say, however, that what you will not get from Simple•ology is a free standing, or in depth, body of knowledge that will help you achieve the belief and behavioral flexibility Mark prescribes. The information and concepts are good, even if he takes a while to get to what I believe are the most important points about how we can create our own realities to serve our own needs.

I would suggest additional studies, particularly in the practice of NLP, which offers not only many of the same concepts, but also specific exercises and techniques to implement these concepts in your daily lives.

Overall I would recommend Simple•ology, but rate it 3 out of 5.