Books about Painful from Amazon.com

In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin.  Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch.

“How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered.

In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings.  And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.

Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve.  And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice.  His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings.

Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world.  When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen.

As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world.  Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion..
Price: $12.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Perhaps the book's most crucial chapter posits that the best way to get over the loss of love is to focus on the "love" more than the "loss." That may seem impossible, especially if the bum took off with your best friend, your life savings, and your Lyle Lovett CDs, but Gray didn't get to be a household name because the advice in his Venus and Mars books doesn't work. Remembering only the bad parts, Gray says, leaves you with an important part of your emotional being closed to new business.

As for the Venus and Mars stuff, that comes in the second half of the book, when Gray looks at how men and women start new relationships from different points of view, with different priorities (a man might want to have fun with no strings attached; a woman might carry with her a lengthy list of requirements for her next partner, a list that excludes virtually all available men).

If you've never read Gray's work before, you have to be prepared to check your cynicism at the door. This is earnest stuff, but it's also based on decades of experience counseling clients. He's not one of those photogenic, nine-times-divorced shrinklets who's telling you how to conduct your relationships without any real clue of what makes love last. This is the real package: nothing glib, nothing quick and easy, nothing you could've figured out from a "Love Is..." cartoon..
Price: $5.73 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A profoundly moving guide to personal and family growth that teaches us it is healthier to forgive than to blame.

For a generation, pop psychology and psychotherapy have promised healing and self-fulfillment through examination of our own childhood stories. We have been encouraged to indulge our interest in ourselves, to embrace our victimhood, and to reclaim and nurture the wounded inner child. But psychiatrist Barry Grosskopf has found a different path. Drawing on the ancient biblical tradition of the Fifth Commandment, Forgive Your Parents, Heal Yourself asks adult children to reframe their family's painful legacy as a way to free themselves from childhood hurt and trauma.

In this exceptionally wise and refreshing departure from standard recovery and relationship books, Grosskopf emphasizes the healing power and benefits of forgiveness and shows how adult children can approach their parents with open hearts -- without recrimination or blame -- to hear the stories of their family's past. Informed by both his experiences with patients and his command of issues in psychology and neuroscience, Grosskopf has developed a sophisticated and powerful plan through which children can repair their own character and relationships by respecting and understanding even hurtful caregivers. He suggests the questions to ask our parents and grandparents about their childhoods, how and when to ask them, and how to use the information to change self-destructive patterns.

Drawing upon a range of case studies and personal stories, including his own family experiences, Grosskopf leads us through a series of chapters that provide insight into the most difficult problems that can arise in a troubled childhood, from untimely loss to depression to food and drug addictions. We discover a novel approach that is particularly effective with survivors of the Holocaust, sexual abuse, and abandonment, for whom traditional self-help techniques rarely work. Forgive Your Parents, Heat Yourself encourages us to restore relationships with our parents, siblings, partners, and children and gain greater health, happiness, and emotional wholeness along the way..
Price: $24.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Under what conditions should we expect states to do things radically differently all of a sudden? In this book, David Welch seeks to answer this question, constructing a theory of foreign policy change inspired by organization theory, cognitive and motivational psychology, and prospect theory. He then "test drives" the theory in a series of comparative case studies in the security and trade domains: Argentina's decision to go to war over the Falklands/Malvinas vs. Japan's endless patience with diplomacy in its conflict with Russia over the Northern Territories; America's decision to commit large-scale military force to Vietnam vs. its ultimate decision to withdraw; and Canada's two abortive flirtations with free trade with the United States in 1911 and 1948 vs. its embrace of free trade in the late 1980s.

Painful Choices has three main objectives: to determine whether the general theory project in the field of international relations can be redeemed, given disappointment with previous attempts; to reflect on what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of general theory; and to inform policy. Welch argues that earlier efforts at general theory erred by aiming to explain state behavior, which is an intractable problem. Instead, since inertia is the default expectation in international politics, all we need do is to explain changes in behavior. Painful Choices shows that this is a tractable problem with clear implications for intelligence analysts and negotiators.