When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation badly and suffer the consequences; or check out Crucial Conversations and discover how to communicate best when it matters most. Crucial Conversations gives you the tools you need to step up to life's most difficult and important conversations, say what's on your mind, and achieve the positive resolutions you want.

The coauthors of the New York Times best-selling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: How we see ourselves. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past 15 years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice.

Life is a series of negotiations, whether or not you think of yourself as a negotiator. From seemingly insignificant daily decisions to major life choices, you negotiate every time you aim to persuade, argue over a decision, or resolve a conflict. But as negotiations and leadership expert Erica Ariel Fox reveals, the most important negotiations - the ones that determine the impact of our actions and the quality of our lives - are those we have with ourselves.

For decades we've been told the key to prosperity is to look out for number one. But recent science shows that to achieve durable success, we need to be more than just achievers; we need to be compassionate achievers. New research in biology, neuroscience, and economics has found that compassion - recognizing a problem or caring about another's pain and making a commitment to help - not only improves others' lives; it can transform our own.

When we align with circumstance, circumstance aligns with us. Using a cutting-edge scientific theory of synchronicity, Sky Nelson-Isaacs presents a model for living "in the flow" - a state of optimal functioning, creative thinking, and seemingly effortless productivity. Nelson-Isaacs explains how our choices create meaning, translating current and original ideas from theoretical physics and quantum mechanics into accessible, actionable steps that we can all take to live lives in better alignment with who we are and who we want to be.

Negotiation is a skill people need to use every day. In this audio exclusive, learn the negotiation skills required to navigate difficult situations that arise in everyday life. From buying a car to purchasing a home, one needs to know how to effectively negotiate, especially when the other party is a seasoned professional. Harvard professor Joshua N. Weiss, PhD, gives us to tools to negotiate when we have a major stake in the game or when we're perceived as the "weak consumer."

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear - but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including more than 200 interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions - and breakthrough insights - and how anyone can create them.

Have you ever been lied to? Of course you have, whether you knew it or not. Ever caught a spouse, business partner, parent, boss, or child brazenly lying right to your face? What if you could tell someone was lying, just by listening to them, and observing their action and behavior? Here's the first audiobook that gives you the tools to figure out what's really going on.

William Ury, co-author of the classic best seller on negotiation Getting to Yes, has taught tens of thousands of people from all walks of life - managers, salespeople, students, parents, lawyers, and diplomats - how to become better negotiators. Over the years, Ury has discovered that the greatest obstacle to successful agreements and satisfying relationships is not the other side, as difficult as they can be.

According to Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, the apologists of the Right have become masters of the subtle and largely subconscious aspects of political communication. It's not an escalation in Iraq, it's a surge; it's not the inheritance tax, it's the death tax; it's not drilling for oil, it's exploring for energy.

Conservatives didn't intuit the path to persuasive messaging; they learned these techniques.

In a culture increasingly indifferent or even hostile to Christian truth, followers of Christ need to be equipped to communicate with those who do not speak their language or accept their source of authority. In Tactics, 10th Anniversary Edition, Gregory Koukl demonstrates how to artfully regain control of conversations, keeping them moving forward in constructive ways through thoughtful diplomacy. Step-by-step, you'll learn the tactics of good persuasion and defense, how to identify the tactics of your opponent, and how to build your case, patiently and practically.

Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there’s a psychological force just as powerful - yet almost nobody has heard of it. It’s responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.

So you're an atheist. Now what? The way we deal with life - with love and sex, pleasure and death, reality and making stuff up - can change dramatically when we stop believing in gods, souls, and afterlives. When we leave religion - or if we never had it in the first place - where do we go? With her unique blend of compassion and humor, thoughtfulness and snark, Greta Christina most emphatically does not propose a single path to a good atheist life. She offers questions to think about, ideas that may be useful, and encouragement to choose your own way.

You are a mind reader, born with an extraordinary ability to understand what others think, feel, believe, want, and know. It's a sixth sense you use every day, in every personal and professional relationship you have. At its best, this ability allows you to achieve the most important goal in almost any life: connecting, deeply and intimately and honestly, to other human beings. At its worst, it is a source of misunderstanding and unnecessary conflict, leading to damaged relationships and broken dreams. How good are you at knowing the minds of others?

You believe in a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it, hoping for enthusiastic support. Instead, you get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets. Before you know what’s hit you, your idea is dead, shot down. It doesn’t have to be this way, say John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to protect good ideas and win the support needed to deliver valuable results.