Teachers can’t add more minutes to a school day, but with mindfulness they can add depth to the moments they do have with students in their classroom. Compassionate Critical Thinking demonstrates how to use mindfulness with instructional effectiveness to increase student participation and decrease classroom stress, and it turns the act of teaching into a transformational practice. Many books teach mindfulness, but few provide a model for teaching critical thinking and integrating it across the curriculum. The purpose of this book is to show teachers how to create a classroom culture of compassionate critical thinking. When students feel a lack of meaning and purpose in their school lives, they resist learning. Using a Socratic style of inquiry, Rabois changes the classroom dynamic to encourage self-reflection, insight, and empathy. Vignettes capture dialogue between teacher and students to illustrate how mindfulness practices elicit essential questions which stimulate inquiry and direct discovery. What bigger mystery is there, what more interesting and relevant story, than the story of one’s own mind and heart and how they relate us to the world?

Leading depression authority Paul Gilbert presents The Compassionate Mind, a breakthrough book integrating evolutionary psychology, new insights from neuroscience, and mindfulness practice. This combination of techniques forms a new therapy called compassion focused therapy that can enhance readers' lives.

A guide for parents to help children of all ages process the onslaught of unfiltered information in the digital age. Education is not solely about acquiring information and skills across subject areas, but also about understanding how and why we believe what we do. At a time when online media has created a virtual firehose of information and opinions, parents and teachers worry how students will interpret what they read and see. Amid the noise, it has become increasingly important to examine different perspectives with both curiosity and discernment. But how do parents teach these skills to their children? Drawing on more than twenty years’ experience homeschooling and developing curricula, Julie Bogart offers practical tools to help children at every stage of development to grow in their ability to explore the world around them, examine how their loyalties and biases affect their beliefs, and generate fresh insight rather than simply recycling what they’ve been taught. Full of accessible stories and activities for children of all ages, Raising Critical Thinkers helps parents to nurture passionate learners with thoughtful minds and empathetic hearts.

Kristin Neff, Ph.D., says that it’s time to “stop beating yourself up and leave insecurity behind.” Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind offers expert advice on how to limit self-criticism and offset its negative effects, enabling you to achieve your highest potential and a more contented, fulfilled life. More and more, psychologists are turning away from an emphasis on self-esteem and moving toward self-compassion in the treatment of their patients—and Dr. Neff’s extraordinary book offers exercises and action plans for dealing with every emotionally debilitating struggle, be it parenting, weight loss, or any of the numerous trials of everyday living.

Many of us have a tendency to measure our self-worth by comparing ourselves to others. But when we fail to reach our own, families, communities or societies 'ideals' this often results in feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and low mood. We may become self-critical, experience shame and a sense of being different from others. Although an improvement in 'self-esteem' is what we may feel we want this is not necessarily what we need. This is because self-esteem is often associated with times when things are going well but can fail us when things do not go to plan. In contrast self-confidence, built from self-compassion, can help us when things are going well and make us more resilient when things are difficult. This book uses the ideas and practices of Compassion Focused Therapy to help build self-confidence. Attention is also paid to difficulties that often come hand in hand with lack of self-confidence such as anxiety, depression, substance use and anger.

New York Post Best Book of 2016 We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In AGAINST EMPATHY, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion. Basing his argument on groundbreaking scientific findings, Bloom makes the case that some of the worst decisions made by individuals and nations—who to give money to, when to go to war, how to respond to climate change, and who to imprison—are too often motivated by honest, yet misplaced, emotions. With precision and wit, he demonstrates how empathy distorts our judgment in every aspect of our lives, from philanthropy and charity to the justice system; from medical care and education to parenting and marriage. Without empathy, Bloom insists, our decisions would be clearer, fairer, and—yes—ultimately more moral. Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make.

This book discusses critical thinking as a tool for more compassionate leadership, presenting tried and tested methods for managing disagreement, for anticipating and solving problems, and for enhancing empathy. Employing a lighter tone of voice than most management books, it also shows how and when less-than-rational mechanisms such as intuition and heuristics may be efficient decision-making tools in any manager’s toolbox. Critical thinking is useful for analyzing incoming information in the context of decision-making and is crucial for structuring outgoing information in the context of persuasion. When trying to convince a client to buy a service, an executive board to fund a project, or a colleague to change a procedure, managers can use the simple step-by-step guides provided here to prepare for successful meetings and effective pitches. Managerial thinking can be steadily improved, using a structured process, especially if we learn to think about our thinking. This book guides current and would-be managers through this process of improving and metathinking, in connection with decision-making and persuasion. Using examples from business, together with research insights from Behavioral Economics and from Management and Organizational Cognition, the author illustrates common pitfalls like hidden assumptions and cognitive biases, and provides easy-to-use solutions for testing hypotheses and resolving dilemmas.