"A master class on team dynamics in a picture book -- yes! Only someone with Michelle Brody’s experience and wisdom could do that! Read this book and learn from the best!" -- Amy Hayes, Global Head of Learning and Development at Meta (Facebook) We all experience workplace conflict. Now, SEE the solution in a new way. What if workplace teams that are pulled apart by conflict could be “drawn together” by actual drawings – playful but pointed illustrations that help us see ourselves (and each other) in normalizing, lighthearted ways to rapidly trigger breakthroughs in team tension? Using a “visual method” developed for couples therapy, high-stakes and high-emotion team situations are captured in mindset-changing pictures so that teams can deescalate conflict, engage responsibility, and achieve real resolution. In her groundbreaking new book Own Your Armor, executive coach and psychologist Dr. Michelle Brody presents a dramatically different, refreshing, and proven way to improve ineffective workplace dynamics and repair toxic cultures. She helps us see our “people dynamics” problems in new ways so we can craft lasting solutions. A Book Like No Other, Now for Your Unique Team There are a lot of books for leaders on “how to fix your team” when they are difficult, which suggests that the team is the problem and the leader is the change agent, pushing or pulling strategic levers to improve the situation. Own Your Armor approaches team dynamics with a completely different set of assumptions: -- The problem isn’t just the team, -- The solution isn’t just the leader’s, and -- The levers aren’t “strategic.” The levers are psychological, and they belong to us all. Team dynamics are co-created and are circularly reinforced over time. Unwinding them requires everyone (leaders and team members) to recognize their contribution to the culture problem and to rejoin the team with their best self. In the engaging pages of this book, which is filled with instructive illustrations and framed by 10 principles for “owning your armor” in the workplace, Brody shares the true causes of why teams experience bad culture and offers a practical way to talk about moving a team toward greater health. Revolutionary Change for Workplace Culture “I love my job, but the culture here stinks ...” “I work with some seriously difficult people ...” “Managing ‘people issues’ is the hardest part of my job as a leader ...”. Fixing an unhealthy work culture isn’t easy, but it’s impossible if we don’t get at what is causing it. The root of team dynamics problems is nearly always a pileup of everyone’s defensive armor. “We can all show up as our regular selves at work,” Brody explains, “but when we’re under threat, we put on some armor.” Passive-aggressiveness, micromanaging, finger-pointing, and resource-grabbing are all forms of armor that good people sometimes resort to when under threat. Once people start armoring up, mistrust in a team grows, causing more need for armor, and locking up the culture even more. “For a team to take off armor to restore good communication, armor has to be owned.” Own Your Armor shows how to help everyone on a team to: -- Own your threats -- Own your armor -- Own your impact. The result? Your team will build trust, reduce defensiveness, shift stuck mindsets, defuse vicious cycles, and unlock individual and team strengths to finally get the dream team everyone wants. Note to the reader: Own Your Armor is an immersive, illustrated eBook in a fixed format – like a textbook, reference book, or graphic novel – and is therefore optimally viewed on larger desktop or laptop screens, rather than on smartphone screens or small ebook readers.

Working with other people is supposed to make things more productive and efficient but, too often, work gets bogged down by the bad dynamics that develop on teams. It's so easy for undercurrents of tension and poor communication in the workplace culture to affect everyone's motivation and productivity, and when the culture gets really bad, people leave.Own Your Armor by Michelle Brody presents a dramatically different way of approaching the difficult problem of ineffective workplace dynamics. Dr. Brody is an executive coach who gets called in to help teams when the people dynamics have gotten too disruptive that they can't be ignored. In this book, she shares the true causes of why teams experience bad culture and shows a practical way to talk about moving a team toward greater health.Own Your Armor is meaningfully different from other books about team behavior because it uses a visual method, which employs drawings and diagrams that provide a normalizing, lighthearted way to rapidly deescalate conflict, engage responsibility, and achieve real resolution by focusing attention on the underlying dynamics rather than surface content.While both leaders and team members want things to change, fixing an unhealthy culture at work is very hard problem to solve. Our good intentions often backfire; reasonable interventions bring about defensiveness and greater frustration. Own Your Armor takes team members - at all levels - beyond good intentions to reap good results.

It’s common for anyone to feel trapped or stuck by their inner commentator, habitual patterns of behavior, and the lessons they’ve learned throughout their lives. Everyone has regrets, with many trying to preserve strained relationships and other difficult parts of their lives. When faced with these hardships, it’s easy for self-worth and confidence to take a nosedive, causing many to wonder where they went wrong and to wish for a “do-over.” ACE Your Life: Unleash Your Best Self and the Life You Want to Be Living offers another way. Michelle P. Maidenberg, Ph.D., MPH, LCSW-R, explains how to create a life and legacy of love (both of self and others) and fulfillment. Predicated on acceptance, compassion, and empowerment skills, Maidenberg’s approach has transformative range, working for those who feel slightly “stuck” and are seeking personal growth and enhancement as well as those with more complex “stuckness” caused by trauma, cumulative stress, or other significant challenges. Each section of Ace Your Life walks the reader through definitions, benefits, barriers and includes curiosity-based mindfulness questions and exercises to promote growth, healing, and a path toward personal fulfillment. Individuals who want to enhance their life in a significant way and become their best self through the work and wisdom of personal growth will benefit from this encouraging, inspirational, and easily actionable guide.

This Illustrated Guide for Couples Ends 12 Hurtful Arguments Once and for All! Conflict within relationships is complex and challenging to overcome. In her 20 years of working with couples, clinical psychologist Michelle Brody found a way to make change simpler. Her secret: clear and lighthearted illustrations that help couples literally see what’s driving their battles and blocking their bond, so they can chart a course together to stop the fights. The Money Fight “You’re such a cheapskate!” “You spend way too much!” The Sex Fight “Not tonight. I’m not in the mood.” “You haven’t been in the mood since 1975!” The Parenting Differences Fight “You’re too overprotective!” “Is skydiving next?!” Stop the Fight! includes more than 300 illustrations to help couples unlock the destructive cycles that drive the birthday fight, the difficult relatives fight, and other familiar battles. Going beyond common relationship advice, the tools in Stop the Fight! will help you understand the big picture and create lifelong change.

The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers Soon to be a Showtime/Paramount+ series starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Rostov From the number one New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel 'A wonderful book' - Tana French 'This novel is astonishing, uplifting and wise. Don't miss it' - Chris Cleave 'No historical novel this year was more witty, insightful or original' - Sunday Times, Books of the Year '[A] supremely uplifting novel ... It's elegant, witty and delightful - much like the Count himself.' - Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year 'Charming ... shows that not all books about Russian aristocrats have to be full of doom and nihilism' - The Times, Books of the Year On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval. Can a life without luxury be the richest of all? A BOOK OF THE DECADE, 2010-2020 (INDEPENDENT) THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A MAIL ON SUNDAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017 ONE OF BILL GATES'S SUMMER READS OF 2019 NOMINATED FOR THE 2018 INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS WEEK AWARD

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Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times--from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes’s conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive--Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world. Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values–the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship–which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.