And to sleep with it under their pillows own their own copy.

But I wasn’t planning on writing about it just yet.

Until I realized that tonight is Shavuot. And this is exactly the right time.

It’s all about the Moment. And the cheesecake.

Shavuot is a big deal for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it’s the cheesecake holiday.*

* And even if you are me and you don’t eat cake, it’s still the yogurt and cottage cheese and blintzes holiday. Yum.

Also, there is the Tikkun Leil Shavuot which involves studying all night — and having deep, complicated discussions until the sun comes up. We kind of geek out on that stuff.

And then — I mean, really, as if cheese + nerdy scholarly fabulousness were not enough — there is a Moment.

Well, there is a tradition that there is a moment. And that’s enough for me. According to tradition, at midnight on the eve of Shavuot, the skies open. Just for this moment. And you are right there.

And it is because of this Moment that I make everyone I know read this (decidedly non-religious) text.

Midnight was approaching.

I was in a park in Berlin. The late night study group at the synagogue had been decidedly uninspired and we had run away.

Jonathan was a friend of a friend. Visiting from Canada. Armed with books. We studied and talked and debated until six in the morning.

Moving from café to café as closing time approached. (Yes, it was a somewhat secular interpretation of the holiday, but our intentions were pure).

But for midnight — for the Moment — we had to be right there. Under the stars.

And what I got from that Moment was the knowledge that all the tools I needed to heal myself and my stucknesses were coming to me.

That it was time to be more watchful because maybe I was already tripping over them.

And then I received the tool I needed the most.

As we walked and walked down Prenzlauer Allee in search of the next café, we talked about books. The kind that change lives.

And he made me promise to track down Nonviolent Communication.

He described how he and his Belgian girlfriend use the method not just as a practice but as a matter of course. How when a misunderstanding or an argument breaks out, they turn to the method and it brings them back to each other.

I promised.

And I kept my promise.

And then I resisted the tool I needed the most.

I cannot even tell you how much I would have despised this book had I been introduced to it in any other way.

Luckily, I’d already been warned about the awful, awful poetry.

Yes, it is the dairy holiday, but that doesn’t mean I like cheese in my books. Seriously. If Jonathan had not guaranteed that this book would change my life, I probably would’ve tossed it out the window.

Also, it had something that suspiciously looked like “I feel” sentences. I hate that stuff.

Feelings? FEELINGS? It reminded me of that unpleasant (and extremely unsuccessful) couples therapy session with my husband in Israel.

Pompous old man Therapist: Let’s diagram some sentences!

Me (in my head): My husband cries himself to sleep every night and you want me to diagram sentences?

He gets up in the middle of the night and goes to his mother’s. What sentences? He blames me for his depression and every day he gets more controlling about what I’m allowed to say and do so that he won’t get more depressed, but you know what’s really important?

Sentences. What’s wrong with you?!

It doesn’t matter that I was wrong.

So of course now I realize that yes, our communication was shot to hell, and that learning how to speak compassionately could have helped us.

But because the person trying to teach the whole compassion thing wasn’t practicing it on us in that moment, we weren’t able to get it.

It wasn’t the right time. It wasn’t the right approach. Not the right doorway.

What I wanted for my husband was for him to receive from therapy what I had: the ability to take personal responsibility for stuff in your life not being exactly the way you want it to be.

What my husband wanted for me was for me to be an entirely different person.

The message that “communication could help us get along” was irrelevant. Now, if I could have understood that communication would help me to finally feel heard and acknowledged and safe, maybe I would have given it a chance. Maybe.

Anyway, I read the book. And it did change my life.

It cleared up the smog.

NVC got me through the trials and tribulations of living with an obsessive-compulsive drag king diva performance artist who hated me (no, not my husband — this was a roommate. I know).

It made everything better. More bearable, somehow. And it helped me get better at communicating with myself. I’d never be able to talk to walls or negotiate with monsters without it.

When I met my gentleman friend, and it seemed like he might end up being my gentleman friend, I tried to scare him off.

I told him that the only way I would be willing to consider getting involved was if he agreed to practice NVC with me.

The next thing I knew, he was immersed in the book.

When one of us is feeling tense, the other one pulls us back to the practice. No matter how upset I am, NVC helps me realize that what’s actually going on.

That his hurt and worried stuff has set off my hurt and worried stuff. And it brings us back to each other.

It brings us back to ourselves.

Consider yourself warned.

It has unbelievably cheesy poetry that will hurt your brain to read. Skip those parts.

You’ll start to wish everyone you knew had access to these tools.

You’ll be kinder to yourself. You’ll be more patient with others. You’ll find yourself drawn to a more mindful way of doing things, but not out of obligation or responsibility or anything.

More because it’s just a natural extension of what you’re doing already.

If you use Nonviolent Communication to change your language (and Dance of Shiva to change your brain), leading a grounded, intentional, relatively happy life gets way, way easier. I truly believe that. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.

Anyway, that’s the long story version of why I have crazy prerequisites for working with me and taking my courses.

It’s not because I’m mean. It’s because my sincere wish for you is for you to be able to feel heard, acknowledged and safe whenever you need to. For you to have that kind of connection with yourself and the world around you.

And because sometimes a little cheese is appropriate. And because I want you to have a Moment under the stars too.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

• The questionable practice of de-guiltifying
• When you need support and aren’t getting it
• A communication breakdown and an emergency calm technique

I’ve been kind of avoiding it lately, but that’s my stuff. It’s called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, and they give you books. To review. If you’re a blogger.

It’s cool because you get a book for free, and then you get to talk up the book to people who might fall in love with it, and everybody wins. And by everybody I mean book people — readers, authors, publishers, and, of course, those bloggers who either a. like to read or b. are stuckified about what to write about.

I always have stuff to write about (usually too much stuff to write about), but I also really love to read. And I thought this site was genius.

But I screwed up.

Okay, here’s what happened. I chose two books. I got them for free, yay. And I hated them.

Well, not so much hated them as that I wasn’t meant to read them. I’m just not one of their Right People.

But now I have these books. And I want to review them. But I have only negative things to say about them, which isn’t really fair because these books need to find their right people, not for me to scare everyone away from them.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

So I’m taking this course with the magical Jen Hofmann (for the second time!) and it’s supposedly about space and clearing and organizing, but — like all good things — it’s actually about your relationship with yourself.

Jen is amazing, and one of the things that she makes so clear is that in order for your workspace to support you and nourish you, you have to remove the things that don’t belong there.

So I’ve been in this pretty deep process of internal and external clearing, as I work on my poor, hurt arms and my office and everything else that’s going on right now.

Yesterday it occurred to me that my “guilt shelf” of books that I know I’m not going to review here does not belong in my office. I don’t need a guilt shelf.

Yes, that’s probably embarrassingly obvious, but it took me awhile to figure that out. So it’s time for these books to find their way out of my space and into a place that will be better for them.

My plan! It is …. a plan!

Right. So I’ll tell you what these books are, and if you think you might like to read one and review it (and then tell the Mini Book Expo people that you’re doing it), I will send it to you.

You can volunteer yourself in the comments, or send an email to Marissa (support at fluentself dot com). And if no one volunteers, I’ll mail them back to the Mini Book Expo people.

The first book: “Where’s your WOW?”

The first book is called “Where’s your WOW? 16 Ways to make your competitors wish they were you!” It’s by Robyn Spitzman and Rick Frishman and it comes highly recommended by Jay Conrad Levinson, if that does it for you.

I read business and marketing books all the time, albeit with a certain degree of internal resistance. Over time I’ve gotten pretty good at just gleaning the bits I like, but this time just wasn’t able to stomach it.

Just looking at chapter titles like “You Gotta Have a ‘Brand Slam’!” provokes awful revenge fantasies towards the authors for perpetrating that much violence and stupidity against both the English language and my consciousness.

Take this book. Please.

The second book: “Your Perfect Fit”

The second book is called “Your Perfect Fit” and I completely misunderstood what this was about. Somehow, from the description I gathered that it was about interacting with body criticism and self-image.

Since I used to teach a workshop at yoga studios called “learning to love your body”, and since the theme of working on your relationship with yourself is so relevant to the stuff I teach now about patterns and habits, it seemed like this would be — dare I say — a perfect fit.

This is not that book at all.

This is a book about how to choose the right strappy sandals so you won’t look fat, how to do exercises so you won’t look fat, and how to snack healthily … so you won’t look fat.

To which all I can say is: ?!?!?!

But of course I am a woman who doesn’t wear heels. Okay, let’s be honest. I own two pairs of shoes. Both of which were chosen for comfort and not for whether or not they make my legs look good.

And I can’t even begin to imagine having interest in or patience for advice like “wear jeans that fit” or “vacation is not an excuse to eat everything in sight”.

But again, I’m not their Right People. If you’d like to learn a bunch of exercises and/or uh, find out what type of sleeves flatter your body type or something, I would be more than happy to mail this to you.

Speaking of Right People …

This is barely even slightly relevant, but what the hell.

Last night I had a fairly insane dream that I was back at SXSW and I was headed to some cafe with someone.

And then it turned out that Tim Ferris was going to be there to and I was all “Really? Do we have to?” because I am so not one of his Right People. And the friend I was with said we couldn’t get out of it and I was going blech blech blech because I am not very nice.

But then Tim-in-my-dream was very nice. And he asked me, “Given where your business is at right now, what do you think you and your duck need the most and is there any way that I could help you get it?”

So I said, “That’s a terrific question.” Because it was. And he said, ” Yeah, I know.”

And I said that I had to think about it. Because I had to think about it. And then I thought about it.

And then something really cool happened.

While I was thinking about it, I had this humming sensation around my heart. It was a very pleasant sort of feeling, and I knew my heart was telling me that my business wants to be peaceful and full of love.

And I was all, there’s no way I’m going to say this out loud because these are marketing people and they so won’t get it, and I’ll come across as the world’s cheesiest businessperson.

But I didn’t have anything else to say, so I just didn’t say anything. And then Tim-in-my-dream said, “I think your business needs to be peaceful and full of love.” And I said, “You’re pretty insightful for a guy who cheats in kickboxing tournaments.” And he said, “Yeah, I know.”

And I thought, man, I’m glad I’m not his Right People, but it must be really great for them to be his Right People.

And the point is …

No idea.

But seriously, take one of these books off my hands. Or both of them.

And hand them over to someone who would enjoy them. So that I can go back to talking up the fabulous work they do at Mini Book Expo and get rid of my a guilt shelf.

The more space I free up — in my heart and on my bookshelf — the more peaceful and loving my business will become. That may make me the world’s cheesiest businessperson — but I can also feel the truth if it.

Just because I don’t like something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t have value. It just doesn’t have value for me.

So I’m going to sit with that for a while and enjoy all this new space.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

• Friday Check-in #30: the “Fourway Pratfall” edition
• Something to believe in.
• Regret. And some patterns. And decisions.

The book: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.
The author: Robert Sutton, PhD. (Also: professor of management science and engineering at Stanford, and all-around swell guy.)
The rating: 4 ducks

What I thought.

This is a smart, funny, sweet, interesting and useful book with lots of neat studies, good research and clever ideas. And it’s well-written too, gott sei dank.

Sutton is a thoughtful, engaging writer (who blogs!) and he’s completely like-able.

In fact, I had the feeling that I could happily have a conversation with him on absolutely any subject and find it fascinating (Bob, if you’re reading this and you ever get to Portland, let me know and I will invite you to dinner!).

Also, you have to love how the title (best title ever?) sums it all up so thoroughly that I don’t have to actually tell you what the book is about or anything about the content. Take that, short review.

And … should you be thinking that the title is somewhat distasteful, he discusses that too, as well as the process of deciding that no, this was really the only thing to call it.

Sutton systematically breaks down the patterns of at-work assholeness, if you will, and talks about who these people are, how to recognize them and how to know when whoops, you’re doing it too. Actually, his “we all have an inner jerk, so let’s be honest here” approach is both endearing and refreshing.

Only one caveat, and it’s not a big deal.

The one thing the book is short on is the how-to side, where, of course, I am naturally tempted to jump in and suggest/apply a bunch of my techniques. Or whatever, forget about my techniques. NVC, baby.

Sutton tends to throw up his hands when it comes to dealing with certain difficult situations in a kind of “whaddya gonna do” attitude, whereas I want him to be more concrete, probably because I already have very concrete opinions on exactly what you could do in these situations.

It doesn’t matter though. The book is about mind shifts, and mind shifts are the important part anyway. I enjoyed this book thoroughly, and it gave me plenty of good material to think about.

Cool unintended side-effect of reading this book:

We’ve all worked with that person. We’ve all had uncomfortable confrontations or uncomfortable avoidance of potentially difficult confrontations.

Though it’s a business book, not a self-help-ey book, you can definitely use it for healing.

Reading the book brought up lots of old memories for me of various people I’ve worked for who could have single-handedly justified the need for such a rule. Doing some work and processing around this has helped me release some old pain and helplessness around certain work-related situations*.

*I know you’re all dying for some juicy Moroccan mafia stories from my pre-yoga life, but that will have to wait for some other occasion.

Bonus fabulousness:

One of my favorite business writers (Leigh Buchanan) interviewed Sutton about the No Asshole Rule for Inc Magazine.

Leigh is so freaking great that even in an interview where all she gets to do is ask questions, she’s still a kick in the pants. But more to the point: it’s good stuff.

Bottom line? I love this book.

Well written, relevant, useful. Read it!**

**Yeah, I’m talking to you, Marshall Goldsmith.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

• Book Review: The Design of Everyday Things
• When things aren’t working.
• Very Personal Ads #119: Zombie Nata

The book: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
The author(s): Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter.
The rating: 3 ducks

Marshall Goldsmith is a character, for sure.

He has a completely authentic voice that gets in your head and makes you feel like you’re right there in the room with him. Which is great and also sometimes not great.

It’s great because it’s so rare in a business book that you get the sense that you are interacting with a real, live authentic human being and not a talking suit. His larger-than-life personality is reassuringly present.

On the flip side, spending this much time with him can give you the distinct sense that he can be kinda unpleasant to be around at times. Maybe even a lot of the time.

Pluses

There are some powerful concepts in this book and some useful take-away tips. It’s certainly more exciting reading than the typically dull “do the right thing, be responsible, be creative” type stuff that you generally find in what I think of as “books-for-people-who-wear-suits“.

So I definitely got good value from my afternoon of reading.

Also, the actual point of the book is good stuff.

The point being: Hey, the qualities and personality quirks to which you owe all your success are — now that you’ve reached this level of success — no longer relevant. In fact, they’re probably even hurting you, so please be conscious and start changing your habits and patterns

Very good stuff.

And: bonus points for having a title that’s a perfect example of how to choose a title (memorable, contains a curiosity-grabbing hook, and sums up what it’s about).

Minuses

For all his harping on large doses of compassion, listening and gratitude (and the fact that he’s a buddhist), Marshall Goldsmith doesn’t really come across as being all that into practicing what he preaches.

It’s pretty amusing (but in a horrible, depressing kind of way) when he lets loose a round of advice on the importance of cultivating neutrality and letting go of the need to make destructive comments.

And then he proudly relates a conversation he had with someone who was having trouble moving on from past painful experiences in which he told this person to “take a quarter and call someone who cares.” Lovely.

Hey, Marshall, I was digging your “let’s let go of the need to make destructive comments“, at least theoretically, but now your destructive comments are totally bringing up my need to make destructive comments!

(Note to self. Ow. That whole compassionate thing: way harder than I’d realized. Not feeling it. Oh well.)

Yeah, so I’m willing to accept the concept that dwelling on the past is an unnecessary and sometimes even detrimental activity that’s mistakenly over-encouraged by our extremely pro-therapy society.

Let’s say you can still work on your issues without ever remembering or understanding what happened that created them. Fine.

But, come on. “Call someone who cares“? How is that compassionate?

Or … you know what? Forget about compassionate — don’t you even want to just be helpful? How is anyone supposed to be able to listen to your great ideas if you’re kicking them in the shins while you’re giving them advice?

Don’t you want us to listen to you?

Maybe it’s just me

Sometimes I found myself wanting to jump in and make suggestions, especially when he was describing situations where there were obviously crossed-communication-wires aplenty.

Specifically I was wishing he would read and apply techniques from Marshall Rosenberg’s book “Nonviolent Communication“.

(Aside: What is it with people named Marshall writing about being compassionate? Is it just me or is this a disturbing trend?)

Bottom line: you’ll get good stuff from his book if his macho “love me, love my tough love” approach doesn’t get on your nerves.

Despite the flaws, it’s still better than most business books and he’s really not as much of a jerk as he’d have you believe in the first half of the book. Though yes, my pleasure from the many gems in this book was definitely diluted by my somewhat negative impression of him as a person.

So if you can be open-hearted enough to not want to smack him … well, you’re a better person than I.

Plus you’ll learn a lot. And you can buy it used or get it from the library if you don’t feel like giving money to jerks (or people pretending to be jerks).

As my father says, it just encourages them.

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

• Self mastery is a big ol’ waste of time
• Success doesn’t mean not having problems. Apparently.
• Taking on the “ew” aspect of affiliate programs

The book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
The authors: Chip Heath and Dan Heath
The rating: 5 ducks

I never say stuff like this, but what the hell. This might be the best business book I’ve ever read. In fact, I think it is.

Yes, it is.

Here’s the thing. If there is one thing you need to know while biggifying what you do, it’s this: it does not matter how great the thing you do is.

Obviously it’s better for the world if it is that great, but all that greatness doesn’t get you anywhere if you can’t present it in a way that’s accessible and memorable and sticks in people’s heads.

If you really, truly want to help people (and if you don’t, it’s hard to imagine that you’d be hanging out here), you need to do them a favor and make it easy for them to find you and adore you.

You need to make the thing you’re trying to give them “sticky” enough that it gets remembered and talked about. That’s the best (and maybe the only) way it’s going to get to the people who need it.

But how do you make stuff sticky?

Ahhh … wouldn’t we all like to know.

This book is a smart, thoughtful, funny, engaging exploration of how exactly that complicated process works. There’s a ton of useful how-to information as well as nice little “oh my gosh” moments that come from the way they regularly reframe old concepts in new ways.

Also, the Heath brothers can write, which doesn’t really happen all that often in business-ey books either. And I especially enjoyed their emphasis on making this information accessible and usable, without you ever getting the feeling that they’ve dumbed it the heck down.

It almost never happens (has it ever happened?) that I can read an entire book without having to mentally argue certain points with the authors — but in this case I either agreed with them completely or was wowed by them on every point.

But the best thing about Made to Stick is probably the way it gets the wheels in your head whirring as you get fired up with thinking about how you’re going to apply this stuff. To everything.

Be like gum, my friend.

All the information you interact with on a regular basis? These concepts give you a different way to relate to the stuff you’re probably thinking about anyway.

Then at some point you start filtering everything through the stickiness filter … and boy is it ever interesting.

Anyway, obviously if you have a business or a project or a venture you can take this stuff and apply it to pretty much every part of what you do … from crafting your message to finally rewriting your web copy to helping your clients/fans/whatever really get who you are and what you do.

And if you aren’t in the process of biggifying yourself, you can still make use of these concepts to better understand how to effectively frame information that you want people to remember. Plus you’ll get better at noticing when and how people/media/writing might be pulling your strings.

As the boys point out on their blog, it’s not really about making things sticky to work the system or even necessarily about business concepts — it’s about understanding how and why stuff works. Which is interesting. And useful.

Good stuff all around. And yes, it should probably go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: totally worth owning and rereading.

Straight to the super-genius-books reference shelf!

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

• Making your idea matter.
• When thinking big is the worst thing you can do
• The thing you think is less important is actually more important than the thing you think is the most important.

The book: The Design of Everyday Things
The author: Donald A. Norman
The rating: 4.5 ducks

Years ago when I was still tending bar in Tel Aviv, this one bar I worked at was set up in kind of a weird way that meant you had to pull open two different doors in order to reach the part where the bathroom was. And everyone would get this part wrong.

Despite the fact that each of these doors was clearly marked with a “pull” sign in both Hebrew and English, everyone (read: not just drunk people) would push instead. And even after years of working there on and off, and hanging out there to the point that I spent more time at the bar than in my apartment, I still — often as not — made that mistake too.

Guess what? The most common reaction– “Wow, could I be any more of an incompetent idiot?” — is wrong, and The Design of Everyday Things is here to help you make the mental move away from it. I’m pleased to report that once your brain has been introduced to the concepts in this book, you’re much more likely to realize, “Ooooh, it’s not me, it’s just bad design.”

This is great news. When things are designed properly, they work without you having to work. It’s easy to default into an automatic state of self-blame — this book serves as a useful reminder that this is not a healthy pattern.

It’s also a terrific intellectual companion to Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. You can apply the ideas in here to so many things. Especially useful (for me) is the way you could apply these principles to thinking about how people use your website. How they interact with the visual and design-based clues you think you’re giving them as opposed to what they’re actually experiencing.

Ironically, the book was originally called “The Psychology of Everyday Things”, which misled most of his ideal readers to think it was actually about something that didn’t interest them. (But wait — it interests me! Write that book too!)

More ironically still, many of the diagrams in the book are actually not very easy to understand. (Which makes me think I — and Donald Norman — should also read Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information, which I know of mostly by way of Calyx Design).

Still, the primary ideas are completely genius, and absolutely as useful and relevant as ever:

• A “push” sign on a door is, for all intents and purposes a manual. When something is designed correctly you know intuitively what to do and how to use it without having to think about it or worse, guess, or worst of all, ask someone to explain it to you.
• What looks or feels like user error is actually a design error. In other words, you’re not an idiot or mechanically inept because you can’t figure out how to program the VCR.

  It’s the job of the design to make everything obvious. (Thank you!)

• We tend to explain things away when in fact we ought to pay more attention to them. If the dog is barking, go see if someone is lurking outside your window instead of telling poor Muffintumbler (okay, clearly I don’t have a dog) to be still and shut up.

How this stuff relates to the whole “changing your habits” thing

I’m going to guess that our Mr. Norman didn’t intend this to be a guide to “working on your stuff” (though, on second thought, his interest and background in psychology say otherwise). But who cares because a. you can still use it that way, and b. I’m physcologically incapable of not relating things to the work-on-your-patterns process.

If anything, this book is a reminder that it’s not you, it’s your patterns. Case in point: when you pull a door instead of pushing it, you’re not the moron. It’s your patterns showing up.

The pushing is a pattern and the name-calling is a pattern. And what you’ve got now is a couple of opportunities, namely:

1. The opportunity to notice when you automatically heap abuse on yourself or repeat the things you learned about yourself from others. (Personal example: My own pattern is thinking: “Oh, I’m clumsy.” When this is actually me just repeating what my mother says about me.)
2. The opportunity to separate what is hard for you because of traits or qualities in yourself, and what is hard for you because it wasn’t designed with you (or anyone, for that matter) in mind.
3. The opportunity to shift your thought from “what am I doing wrong?” to “where do I assign blame to myself, and is it possible that there are other things going on here that don’t actually have anything to do with me?”

All this is the stuff that it’s not necessarily fun to notice or learn (okay, it sucks) but gives you some useful clues that you get to use in untangling your issues. Which you want to do because it gives you the freedom to stop tripping yourself up and start doing stuff differently.

Bottom line

There’s a reason this book is a classic. I took it out from the library twice (I can be slow that way) before realizing that it belongs on my shelf because I’ll be referring to these concepts forever. Get it here if you like or at your local independent bookstore.

(Thanks to JP Collins for recommending this to me twice, which, by the way, is the best way to get me to read something.)

If this seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

• There’s time.
• Ask Havi #10: the “explain yourself” edition
• Oprah, the Universe and Black Hockey Jesus