19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CBN.com Review, October 20, 2008
This review is from: How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships (Paperback)
I knew I was going to like this book by the second page of the first chapter (which may be a new record for me!). Clinical psychologist Dr. Godwin begins "How to Solve Your People Problems" with a laugh out loud anecdote from his own childhood. And that surprised me. I thought maybe a book written by a psychologist would be serious... studious... somber. I couldn't have been more wrong! Dr. Alan Godwin goes about the business of covering a very serious topic, "conflict," with a delightful use of humor, interesting stories, real life examples, and everyday language. Staying away from doctor-speak, he chooses instead to write "How to Solve Your People Problems" in a digestible, readable, and engaging way.
"How to Solve Your People Problems" is basically broken into two parts; conflict with reasonable people, and conflict with unreasonable people. Each of these types of conflict must be handled differently, and I found Godwin's approach informative and eye-opening. When discussing unreasonable people Dr. Godwin writes, So here's what we're up against when we have conflict with unreasonable people. They automatically assume we're the ones in the wrong, they fail to see their contributions to the conflict, they claim no responsibility for any part of the problem, they're not bothered by the impact of their words and actions on us, and they change nothing because nothing about them needs changing. Is it any wonder that unreasonable people are so difficult for us to handle?
When a reasonable person argues with an unreasonable person, they have different objectives. The reasonable person's conflict goal is resolution while the unreasonable person's goal is rightness. To the unreasonable person, being right is entwined with his identity as a person and/or survival. He needs to eat, he needs to breathe, and he needs to be right.
I don't like conflict, and I don't know anyone who does (I'm sure they're out there--I just don't know any). But, conflict is a normal part of life and it's important that we learn how to best handle it when it comes our way. "How to Solve Your People Problems" would be ideal for young married couples, for those struggling with obstinate family members, as a tool in pastoral counseling, or for those in a hostile work environment.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A "People Book" from a "People Person", September 6, 2008
This review is from: How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships (Paperback)
On September 4 my wife Ann and I celebrated 14 years of marriage. We're very happy and with the recent addition of our daughter Katie it's hard for us to imagine a better relationship or a stronger family.
That wasn't always the case, though. By January 2005 we had a marriage where conflict was regularly damaging our relationship. We still cared about each other, but we weren't connected in a healthy or sustainable way. We were headed for divorce.
That's when we got a recommendation to see Dr. Alan Godwin. We called him and arranged an appointment.
Neither one of us knew what to expect. Would this help save our marriage? And what was this Dr. Godwin like?
A clue to the man and his methods came as he opened the door to show us into his office that first day. He greeted us with one of the warmest smiles and firmest (yet gentlest) handshakes I've ever encountered. His eyes were bright and his pleasant Southern accent was inviting.
"Hello. Call me Alan," he said as I started to greet him with his professional title and last name.
Alan made us feel better about what we were doing during the first moments of meeting him.
There were many sessions after that first appointment. They were sometimes hard and often painful. It wasn't easy to jettison bad behavioral habits and develop what Alan called a "new process" to deal with conflicts so our marriage could survive and thrive. But Alan, patient and caring, worked with us together and separately over many months as we created that new process and placed our marriage and individual lives into healthier, more flexible frameworks.
During those sessions it became obvious to me that Alan Godwin is more than a licensed psychologist who counsels couples as part of his professional practice. He's a "people person" whose strong empathy for others makes him well-suited to his vocation.
Now that "people person" has written a "people book" that's well worth reading, whether your relationship troubles concern your spouse, another family member, friend, colleague or acquaintance. "How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships" is a thoughtful, easy-to-read guide to handling the inevitable conflicts that come through human interaction.
I've been an actor and journalist. I know you have to be aware of your audience to be a successful communicator. Alan knows his audience too - he doesn't descend into a pedantic written lecture on the never-ending quest to understand the human brain or give us a mind-numbing history lesson on the development of modern psychoanalytic techniques. His writing style is like the man himself - down-to-earth, friendly, often funny and always insightful.
His book starts with an introduction called "Good Conflict Camp" that notes our often childish behavior when conflicts arise and truths about those conflicts. Two of those truths stand out to me as being necessary to embrace in order to become better at dealing with conflict: that we naturally handle conflict poorly and that conflict with reasonable and unreasonable people must be handled differently. Those may seem obvious when they appear in a book but I know I've failed to heed both truisms on several occasions.
The book is then broken up into three sections: "People and Problems", "Reasoning with the Reasonable" and "Dealing with the Unreasonable". Alan leads us through a myriad of man-made relationship minefields with examples taken from his personal and professional experiences, references to Biblical text, relevant quotations and common-sense observations. There are summations called "In a Nutshell" and "For Reflection" questions that help us focus our thoughts as we finish portions of the book.
A portion that resonates strongly with me occurs near the end of the "Reasoning with the Reasonable" section. It's a list of questions I now try to ask when I'm in conflict with someone else. The list is called the "5 Crucial Questions for Good Conflict":
Which problem will we fix?
Why do we feel so strongly?
How can we agree to fix this?
What will we do to implement it?
When will we evaluate it?
Alan notes that awareness, empathy, humility, reliability and responsibility are the "muscles" needed for the actions that satisfactorily answer these questions. Notice that the word "right" isn't listed. As I've heard Alan say before, "Do you want to be 'right' or do you want to have a relationship?"
That last question leads me to Alan's final section about dealing with unreasonable people. We all have someone in our lives that fits the unreasonable tag: the "toxic" parent, the controlling spouse, the manipulative acquaintance or the difficult-to-deal-with colleague. Alan lays out strategies to set boundaries in our relationships with such people and avoid the "dramas" they try to entice us into playing with them.
The balance between age-old truisms, modern situations and flexible solutions makes "How to Solve Your People Problems" a practical guide for overcoming corrosive conflict. What marks this volume out from similar books, though, is that it's not just a mental health professional talking to us through these pages. Alan's humane and inclusive prose makes us feel a friend is helping us relate to other people in an enriching and nurturing new way. I know Ann and I are glad he's been our friend since that day in 2005. Now through this book he can be yours too.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clear, informative, practical, easy read, February 26, 2010
This review is from: How to Solve Your People Problems: Dealing with Your Difficult Relationships (Paperback)
I bought this book two months ago after an upsetting conflict. Out of all the books available on the subject, I bought Dr. Godwin's specifically because reviews had mentioned he addresses the differences between trying to resolve conflicts with reasonable vs. unreasonable people.
That's always been my complaint: that all the self-help books and commuication strategies to resolve conflicts only work if you are dealing with a cooperative and responsible person. But my family, and so many people I would routinely encounter, were impossible. It made me crazy. It made me very sad. And I never found a book that addressed this, especially not one that was quick and easy to read, written not in academic language but for practical use.
By the time the book arrived, I no longer cared as much about the frustrating situation so it sat unread. Then this morning, I had an encouter as crazy-making as they come. Someone I'd upset stood me up, then called the next morning to berate me - and claimed they hadn't stood me up because they'd told me they might not come. They made several other claims that were wild distortions of the truth. They wouldn't let me speak. Then when I instinctively went quiet,realizing I wasn't being heard, they said I was being passive-aggressive. There was more, but you get the point.
I pulled out Dr. Godwin's book. I've now read only two chapters of the 2nd part but without hesitation give it 5-stars. I personally think the truly brilliant books are the ones that you can understand! And the ones you can read in a night, if so inclined. Anything beyond that is filler.
His book accomplishes all that. He says 5 times more than most people in 1/10th the space.
I promise you - if you are dealing with someone who bullies you verbally, seems to exist in their own reality, relentlessly blames everything on you so that you start to think you're crazy, doesn't treat you with respect while claiming you're the one not treating him with respect...you get the picture...get this book.
There's something so healing about reading a description of your experiences and having your responses validated. There's something so freeing about being told "This person who does THIS and THIS and THIS is NOT reasonable and you won't be able to reach him/her because your goals aren't aligned and all they want is to be right."
I'm a psychotherapist. They don't teach you this stuff in school and I never saw it explained in any self-help book before. I studied communication as part of my couples' work and still never came across a commonsense discussion of how to argue with a narcissist. All you ever read are descriptions of good vs. bad communication practices. You're never told that some people will never use or respond to effective communication skills because they aren't interested in communicating - they only want to be right.
Get this book. You'll both enjoy and get a lot from it.
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