Customer Reviews

Toxic Work: How to Overcome Stress, Overload and Burnout and Revitalize Your Career

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Toxic Work is the first reference book in the career section which has a bibliography worth reading. The book not only does all the work for you by collecting and organizing relevent resources, but provides a wealth of examples. The author doesn't give pat answers, but takes the reader through the problem-solving process. I found the book empowering because it provides the structure and information I needed to generate a successful game plan. I became proactive, and am happily employed at the same job that sent me to the book store looking for an escape.

This book is quite typical of career guides that take the corporate reality as a given and recommend career change (or worse, job hopping) as the solution to abusive work.

The reader should checkout _Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It_ by Judith Wyatt in order to truly survive abusive work that can't be avoided by job hopping---because work abuse is everywhere.

TOXIC WORK is broken down into two sections. The first section is devoted to "Recognizing and Managing Toxic Work" while the second is devoted to "Making Major Changes: Designing a Nontoxic Life." Overall, the book surveys the major topics of career disatisfaction with an eye towards recognizing when such disatisfaction causes physical affects. It does not get very deep into possible solutions. Instead, the author prefers to continually recommend that anything more in-depth requires professional counselling. On the contrary, I kept feeling the book could have gone further and that it stopped just when things were getting juicy. I also felt that it was padded with a lot extra examples. Despite these flaws, I consider it to be a good tool to help anyone who is currently less that satisfied with their career. It covers such a broad range of issues that everyone should be able to come away from it with some positive ideas about what to do next an! d some new insights about themselves and their career.

Toxic Work is a wonderful resource. I have used the book as a required text for both my graduate level Managment Training and Development and Human Resource Management courses. My students, without exception, rave about the content. Dr. Reinhold's humor and insight have provided me and over 100 of my students with a great set of career problem solving tools and a teriffic bibliography. I keep hoping that there will be a sequel ... perhaps Toxic Two. Keep them comming.

The Author definitely has a deep understanding of the negative effects that work can have on your health. I particularly liked the idea of thinking of your career as a collage rather than a photo (i.e., designing a composite career).

I was distracted by all the feminist references. For example, "Bobbie" feels she has disappointed her family because they expected a boy. The Author explains that women are treated like second class citizens despite being "better students and more productive employees than men" and that women have been told all their lives that they are "less valued and valuable than their brothers". The book also tells the sad tale of "Marianne", a closeted lesbian, and her "homophobic VP".

All of that may be true, but it doesn't relate to the topic of overcoming burnout and revitalizing your career. The book was useful, but would have been better if the Author had stayed on-topic.

This book was just what I needed to read to re-orient my perspective about my current job situation. I think it will be helpful for a lot of people in this day and age of "If you still have your job, be grateful, get paid less and work harder". With that kind of pressure, I really needed a guide to help me see more clearly and elevate my morale.

En febrero del 2000 Toxic Work cayó milagrosamente en mis manos en el momento justo, cuando mi vida profesional como ingeniero en sistemas estaba provocándome problemas graves de salud.

Gracias a Barbara y su libro pude tomar distancia y rediseñar mi vida profesional, familiar y personal. Pude crear un plan de acción para lograr alejarme de mi anterior profesión y re-crear mi existencia como instructor de buceo primero y propietario de un centro de buceo en una ciudad mediterranea, a más de 1000 kilómetros del mar más cercano. Y eso en el tiempo que Barbara garantizaba en su libro, 18 meses.

El capítulo dedicado a diseñar un nuevo trabajo "Career Wish List Exercise" me resultó súmamente práctico, y gracias a lo sencillo del método pude armar una empresa totalmente nueva e inexistente hasta el momento en mi país, Argentina.

Desde entonces he difundido e inspirado a mucha gente a animarse a tomar las riendas de sus vidas y re-nacer profesionalmente.

Gracias Barbara

I didn't find this book very helpful. The author seems to recommend leaving your job more often than I expected. . . if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't be reading this book. I wanted to learn how to FIX the problems that are there.