Are you a brave person? When it comes to the workplace, do you feel courageous, or more like someone who just has to accept whatever is happening, even when it feels wrong? As it turns out, courage is very individual. For one person, speaking up in a crowded room might be a crucible, while another must learn to manage chronic illness while working.
In the four books reviewed here, each author takes a different approach to issues that are ultimately about being brave.
Choosing Courage: The everyday guide to being brave at work, Jim Detert, Harvard Business Review Press, May 2021.
We start with a scholarly, yet engaging look at workplace courage from a professor who has spent decades researching the topic.
A key and foundational insight he presents early: Overcoming fear can be done with practice, and by starting with small steps. That is, rather than assuming courage is inbred — and thereby letting ourselves off the hook — we are offered a blueprint for building this trait step by step.
Detert takes a very pragmatic approach, acknowledging that not every battle is worth fighting, while offering advice for managing emotions, choosing the timing and learning to understand other perspectives before acting on an issue, be it an injustice at work or simply a difficult conversation you might be dreading.
The Business of Friendship: Making the most of our relationships where we spend most of our time, by Shasta Nelson, HarperCollins Leadership, 2020. I almost hesitated to include this book, given how many people are isolated from work colleagues at the moment. And then I realized that that’s Nelson’s point: We’re isolated. Even before our pandemic restrictions kicked in, loneliness was becoming a national health crisis; the ideas Nelson promotes here for connecting may have even more value in our current situation.
What’s interesting is how well Nelson makes the case for having friends at work — a sometimes disputed idea — before she provides steps for making them. While her advice might be more challenging to implement in virtual settings, the reward of building meaningful work relationships should be worth the effort … provided we can be brave enough to reach out to those we see in our tiny screens every day.
Business Pearls: A Journey of Lessons Learned 3, Richard W. & Nancy K. Gozola, 2020. If reaching out to make friends requires courage, so too does self-publishing a book of your own collected business wisdom. This volume is No. 3 in a series with Nancy Gozola’s name on the cover, but it’s the first book authored by her husband Richard.
After 39 years in the business world, Gozola realized in his retirement how helpful his insights might be to others. He began coaching and mentoring at no charge, sharing his “pearls” as he had in the workplace. This book covers advice on topics ranging from attitude to emails, along with coaching tools he has provided in the appendices. Each section also references related Bible passages and famous quotations as a way to provide deeper insight.
Difficult Gifts: A physician’s journey to heal body and mind, Courtney Burnett, Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2021. This author’s courage is readily evident in the challenge of living and working with terminal brain cancer. While she describes some of the daily aspects of those challenges in the blog she has maintained since shortly after being diagnosed (elephantlotusbraintumor.com/blog), Difficult Gifts is more of a memoir.
Burnett was just 30 years old when she began experiencing symptoms during her medical residency last year, a situation requiring her to grapple with her own mortality at the very time she was beginning her career as a healer. (She is currently a chief resident of internal medicine at Regions Hospital in St. Paul.)
Although Burnett’s book describes her diagnosis and treatment, she doesn’t tell it as a sad story. Using her Buddhist spirituality for context, she brings the reader on her journey of acceptance, and then joy, despite her likely lifespan of just five or 10 years.
Since the pandemic was underway while these events were unfolding, Burnett is able to weave in the nearly universal experience of self-quarantine and isolation as she comes to terms with interrupted plans and the loss of dreams she once valued:
“When faced with your own mortality, nothing rings quite so true as realizing that we chase after what we think we lack. I realized … don’t just plan your bucket list; live it, every single day.”
Facing death and living life with joy every day; sharing a lifetime of business wisdom with others; reaching out to create deeper bonds with those you work with — whatever form your bravery might take, now is as good a time as ever to jump in.
Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.
The Link LonkApril 04, 2021 at 12:44AM
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Working Strategies: Books for courage, in life and at work - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
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