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Our Authored Books
Take a Deep Dive Into Our Parenting and Leadership Development Programs
The Listening Space: A Guide to Strengthening Parent-Child Relationships with Motivational Parenting
Have you ever had one of those moments when you described something that you’d like your child to do, but after your brilliant, clear explanation, you realized that your child didn’t hear a word of it? Oftentimes, we try to get the result we want by telling our kids what to do without taking the time to really listen and see things from their perspective. Taking this approach can turn parenting into an exhausting chore and can damage the parent-child connection. At the end of the day, we still want to feel close to our kids. How do we make sure that our kids hear us, while still tuning in to them and staying connected? Motivational Parenting (MP) provides a roadmap for effectively parenting kids using empathic listening skills, providing guidance and limit setting, and offering choices. You don’t have to be the “bad guy” to get things done. With MP, you will build connections with your child that will last a lifetime. Happy parents, happy kids. You don't have to choose.
Leadership can be complex, difficult, demanding, and stressful. It is not surprising that there are so many books, programs, trainings, consultants, and coaches that exist to help leaders develop leadership and management skills. Leaders play an important role in employee satisfaction and ultimately the success or failure of an organization. Communication is at the heart of all leadership skills, and it is frequently an area of focus by consultants and trainers. As Kotter, a New York Times bestselling author and retired Harvard Business School professor, explained, “What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.” Our book, Motivational Interviewing for Leadership: MI-LEAD, provides a roadmap for leaders to become Transformational Leaders. It provides concrete, person-focused tools that help to address ambivalence and engagement both on an individual level and at a group level. These tools are an effective approach to developing skills as a transformational leader, one who can communicate well, enhance engagement, respond effectively to ambivalence and discord, and lead through change.
Effective leadership can be challenging, especially when addressing problematic behaviors with team members. Leaders often struggle with the following questions: How do I manage difficult team member behaviors? Where does taking disciplinary action fit in? When should I just fire my employee? Through many rewarding discussions with leaders, we have had the opportunity to really challenge the notion of “difficult team members”. MI-Lead: A Leader’s Guide for Difficult Conversations serves as a supplement to book one on MI-Lead, Motivational Interviewing for Leadership: MI-Lead, and focuses specifically on addressing problematic team member behavior. While we provided some general ideas and strategies for addressing problem behaviors in book one, this supplemental guide builds upon the foundational strategies outlined in book one and includes a specific 4-step MI-Lead method for approaching difficult conversations with members of our teams. This guide also provides examples of common scenarios with ideas for effectively addressing the problematic team member behaviors while maintaining a spirit of partnership, acceptance, compassion, and evocation.