Step Back
Bringing the Art of Reflection into Your Busy Life
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- 28,99 €
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- 28,99 €
Publisher Description
How to find clarity amid the turbulence of work and life
We all wish we had more time to pause and reflect about small decisions and big goals—and everything in between. But since we live and work in a vortex of tasks, meetings, decisions, and responsibilities, we rarely get the chance to step back.
In this practical guide, bestselling author and Harvard Business School professor Joseph Badaracco argues that you don't need long periods of solitude and tranquility to reflect well. In fact, reflection can take place in the cracks and crevices of your very busy life, and these moments can help you understand your feelings, look at problems from different perspectives, focus on what really matters, and, ultimately, lead a better life.
Building on candid interviews with over a hundred executives and professionals, as well as on the classic works of Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, and Ignatius of Loyola, Badaracco offers simple, customizable principles and ideas for reflection that lend a gentle discipline to an otherwise nebulous process.
Concise, smart, and pragmatic, Step Back is the guide you need to make reflection a positive force in your work and life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title says it all in this skimpy, tiresome look at the need for businesspeople to take a break. Harvard Business School professor Badaracco (Managing in the Gray) spent four years interviewing more than 100 managers about the "art of reflection," and determined that the key action for effectively incorporating this act into one's job is to step back from the slog of everyday work. Successful people practice "mosaic reflection," he explains, by setting aside small segments of time for deeper thinking. His breakdown of the ways to step back from the "cult of productivity" be content with "good enough" when it comes to reflections, "downshift" occasionally into a mode of quiet reflection, and make time for considering difficult issues from different perspectives are solid enough, but the exhaustive descriptions of the many people who use these methods are too similar to keep interest. His interviews turn up nothing terribly surprising; interviewees engage in the usual methods of exercise, prayer, keeping a journal, and sleeping on a problem, suggestions which are too familiar to be of much use. The result is an unnecessarily protracted look at an already well-understood concept.
