HONEST ABE'S
NLP BOOK REVIEWS

Written and Produced
by Andy Bradbury (author of "Develop Your NLP Skills", etc.)


Reviews: Part 22





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The Title
Name(s) of the Author(s)
Publisher and ISBN Number [this will be for the paperback version except where the number ends with (Hb)]

Test Your Emotional Intelligence
Robert Wood & Harry Tolley
Kogan Page   ISBN 0-7494-3732-4
This is a definite borderline case.
On the one hand it has some very basic errors of fact (the comment on page 6 about turning ordinary people into brutal thugs must surely be a reference to Zimbardo's prison simulation rather than Stanley Milgram's experiments).  Further on there is a rather worrying piece of "advice":

"...be more receptive to what your emotions are telling you - ... take your 'gut feelings' seriously.  To do this you have to be prepared to banish the brain tyrant and surrender yourself to your intuitions, sensations and the play of your imagination.
(page 55)

Up to "take your 'gut feelings' seriously" this is indeed good advice.  The rest, however, is absolute balderdash and totally contrary to the idea of establishing a healthy balance between EQ and IQ - which I suspect the authors themselves know perfectly well, given numerous comments throughout the rest of the book.

Another aspect of the introduction to EI that I found a bit off-putting was the way Goleman seemed to be regarded as the world's only authority on the subject of Emotional Intelligence, with not a single mention of Salovey and Mayer's original work and subsequent development.  It may not seem like much, but it added to my overall doubt as to the degree to which the book accurately reflects what EI is all about.  (I should maybe explain here that Mayer and Salovey do not seem to regard Goleman's books as an entirely accurate representation of their studies - which are still 'work in progress', by the way).

On the other hand the book is particularly strong in constantly encouraging the reader to practise self-evaluation rather than simply giving a series of simple questions and pat answers (these questions are apart from the end of chapter tests - see below).

Having said that, the back cover blurb tells us that "This book aims to provide you with a thorough understanding of emotional intelligence", offering unspecified "expert guidance" which "could make all the difference".  IThere is nothing to tell us why these two authors qualify as "experts" on the subject of EI, and I personally felt that there was a touch too much "what" and too little "how" to meet the book's declared target, as in this comment in the chapter on Empathy:

"On the positive side, all of us can experience or generate feelings that can have a positive effect on our learning and performance."
(page 98)

Okay, but how do we experience or generate these feelings?  There is no explanation that I could find.
Unfortunately, this is typical of the whole book as far as I was concerned.
The five main chapters all have multiple choice self-tests at their endings, but there is no commentary on the questions, and no meaningful analysis of the test results - just add up all the points and see if you come out low, medium or high on each of Goleman's five basic headings - self-awareness, self-regulation, etc.  The last chapter of the book is entitled "Scoring, interpretation, reflection and a postscript", which strikes me as a little grandiose for what amounts to not much more than a set of large boxes in which to write down what you need to work on, and how you're going to do it, each preceded by approximately one page of text which summarises the contents of the corresponding chapter.

If I were to rate this book on the overt "guidance" it offers, I wouldn't recommend it at all.  Nevertheless, on the basis of the wealth of questions it poses, I can see how readers might find it very useful as a prelude to studying genuine emotional intelligence. Qualified recommendation     *  *   *  *

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managing yourself
Paul Morgan
momentum   ISBN 1-543-04023-9
(The lower case initial letters are the publisher's idea, not mine.)

If there ever comes a time when I feel the need to argue that sports coaches should stick to what they know best, I may very well call this book as my stay witness.

According to the cover blurb, this author specialises in applied psychology and "has been the sport psychologist for the Ireland and Great Britain rugby league teams" (not to be confused with the rugby union team which recently won the World Cup in Australia).  To which I can only say that I would never have guessed it from reading this book.  For example, in a section labelled "Creative tension" we are told that:

"The gap between your current reality and your desired future reality leads to psychological tension as shown [in the diagram] above.  It is sometimes called 'cognitive dissonance'."
(page 134)

Oh really?  Who by? (Or "By whom?", for lovers of good English.)
The generally accepted definition of 'cognitive dissonance' goes something like this:

A psychologically uncomfortable state resulting from inconsistency between one's beliefs and one's behaviour, or by the struggle to hold apparently incompatible beliefs.

Strange!

Or maybe not so strange.  For me personally, alarm bells went off quite early, in a section headed "Perceptions", where we are told that

"The RAS [reticular activation system] is part of the brain that acts as a filter.  It makes us aware of things that are important to us while filtering out the less important stuff.  How does the RAS know what is important?  It uses our maps and beliefs."
(pages 20-21)

Sounds pretty impressive, huh?
Probably means that the RAS is tied in to the neo cortex where we actually store maps, beliefs, etc.?
Well, not exactly.  Steve Andreas makes this same point in his book Transforming Your Self, published the year before this book.  It must be said, however, that Andreas was taking his information from a book published nearly 40 (forty) years ago.  What we now know, thanks to developments in brain scanning technology, is that the RAS, located way back in the brain stem (the "reptilian brain", as it's sometimes called), is little more than a conduit for signals on their way to and from the Thalamus (there are actually two RAS's, the "ascending" and the "descending").  And whilst the Thalamus does indeed play a central role in the processes described here, the "ascending" RAS itself does nothing more complex than govern our state of arousal at a very basic level.  It wakes us up when things are going on, and it allows us to nod off when things go quiet.  It does carry sensory messages to and from the "higher brain", but as an unsorted collection of signals because the RAS itself has only vague awareness of any particular sensory modality and is therefore in no position to determine (as this passage suggests) whether a particular noise (for example) is or is not important.  In fact it may not even recognise the stimulus as being "a noise".

So, not exactly rocket scientist level as far as the psychology and neurology are concerned.  Does it get any better when it gets onto the subject of Emotional Intelligence?
In short, "no", because despite the subtitle: "coach yourself to optimum emotional intelligence", the book really doesn't have much to do with Emotional Intelligence as such, at least not in the Goleman sense.  For example, there are fairly substantial sections on intuition and creativity, and whilst our emotions undoubtedly involved in these areas (as in every other area of our lives), neither intuition nor creativity are emotions or emotional skills as such.

Even in those parts of the book where it genuinely touches on the subject of emotional intelligence it tends to shoot itself in the foot.  On page 35, for example, it introduces the subject of the Johari Window model.  Top marks!  This is a model I expected to see in every book on EI,  But what happens?  We get a totally superficial description of the model and then switch to another subject.

On a somewhat different tack, on page 74 we are introduced to the subject of empathy, a key competence in EI, and we are told that:

"When you feel empathy you understand another's feelings but you don't directly experience them."
(page 75)

Which doesn't seem to quite fit with this passage which occurs a couple of pages on:

"The partners who were accurate in interpreting the other's emotions exhibited an extraordinary mode of empathetic behaviour.  It was found that their own body was mimicking their partner's.  If the heart rate of their partner rose so did their own.  This shows a very high level of empathy."
(page 77)

Matching your partner's heart rate shows a very high level of empathy, but empathy means that "you understand another's feelings but you don't directly experience them."?
No.  Sorry.  I just don't get that.

For me, the usefulness, or otherwise, of this book was summed up in three short paragraphs in the very last chapter of the book, entitled: "just do it!" (see what I mean about sports coaching):

"I have looked for the reason why some people will make the effort to change, while others will not.  And why will some people read through this book, accept what it says - and yet do nothing?
 
The answers to these questions is simple, though it does not offer a magical solution.  In the end people make changes because they choose to change and choose to act.  Most people do not make these choices."
(page 176)

Run that by me again?  The reason why some people make the effort to change and some don't is because some people choose to change and most people don't?  Is this really the best answer this book has to offer?  In a word, yes:

"Finally, there are people who can't wait to be proactive.  They decide that life can be better and they choose to change and choose to take action.  Why they do it is a mystery."
(page 177)

Actually it isn't much of a mystery at all.  Researchers in psychology have done a great deal of work in this area, and have some very viable ideas about why people do or don't choose to change.  I shall shortly be reviewing a book called Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts (Cambridge University Press, 2000) which discusses these ideas in depth.
In the meantime, for what seem to me to be very obvious reasons, I don't feel that managing yourself makes any kind of useful contribution to our understanding of Emotional Intelligence or how to get it.
Definitely Not recommended.

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Emotional Intelligence at Work
Hendrie Weisinger
Jossey-Bass   ISBN 0-7879-5198-6
According to John Mayer, co-author of the article that gave rise to Daniel Goleman's bestseller and still highly active in the field, this is:

"...the one book that translates the theory of emotional intelligence into an accessible, hands-on program everyone can use to advance their careers and improves their lives."
(back cover blurb)

Which was actually my main reason for buying this book.  It is also the reason why I found it to be a bit of a let down.

Not to be confused with Daniel Goleman's Working with Emotional Intelligence, also published in 1998, when considered as a whole I think this book is more or less well-written (I'll come back to this), and provides numerous tips, exercises and brief case studies.  At a fairly superficial level it does a reasonable job, and for that reason I'm going to give it a modest recommendation.  Unfortunately, when we look below the surface there really isn't as much "iceberg" as we might have expected after reading John Mayer's fulsome recommendation.

Unlike Goleman's first two books, for example, there is a seriously limited description of the topics/competencies covered by emotional intelligence.  The author sets out just four competencies, in fact, a list which accurately reflects Salovey and Mayer's original definition, but which appears to take no notice whatever of the updated and expanded version which theymade public in 1997, the year before Weisinger's book came out.  This is even more inexplicable given that the book containing the newer model is included in the otherwise remarkably brief bibliography in Weisinger's book.

As to the standard of the writing, at one level it is excellent and highly readable.  What makes it a pain in the glutius maximus is the author's failure to present the text in a reader-friendly format.
Firstly, the 212 pages of main text are split into just six chapters, ranging from 24 to 44 pages in length.  That might not be so bad if the sections within each chapter were a suitable size for reading in a single session, but they aren't.  In the most extreme case, just one section of a 44 page chapter was 33 pages long!
At the same time, sections such as Putting All the Emotional Management Tools Together, Putting All the Self-Motivation Skills Together, Putting All the Communication Skills Together and Moving Toward the Emotionally intelligent Organization each ran to just one side of a page, or less.

This same superficial approach is evident in the case of goal setting, for example.  A topic I would expect to see given close and detailed attention gets a brief outing on page 73: Give Yourself Meaningful Goals and is revisited at rather greater length, after a fashion, in a section headed: Utilize Productive Actions and Behaviors which could have been subtitled: "How to Make Your Goals Manageable".  We almost return again in the section called "Helping Others Plan Their Goals and Reach Them )page 202, but in not one case do we get any real help on how to set goals - not even a simple model like SMART.

I'm also somewhat uneasy about the thinking behind the advice that's on offer, which seems, at times, to be far more interested in find and solving problems rather than averting them.  In one typical case study, a meeting is being held involving several departments of a book publishing company, because an important book is not going to be ready on time.  We are told that:

"The group is discussing what has gone wrong."
(page 147)

The editor gets chewed out for being too easy on his authors, the book's designer is told her ideas are too complicated, and the marketing manager is criticised for setting unrealistic targets.  And all of this is justified, we are told, because:

"The time and place for this criticism is appropriate: you are trying to ascertain what has kept the book from getting out on time..."
page 147)

Well, is that really true?  Not one of the criticisms relates to unforeseeable events; in fact we're told that one of these problems is at least two years old,  Wouldn't it have been better if the editorial director (who is the one throwing these brickbats around) had held discussions with each of the individuals BEFORE the crisis arose, to negotiate ways of making sure that either the book did come out on time or other arrangements were made?
The author goes on to say:

"You can clearly see here that as the group gives productive criticism to one another they learn a lot ..."
(page 148)

Having sat through many similar confrontations I personally cannot see anything of the kind.
I'd say that the meeting has already turned into a "blame session", that it is anything but "positive criticism", that its real function (were it a real life situation) was to allow the editorial director to "pass the buck", and that the most likely outcome is a great deal of ill-will and bad feeling all round.
Not exactly top advice in a book on developing "emotional intelligence", you may think.

Likewise the NLP technique of reflecting back to the speaker any comments which seem excessive is poorly handled.  If the example on pages 194-5 is to be taken literally then the correct procedure is to simply repeat everything the other person says, parrot fashion - not even in a questioning tone of voice.
Oh really?

So, very much a "curate's egg" of a book.  Which puts it in a very edgy category.  If you know enough to skate over the crud, then you may already know more than this book will tell you.  If, on the other hand, you don't know enough to filter out the duff bits, you may pick up some very nasty habits by taking everything in the book as being of equal value.

In the final analysis, I'm influenced by the fact that I have, as yet, seen so few worthwhile books on the subject of EI
It really is far too sketchy in many areas, and includes some very questionable views, yet it undoubtedly also offers a number of useful ideas and observations.  I'd be very reluctant to use this as a primer on the subject of EI, but readers who already have a reasonable grounding in the subject - and approach the book with a healthy pinch of scepticism - may find it though provoking
On that basis alone, I give this book a:
Qualified recommendation     *  *   *

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NLP Pcketbook
Gillian Burn
Management Pocketbooks   ISBN 1-903776-31-7
As a very brief introduction to NLP this compares well with, say, Sue Knight's book Introducing NLP (also reviewed on this site.

For the most part it is well planned and well written, and despite that I really cannot give it much of a recommendation, mainly because it really is quite literally "too little, too late."

Having said that, I must applaud Ms Burn for an excellent section on neurological research - Looking Inside the Brain (pages 49-66), a subject few other writers on NLP have cared to tackle.  It may not be 100% standard NLP, but in my opinion it ought to be.

Unfortunately that isn't enough to mark the book as being a cut above the rest.
The problem with book as brief as this is that it offers little room to create any kind of context for the material they cover.  This author certainly tries to overcome that hurdle, but with very little success.  Just including the section on neurology eats away space that could have been used to clarify other more basic issues which would be of more immediate relevence to the kind of reader this book is presumably aimed at (i.e. people who currently know little or nothing about NLP).
As a consequence this is ends up as one of an increasingly large collection of more or less standard introductions to NLP, and to be blunt, plenty of the competing bools cover much more material, just as well, for comparatively little extra cost, and therefore constitute far better value for money.

It also has to be said that the book contains several critical and quite inexplicable errors.  For example, modeling is described as:

"...one interesting NLP technique..."
(page 33)

Which is going to be something of a surprise to all the people who thought that NLP was first and foremost a specific modeling process.

And later on:

"Language patterns, known in NLP as meta programmes, develop throughout your life."
(page 68)

In fact meta programs (no "me" at the end because the term is borrowed from computing jargon), are filters, not "language patterns," and I'm not quite sure how someone genuinely familiar with NLP would make such a error.
Indeed, the presence of such elementary mistakes did leave me wondering whether the author is actually familiar with NLP, or simply read up enough to be able to write this book.

Bottom line, not excruciately bad, but not enough material or accuracy to warrant any enthusiam.  I wouldn't buy it even as a Christmas "stocking filler".
Recommendation:   *   *

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Andy Bradbury can be contacted at: bradburyac@hotmail.com