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Connect
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Description
A BLOOMBERG BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A transformative guide to building more fulfilling relationships with colleagues, friends, partners, and family, based on the landmark Interpersonal Dynamics (“Touchy-Feely”) course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business
“Full of thoughtful, actionable advice on showing vulnerability, setting healthy boundaries, earning and restoring trust, handling feedback and conflict, and building and strengthening relationships.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential
The ability to create strong relationships with others is crucial to living a full life and becoming more effective at work. Yet many of us find ourselves struggling to build solid personal and professional connections or unable to handle challenges that inevitably arise when we grow closer to others. When we find ourselves in an exceptional relationship—the kind of relationship in which we feel fully understood and supported for who we are—it can seem like magic. But the truth is that the process of building and sustaining these relationships can be described, learned, and applied.
David Bradford and Carole Robin taught interpersonal skills to MBA candidates for a combined seventy-five years in their legendary Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics (affectionately known to generations of students as “Touchy-Feely”) and have coached and consulted hundreds of executives for decades. In Connect, they show readers how to take their relationships from shallow to exceptional by cultivating authenticity, vulnerability, and honesty, while being willing to ask for and offer help, share a commitment to growth, and deal productively with conflict.
Filled with relatable scenarios and research-backed insights, Connect is an important resource for anyone hoping to improve existing relationships and build new ones at any stage of life.“It’s never been clearer that meaningful relationships are critical to a fulfilling and healthy life. Connect shows us that by learning to connect with ourselves we can more easily build thriving relationships.”—Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global
“Connect offers a compelling and highly accessible road map for building relationships that lead to professional success and personal fulfillment. I highly recommend this book.”—Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and co-author of Blitzscaling and The Alliance
“In Connect, my colleagues Carole Robin and David Bradford have written a practical and easy-to-read book. They have succeeded in bringing to life a legendary course at the Stanford Business School.”—Joel Peterson, former chairman of JetBlue Airways
“Full of thoughtful, actionable advice on showing vulnerability, setting healthy boundaries, earning and restoring trust, handling feedback and conflict, and building and strengthening relationships.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals
“Carole Robin and David Bradford have a unique and invaluable feel for the human psyche and an instinct, tuned over thousands of examples, for how to get the most out of our relationships with others, and ultimately ourselves. This book is a treasure chest of their wisdom, shared with us all.”—Scott Kriens, chairman of Juniper Networks and co-creator of 1440 Multiversity
“What’s different about this book? You’ll see how many dilemmas at work that you thought were about priorities or strategy or ‘right and wrong’ were really about relationships all along. The future of work will reward those who can see past numbers and bullet points into the map of relationships. Carole Robin and David Bradford sketch that map for you.”—Roy Bahat, venture capitalist at Bloomberg Beta
“There’s no better time to learn how to create more meaningful interactions and relationships, and Connect helps us do just that. The more people who read this, the stronger our families, organizations, communities, and institutions will be.”—Alexa von Tobel, managing partner of Inspired Capital and New York Times bestselling author of Financially Fearless
“Carole and David’s classes have been an invaluable resource—what a gift to have their insights and lessons in a book. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to feel happier and more fulfilled, and to anyone who wants a better, smarter future for our world.”—Dr. Jennifer Aaker, co-author of Humor, Seriously and The Dragonfly Effect
“Learning to connect across differences and develop relationships in which we can actually see and hear others for who they are is becoming an imperative for nations and individuals alike. Connect is a treasure!”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America
“I am thrilled that the immensely valuable lessons in Connect are now available to millions of people. I encourage anyone who cares about developing stronger and more meaningful relationships anywhere in their life to read this book.”—David Rogier, founder and CEO of MasterClassDavid Bradford is Eugene O’Kelly II Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Leadership at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he helped develop Interpersonal Dynamics (“Touchy Feely”). He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife of more than fifty years.
After more than twenty years at Stanford, Carole Robin was the Dorothy J. King Lecturer in Leadership before co-founding Leaders in Tech, which brings the principles and process of “Touchy Feely” to executives in Silicon Valley. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of thirty-five years.
1
Seeking Exceptional
This book is about a special type of relationship we call exceptional. You may have one or two exceptional relationships already—maybe even more. In these relationships, you feel seen, known, and appreciated for who you really are, not an edited version of yourself. Your hundreds of Instagram friends might know what you ordered for dinner at that fancy restaurant last week, but the person you have an exceptional relationship with knows that you’ve actually been struggling with food issues for years, or that this was the dinner when you and your partner talked about starting a family, or that the impetus for the evening was to discuss the pros and cons of leaving your job. Those subjects are off-limits to the friend you haven’t seen since high school who follows your feed. They rarely come up with the person you carpool with. They are not germane to the aunt you check in on every so often. But someone you’re in an exceptional relationship with knows what’s really going on for you because that someone really knows you.
Relationships exist on a continuum. At one end you experience contact without real connection, while at the other end you feel known, supported, affirmed, and fully accepted. In the middle of the continuum, you feel attached to people in your life, but with many, you want closer connection. The question is, How? How do you move along this continuum? We have dedicated our lives to answering this question for thousands of students and clients, and now, for you.
Exceptional relationships can be developed. They have six hallmarks:
1. You can be more fully yourself, and so can the other person.
2. Both of you are willing to be vulnerable.
3. You trust that self-disclosures will not be used against you.
4. You can be honest with each other.
5. You deal with conflict productively.
6. Both of you are committed to each other’s growth and development.
Let’s unpack these a bit.
The first three center around self-disclosure. Why are we still talking about this, when many would say we’ve become a culture of oversharers? Because there is a difference between a presented image and sharing who you really are. Oscar Wilde, among others, wryly commented, “Be yourself, everybody else is taken.” Too often, we edit what we disclose out of fear of being poorly judged.
Social media has created a world where we’re pressured to spin everything into a positive. Your Facebook posts might show you smiling in front of the Eiffel Tower, but in reality, the trip was a disaster. Silicon Valley CEOs we know talk about the incessant need to describe everything in terms of how much they are “crushing it,” but fatigue, fear, and burnout are very real in the Valley. It’s exhausting to keep up these false fronts. Editing and spinning who you are not only costs you your ability to be authentic but leads others to create their own spin. We’re not suggesting you have to reveal everything to one single person. But you do have to share the parts of yourself that are important to that specific relationship. And what you share needs to be the real, wholly authentic you, not one obscured by a smiling vacation picture or cheery holiday greetings.
The last three hallmarks have to do with feedback and conflict. Challenging someone can actually be a powerful way of supporting them, and yet few people feel confident they can do it well. Someone with whom you have an exceptional relationship calls you on behaviors that really bother them, and when they do, you know it’s a chance for learning, not something against which you have to put up your guard. They know that in helping you understand the impact of your behavior, they are showing commitment to your relationship and helping you grow.
Fights happen, even in the best of relationships (as you’ll see, the two of us are proof of that!). But a fear of conflict can lead you to bury irritants that, if raised and successfully dealt with, could actually deepen the relationship. Conflicts left unspoken can still cause harm. In an exceptional relationship, it’s easier to raise and resolve issues so that they don’t lurk and result in long-term damage. You see such challenges as opportunities to learn, which decreases the chance that these same difficulties will appear again.
We have spent our careers showing people what it takes to build and maintain strong, functional, and robust relationships in both personal and professional settings. We invite you to join the thousands of students and clients who have learned that, and more, from us. Our passion comes from results we’ve observed in our coaching, teaching, and consulting careers. We don’t just study and teach the concepts in this book—we live them. Sometimes imperfectly; David’s wife of over fifty-five years has told him, “You teach this stuff—why aren’t you doing it!” Carole’s husband, Andy, has expressed similar sentiments to her. But we have always sought to live what we teach, and it has shaped our lives for the better.
Even so, we almost lost our exceptional relationship with each other. There was something that David did (or, more accurately, didn’t do) that caused Carole to get to the point where she wanted to write him off and have nothing more to do with him. We’ll go into the details in chapter 17, but the critical point is that even though we were at the brink of a total collapse of our relationship, we were able to come back and repair it. This allowed us to write this book together and, in the process, to develop an even more exceptional relationship. We are living proof that mistakes and misunderstandings happen, and repair and recovery are possible.
The two of us are teachers but will be the first to tell you that some lessons have to be experienced; that’s why the focus of this book is on application. We worked in the business school of one of the world’s most prestigious universities, but what we have to say has even more relevance outside the business sphere. And while the course we devoted decades of our lives to, Interpersonal Dynamics, is affectionately called “Touchy-Feely,” there’s nothing squishy about it. Soft skills require a lot of hard work.
The conceptual material in this book is based on social science research, especially interpersonal psychology, as well as decades of our own experience. David came to Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business over fifty years ago to develop the Interpersonal Dynamics course and today is known as the “Father of Touchy-Feely.” Carole joined twenty years ago, became known as the “Queen of Touchy-Feely,” and helped expand the program, doubling its size.
Touchy-Feely remains, far and away, the most famous and popular course offered in the MBA program. Over 85 percent of students enroll, and they often have to place it high on their class ranking to get in. Students frequently report the experience as “transformational,” and alumni regularly say that it was the most impactful course they took and one that they continue to use in their personal and professional lives. Lifelong friendships and even marriages have been forged among the students. It’s been written about in bestselling books like Creative Confidence by David Kelley, featured on the Today show, written about in The New York Times, and featured in The Wall Street Journal—all of which noted the importance of these skills in today’s organizational life.
As students quickly learn, just because the class is affectionately known as “Touchy-Feely” that does not mean it is easy. When they sign up for the course, they are placed in a twelve-person group known as a T-group, which meets for about sixty hours over the ten-week term. The “T” in T-group stands for “training,” not “therapy,” and its purpose is to provide a learning laboratory in which students can practice class concepts—such as the importance of self-disclosure, how to give and receive feedback, how to connect across differences, and how to influence one another—by interacting with one another and learning from the reactions of their peers. We firmly believe that the best way to learn to be more interpersonally effective is to engage with others in real situations and in real time rather than through lectures, readings, case studies, or, yes, even a book. While Connect covers everything that we teach during class, you will need to use the relationships in your life as your laboratory to get the maximum benefit. Throughout the book, we provide specific suggestions to show you how.
For students who are used to crunching numbers and muddling through problem sets, it can be initially jarring to sit in a group exploring who feels more connected to whom and why. But over the years, countless students who didn’t initially grasp what all the hype was about have left the class as true believers. (And no, it’s not a cult!) The class’s impact doesn’t come from brilliant comments from the faculty, as good as we might be. Our function is simply to build conditions in which students learn how the way they behave impacts others—and what that might mean to their success as future leaders.
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Additional information
| Weight | 19.4 oz |
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| Dimensions | 1.0500 × 6.3600 × 9.5200 in |
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| Subjects | interpersonal communication, mindset, relationship books, self help books for women, self help books for men, gifts for couples, couples gifts, personal development books, communication skills, Feedback, risk, communication books, relationship gifts, social psychology, relationship book, communication book, commitments, Daniel Goleman, Friendship, business, self help, marriage, relationship, learning, social, communication, PSY031000, psychology, Emotions, feelings, social skills, self help books, emotional intelligence, empathy, connect, BUS007000 |