If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered why your well-intentioned advice is often met with resistance or resentment instead of gratitude?
- What’s the secret to ensuring your help is actually welcome and useful, rather than being seen as an unwanted intrusion?
- Did you know that the simple act of helping involves a delicate social dance that can either build trust or accidentally damage a relationship?
Listen to Helping — Free Audiobook
Key Takeaways from Helping
- Discover why well-intentioned efforts to help often backfire, and learn how underlying social and psychological dynamics can obstruct healthy helping relationships.
- Understand how everyday cooperation functions as an unspoken psychological contract, acting as the invisible glue that holds both personal and professional environments together.
- Learn to categorize assistance into informal, semi-formal, and formal types, and discover why the most commonly overlooked informal help actually shapes our lives the most.
- Realize that helping dynamics closely mirror economic transactions, requiring an equitable exchange of give-and-take to maintain a healthy social equilibrium.
- Explore how human interactions resemble theatrical performances, shaping the specific roles and behaviors we adopt when navigating the complexities of giving and receiving help.
Helping — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Helping is essential in human society, though we don’t always notice it.
Chapter 3: Helping can be divided into three fundamental categories.
Chapter 4: Human relationships are quite like economics, even when we’re helping each other out.
Chapter 5: Human relationships are much like theater, even in how we help one another.
Chapter 6: Helping — and receiving help — can be tricky.
Chapter 7: As recipients of help, there are diverse ways in which we complicate or hinder the helping process.
Chapter 8: As helpers, we can sometimes be profoundly unhelpful.
Chapter 9: To learn how to help someone, it’s best to start with a truly humble inquiry.
Helping Summary & Overview
Helping (2009) explores a common phenomenon; when we offer help to other people, we’re often met with resistance, ungratefulness and even resentment. Drawing from a variety of real-life scenarios, author Edgar Schein describes the social and psychological dynamics that underlie this most fundamental human activity and, perhaps more importantly, how we can ensure that our help is both welcome and genuinely useful.
Who Should Listen to Helping?
- Educators, therapists and lawyers looking to provide more effective assistance
- Team-players in the corporate world
- Anyone looking to be a better helper in their day-to-day lives
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