A review by roseleaf24
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Third Edition by Ron McMillan, Kerry Patterson, Emily Gregory, Al Switzler, Joseph Grenny

3.0

This book has lots of good ideas, and I believe there is a relationship it will help me with a great deal. I also think it provides me with tools to approach potential crucial conversations in the future. The relationship I went in to the book hoping for help with, though, I'm still stumped as the conversations that suddenly become crucial are conversations where I'm in the middle and for my own mental health, I need to stop taking responsibility for restoring the safety of the conversation. It bothered me that all of the extended examples between a man and a woman showed how the woman could change her tactic and guide the conversation back to what it needed to be. We don't actually need another book or there about how whatever the man says or does, it's the woman's job to be more understanding and calm down the situation, and that's how it hit me because of the way the examples were written. If you're a woman reading this book who has been working on NOT taking on emotional responsibility that doesn't actually being to you, skip the examples. Read the chapter summaries, and go back and read directly what you need fleshed out a little more. And, please, if you are being sexually harassed, DOCUMENT before you approach it as they describe. Don't gaslight yourself into believing things have changed after you confronted it off they haven't, document your confronting conversation, document any continued behavior or repercussions, and report it. This book was written by men 20 years ago. They do not take it seriously enough and do not provide any citations for their repeated belief that usually harassment stops when it is confronted because it is a misunderstanding. I think the last 20 years have taught us otherwise, but I also don't have any citations to prove that.