ConfidentialBook Proposal Material140711
Possible Ingredients of aJacket Front Cover Design
“Thanks, Angus. That’s a valuable insight.”
– Steven Pinker[1],author of ‘The Stuff of Mind’& 7 other best-sellers
Strengthen Your Relationships
(Authentic?)…dialoguing…(Genuine?)
GrowYour Problem-Solving Capacities
A Tested, Practical New Approach to
Conversations Requiring Problem-Solving
that leads to Life-Enhancing Choices and Better Decisions
Angus Cunningham
Founder ofAuthentix Coachesand the
Eye-Zen Englishapproach toProblem-Solving Conversation
‘XYZ Publishing’
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Confidential Book Proposal Material140711
Possible Ingredients for a Jacket Back Cover Design
Ever feltcommon conventions of language usage might be minefields in problem-solving? Conventionallanguage habitsoften wreck our most earnest problem-solving efforts. This book not only explains why and how we sooften are blind or deaf to those ‘reefs’; italso shares practices tested inyears of coaching experienceboth for finding ‘safe waters’ and for repairing the sometimes ‘ruinous rents’ in our psyches such reefs have cut’. Drawing on scrupulous records of challenging moments, coach-author Angus Cunningham describes the many benefits of working with a set of guidelines designed to help us combine authenticity with empathy – the keys he identifies to facilitating the finding of solutions to ‘impossible’ problems:
We face must-solve problems by giving up, by prayer and meditation, by waiting patiently,by rigorous application of evidence-based logic, by ‘gut feel’,by the prestige or victimhood of our social position,by inspirational conceptions of truth,by hunches and intuitions, by stoic patience, and by sheer bluster bravado, bombast, orcharm. ButEye-Zen English– aname Angus and his family, friends, associates, and clients call the ‘reef-avoidant’psycho-linguistic practicesto which this book gives youaccess – helps us refine our habits of perception,interpretation, thinking, and expression into the power to face ‘impossible’ problems and increase our chances of solving them. Timely reading for entrepreneurs, writers, executives, educators, teachers, professionals in any field, spouses, and adult families.
- A.J. Jacobs, Editor-at-Large of Esquire Magazine and author of several books, including My Life as an Experiment, tried out the root idea of this book and had this to tell Angus: “I have much gratitude now! I loved reading your theories.”
- Douglas Stone, Co-author ofDifficult Conversationsand Thanks for the Feedback: “Helps givers of feedback recognize that feedback isn't a gift when we might only be venting or going through role motions but rather an opportunity to contribute to thorough problem-solving. Will help many of us to be more fully present and to invent both authentic and empathic ways to make our conversations less polarizing, more engaged, and more productive of the approaches we need to create just and practical solutions”[2]
Angus is the founder and principal of Authentix Coaches. Educated at Cambridge and Wharton, he has worked for McKinsey & Company, management consultants, in Canada, the US and Japan; served Cummins Engine as its Administration Director for the Asia/Pacific Region, and, as the Marketing VP forBarbecon, Canada’s largest independent graphic arts supply group in the 70s and 80s, helped it achieve greater market share and profitability. FoundingSystemtree, he and his employees built, for Eurobrokers Harlow, the world’s first electronic trading system from open-system hardware and software components. Articulator of Eye-ZenEnglish principles for problem-solving conversation in challenging circumstances – focusfor the surprisingadventures you’ll find inthis book – Angus lives in Toronto(problem-solving with his beautiful ex-wifeand lovely daughters?)
‘XYZ’ Publishing / Soft cover:14.99 / Hard cover: / $29.50Paper back: / $14.95
(eBook: / $9.50)
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Confidential Book Proposal Material140711
Possible Ingredients for the Publisher’s ‘Blurb’ (on Jacket Cover’s Inside Flaps)
When you depend onteamwork and partnershipand something’s not working, what then? The insights here are a powerful reminder that, once we make a practice of recognizing our assumptions, surprisingly goodoutcomes become attainable. If you’re looking for the inspiration and practical means to discoverlife-enhancing solutions to problems that once seemed ‘impossible’, read on.
Exchanges ofI-statements can lead either to astounding success or to utter disaster. Coach-author Angus Cunningham has discovered how you can increase the chancesof the former emerging. In this first book on Eye-Zen English principles for problem-solving dialogue, he reveals what he’s been sharing and learning with his clients.
Combining authenticity with empathy is the secret, he has identified, to success in problem-solving conversations. But the ‘normal’ structures of I-statements in English turn out to make that combination very difficult. So, Angus offers us some solutions you can practice with yourself and your friends – until you are ready to put them to a‘big time’test. That could be in intimate conversations with your significant other;in consulting engagements for McKinsey & Company, with multinational giants likeMitsubishi or Air Canada; in coaching sessions with embattled entrepreneurs like Ted Chant of Aurora’s Chant Construction Group in 2006; or round the corner tomorrow with your pals on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue
Angus tells amazing stories of success (and failure) in each of those situations, and more. So now, after six years of writing, this book show us, accurately, when and how to use which of the various I-statement forms he has studied and practised to navigate conversational situations for conscientious problem-solving. All you need to benefit from this gem of a book is a problem to solve and a yearning to be honest, and – let’s not forget – some friends and associates willing to work a bit with you.
The accuracy of the words we use is much more crucial than most people today presume, says Angus. But when we understand how the forms of I-statement that are conventional in our milieu lock us unwittingly into innocently taken perspectives that turn out to be divisive, we become clearer. Clear enough to relinquish diffident, defensive, ‘professionalized’,and other off-handedlyconventional roles. We can then begin again to listen carefully to, and to trust again, the vitalizing inner senses oftruth that always emerge when we strive for authentic dialogue.
We find our ‘problem-solving mojo’.
For perhaps 500 generations, says Angus, most people have felt truth to be sacrosanct – even if that meant fighting for whose truth was God or whose God was truth. In certain circumstances that common expectation might be wisdom. But in others, it leads to disaster. Which is it, when?
Today, as huge financial/political and media scandals are grim reminders that some peoplestill ‘shade, bend, or falsify the truth’ to burnish ego, avoid loss of face, escape punishment or defeat, flatter, or legally steal. So it’s timely for a book to help us to cleanse rather than block our ears, and to findthe means to voice ourselves with the power of accuracy rather than hide in the bushes, andAngus explores how we can do soby working on our capacities fo combining authenticity and empathy.
Angus was born in the British Raj’s summer capital. Moving with his mother’s half of his Army family, ‘back’ to England, and enjoying a country life and private schools, Angus emerged with the confidence to earn an engineering degree fromCambridge and win a Cummins Fellowship to Wharton. But when the climb up corporate mountains proved steeper than the sub-Himalayan hills in which he was born, the natural advantages (and disadvantages, later discovered) weren’t enough to save Angus from losing what had become an outstandingcareer and becoming unable to give his family what he knew they deserved.
That’s when he had to think about a language he had become expert in – all over again. And suffer a lot, of course, as he gradually became aware people were unfairly taking him for someone he wasn’t. But someone is in thoughtful dialogue with him on the issue. What can theypossibly be discussing?
Could it actually be in ‘the ether’ between them? Or is it ‘just words’?
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Confidential Book Launch Material140711
Author’s ‘Comment Addendum’ on his suggestions for Jacket Cover ingredients
The preceding 3 pages presentedpossible ingredients for the design of what might be an attractive and veracious jacket cover design. Possessing only very unverified intuitions in the field of book marketing, I can only trust these ingredients will provide a useful starting point for the people in the publishing world into which I now ‘throw myself’ with a mixture of zest and, hopefully, prudence also!
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Possible Themes for a Desirable FOREWORD[3]
This book will introduce and encourage psycho-linguistically habits of self-monitoring, centering, listening, thinking, initiation, problem-solving conversation, and review – all in pursuit of both relationship building and accurate problem-solving. Perhaps it should be called Cocooning No More!
Everyone's habits in these domains can be described as 'sometimes robotic': characteristically either too serially self-serving,or too seriously stoic. People such as Daniel Kahneman (in his meticulously authoritative book Thinking, Fast and Slow[2011]) and authors from the Harvard Negotiation Project (in books like Getting to Yes [~1980?], Beyond Reason [2005], Difficult Conversations [2010 second edition], and Thanks for the Feedback![2014]) convincingly advise us from their vantage points as distinguished researchers and practitioners, that this is so[4].
But roboticuses of language, while they may be fashionable, tend to introduce‘tribal bias’, which, regardless of the ideology favoured by a participant in a problem-solving group, always triggers asocial polarization in due course; and– without our wanting it to do so – tribal bias slowly corrodesthe social vitality of either one's own or another's self-and-social image. Even worse, absent-minded uses of conventional ‘memes’ of language precipitate eruptions of outrageous attempts to garner independence and/or freedom at the expense of lasting equanimity and self-worthfor they crowd out saner solutions to problems that perennially challenge our searches for equanimity and peace.
Acting out resolutions reached in intermittently robotic problem-solving conversations can, and sometimes, stall or reverse the gains in quality of life that advancing human knowledge and insight could otherwise make possible. So, can we make our uses of language much more persistently reasonable AND rational (from an increasingly universal perspective)? We need both cultural and(hopefully) universalperspectives in problem-solving oriented to meet truly soul-testing needs. Combining the two can be a boon in almost every circle of problem-solving conversation, powerful or not, in English-speaking cultures. So this is the urgent challenge this book addresses. Judging by the results Angus reports to us from an amazing variety of ‘moments of truth’ for him and his clients,this book really doesoffer us a surprisingly practical, and certainly hopeful, way forward in a field in which we all have some skill: our use, whether as listeners or hearers, or speakers or writers, of words.
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[1]Note to reviewers: Steven Pinker has authored 8best-selling books in the rapidly developing field of psycho-linguistics. He has made the post of Johnstone Family professor of Psychology at Harvard so prestigious that in 2004 Time Magazine listed him as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Interested in the context in which Prof. Pinker expressed the appreciation (shown top left on this draft front cover) for the key insight spurring this communication project? Feel free to download the short ‘.pdf’ document “AC & Steven Pinker 2012 Correspondence” available at this link
[2] Blurb only suggested to Doug Stonein an email to which he replied (coyly?): “May not have time.”
[3] Suggestions for well-known people a prospective publisher might want to invite, with some reason to hope for a favourable response, to write a Foreword to this book: Steven Pinker, Jonathan Kay, Douglas Stone, Daniel Kahneman, Lama Marut– all of whom have responded in a warm way to emails at various times from the author – and possibly evenDan Ariely orMichael S. Gazzaniga,whose work he has critiqued, or even Steven Covey
[4]Reading between the lines, one gets some of the same idea from Michael Lewis’ Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (2011), which appeals to people contemplating emerging market investments