Fierce Conversations - Susan Scott

Image source: amazon.ca

Fierce Conversations was another book that I had to read for school. Going into this book I have to admit I was prejudice, mostly because of how this book was presented. It was for a class that I had started with high hopes for, but quickly lost all enthusiasm and it became my least favourite course.

The professor put this book on the syllabus and then didn't mention it again until almost the end of March when she told us that we needed to have it read for next class.  Um, what? I'm a fast reader, but even I can't finish a book like this in one night. So I was not in the best mood for reading the book, nor was I particularly interested.

I admit that I didn't even want to become interested because I was really unimpressed with this teacher and no longer cared about the class.  But then I decided that this was a book that I was supposed to read (although the majority of the class never did read it) and I could count it as a book towards my yearly count. And besides it is apparently a best seller so it must be somewhat good. (Although so is Twilight, so not sure I can count on Bestsellers).

Susan Scott teachers through this self-help book about how to have fierce conversations. These conversations are not fierce in the sense of scary/fearful, intense, anger-filled conversations, but rather in the intense, personal, honest, lets-move-things-forwards conversations. I did not come across any earth shaking discoveries while reading this book, everything seemed to make sense.  Be honest, tell people how you are feeling about the issue and your thoughts behind it and then listen to their feelings, really listen, and try to understand their thoughts behind it. You want to get to a point of full understanding of an issue, which will not happen until you truly understand their point of view. But I have already known this to be true (although I don't often put it into place since I would rather hide from my feelings and confrontations).

Although Scott does not present any earth shaking ideas in her book, in my opinion anyways, she does present some good, solid, advice. Once I got past my prejudices about the book, I was able to appreciate it for what it was, and had some good conversations with a few of my classmates who had actually read the book about our conversations and how we approach them generally.

This book is best read over a longer period of time (not in the less than a week I took), because to truly benefit from it you will want to digest what has been said and try out some of the assignments. That is if you really want to start having fierce conversations.

I give Fierce Conversations a 3/5 because while it had good advice, it was not much new and I still never fully got over my original feelings of the situation.