Peter Bregman - How to Have Hard Conversations, Create Accountability, and Inspire Action on Your Most Important Work

1. Why You Should Read This Book
2. Chapter 26

Leading with Emotional Courage is a trailblazing idea, inspirational manifesto and eminently achievable manual. Peter Bregman's central idea, if you can feel everything, you can do anything, instantly became my motto for forging more productive and rewarding relationships in every aspect of my life. It's ingenious, it's intuitive, and it works.

Jeffrey Seller, Four time Tony Award winning producer of Hamilton, Rent, Avenue Q, In the Heights.

Leading with Emotional Courage is a terrific guide that explains why and how we need to look inward before we can drive leadership forward. It will also help you connect on a deeper level with those around youan absolute necessity if you want to get your most important work done.

James A. Forese, President, Citigroup

Peter is a master storyteller who offers compelling and important takeaways that really do make a difference. The principles in this book are the ones I believe in, and they are aligned with those that helped me and my tribe build a culture that resulted in a 93% employee engagement level at WD-40 Company.

Garry Ridge CEO WD-40 Company & coauthor with Ken Blanchard Helping People Win at Work

We must see ourselves life size, as Peter Drucker instructed. Leading with Emotional Courage is a leader's blueprint to do so.

Frances Hesselbein, Chairman, The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum, Former CEO of the Girl Scouts, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient

Becoming a Values-based leader requires you to first be capable of leading yourself. Peter does a fantastic job of demonstrating why emotional courage is absolutely key to your personal leadership journey. I learned a lot by reading Peter's book.

Harry Kraemer, Jr, Professor, Northwestern Kellogg School of Mgmt; Former Chairman and CEO, BAXTER International

After reading this book, you will want to share it with your colleagues, your kids, and others in your life. Peter is a master at drawing readers in with self-evaluation, compelling stories, and concrete take-aways. This book will stay on my bookshelf as a reference.

Asheesh Advani, CEO, JA (Junior Achievement) Worldwide

Leading with Emotional Courage is good for business, good for people, and good for the planet. Bregman's book offers the communications tools environmentalists and other nonprofit leaders need to transform tough conversations into progress and action.

Mark R. Tercek, President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy

Leading with Emotional Courage brilliantly identifies the often unnoticed emotional undercurrents of high-stakes business situations and the dynamics of everyday interactions. By making conscious the unconscious, this book offers us control over our own decisions and actions, asking us to open our minds and be curious when emotions are provoked. It has helped me personally to turn some of my most counter-productive reactions into questions. With practical, real-life examples and bite-sized nuggets of information, this book is relevant to everyone, not just ultra-senior leadership.

Michael Thatcher, CEO, Charity Navigator

At the end of the day, Peter gives useful tools for people to own their unique strength and power to be bold leaders in the board room and at the kitchen table

Randall Tucker, Mastercard Chief Inclusion Officer.

Emotional Courage is the foundation for inspirational and effective leadership. Peter Bregman's groundbreaking and timely book, Leading with Emotional Courage, does not merely inspire action, it cultivates it. Through concrete and actionable how-to's and compelling stories, this book will change the way you make decisions, how you speak in a boardroom, and actually how you feel at the end of each day. Leading with Emotional Courage is right on target and surprisingly different than anything out there. I feel like I've been waiting for this book for a long time!

James M. Citrin, Leader, Spencer Stuart CEO Practice, Author, You're in Charge, Now What?

This is a brave and generous book about being brave and generous. Emotional courage isn't about getting what we want, it's about serving others. Peter Bregman is sharing useful magic here.

Seth Godin, author of Linchpin

Emotional courage is the courage to feel. It's what stands between us and the difficult things we must do as leaders. Emotional courage grows stronger when you practice itby taking a risk, making a decision, or otherwise following through when you may not be comfortable doing so. It's about getting out of your own way and having the emotional freedom to act. Want to know more? Then follow through and read this book!

Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The New One Minute Manager and Servant Leadership in Action

Peter's concept of Emotional Courage is a game-changer. It isn't just another theory about productivity or leadershipit's a truth you can feel. It affects every aspect of your leadership and every relationship in your life. The beauty of this book is that it helps you actually strengthen those critical mental-emotional muscles and will make even the most successful leaders better.

Marshall Goldsmith The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Triggers

Leading with Emotional Courage tackles a tough subject that isn't much talked about in the business world: the hard emotions that we all experience. If you courageously adopt the advice in this breakthrough book, you can begin the tough conversations that lead to real change, build more trusting relationships, and perhaps even become an inspiration to others.

Daniel H. Pink, author of WHEN and DRIVE

Want to learn how to brave the fears associated with difficult interpersonal exchanges on the job and elsewhere? Leading with Emotional Courage, brimming with applicable insights and lessons, is definitely the book for you.

Robert B. Cialdini, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

Change begins from within; so does leadership. Bregman's insights help leaders gain personal confidence so that they can approach others with a clear purpose and bold, courageous actions. This marvelous book lets me feel like Peter is sitting next to me, coaching me how to be more effective. The insights resonate, the assessments inform, and the stories inspire.

Dave Ulrich, Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Partner, The RBL Group

It's incredibly refreshing to get this sort of wise and kind advice from someone who specializes in helping leaders get massive traction. Most voices you'd hear today urging massive traction would speak fast, hard, unrelenting exhortations couched in inspirational illustrations of super-human performance. As human-centered-designers, we at the Life Design Lab at Stanford aren't too keen on those driven voices. We're looking to help people be more human not super-human, which is a very different, and frankly in-human, thing. Peter Bregman has a different voice. What other massive traction-getting coaches will suggest that compassion is a critical foundation of self-confidence or that you need to master irrelevancy if you're going to succeed (and better do so well before retirement)? I've been assigning students to read Peter's contrary ideas for years and I recommend this book to you. I finally got to share coffee with him face-to-face and had one of the best first dates of all time. Pull up a chair with this book and share a coffee with Peter. You'll have a lovely time and be better for it.