The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense at Work

Elgin is probably the grandmother of verbal self-defense, and teaching people to deal more effectively with verbal abuse. In this book she turns her attention specifically to the work place. If you buy one book on how to deal with nasty abusive people in the workplace, get this one. Her work is based on sound psycholinguistic principles, so this is not just another pop psych. book written by someone trying to make a buck.

This work provides a good development for constructiveargument aimed at management of confrontal modes. The authordescribes classic behaviors; such as, the placater, the blamer,the distracter and the leveler. There is a good section onvoice management which describes unifying metaphors and balancedspeech. The work describes practically every confrontationimaginable with appropriate voice responses and body language.This book will help you manage almost any type of confrontationconstructively. For this reason, it is well worth the price.

In addition to recognizing manipulation and deflecting those comments, this book teaches skills about:better communication by recognizing visual versus auditory communication, e.g. ("I see what you mean" versus "I hear you") It discusses that communication skills can be taught and learned, not just the result of luck, inheritance or genius.

I was on a curriculum development program on the real world for graduate students and we ended up specifying this book as one of the essential parts of the program. I've since specified other Elgin books as textbooks for graduate students and have never been disappointed.This book does have a second edition which was reviewed positively by _The Alternative_, a dispute resolution publication out of Seton Hall Law School. Extremely accessible (meaning that *real* people can read this book and use it), with insights and information that many professionals do not have.While her best selling book is now a little dated, and is written for a very basic audience (and is a classic in psych circles), this book is written to a more educated audience, without losing its message in jargon or technical language.