My consulting business, Collaborative Solutions, has focused on the value of knowing who you are and communicating with colleagues and friends. My books extend these values. Of my first book, A Tao of Dialogue: A Manual of Dialogic Communication, a reviewer said, “The Tao of Dialogue shows us how happiness and success depend on how we exchange real meaning with words, rather than use them to score points off each other or strive for our personal goals at the expense of others.”
My experience with clients is that no matter why I am hired, there is an internal and fundamental communication breakdown. So I collaborate with them, side by side, to find the processes that resolve the challenges. Through this web site, you can explore descriptions of my client interventions and using my blog, offer your own experiences.
Dialogue helps people keep their business and personal relationships alive and well, and directly and indirectly led to my book titled Make Relationships Last: A Man’s View. Though brain and endocrine chemistry is a very large part of the attraction process, long term relationship success depends on effective communication. My book (easily found on Amazon.com) helps people get into the right relationship, stay in the relationship, and if necessary, find a healthy way out.
Finding Personal Success: Knowing Yourself is a short book featuring ways of learning more about oneself and contains 150 “wisdoms” focused on knowing yourself and maximizing that knowledge to create success in life and business. Trying to be other than who you really are always seems to come back to bite you. Some of these suggestions are my own, but I’ve also drawn on many authors for their best known thoughts.
A fourth book, Beach Bocce Champion, uses the playful game of bocce, played on the wide expanse of seaside beaches to identify how important making and keeping agreements is to happiness and success. It also teaches the easily learned and fully enjoyable fun of playing bocce on a warm sunny beach. What could be better?
My fifth book published was Baseball: Preparing Your Child to Play. It is aimed at the parents and coaches of beginners, kids 6 – 8. Kids develop and mature at very different rates, and this means who is best varies from year to year, and even from game to game. The key is to encourage young players to have fun, and to minimize competition among each other. I urge coaches and parents to avoid public criticism of children at this very young and sensitive stage. Help with improvables quietly and in relaxed surroundings and situations.
Doug