We are trained from our first days at school to produce answers, and to produce them quickly. Exams reward them, job interviews test for them, and in meetings the person with the most confident answer is routinely mistaken for the person who has thought hardest. Almost nobody teaches the harder and more valuable skill that sits upstream of every answer worth having: knowing what to ask.The Art of Asking Good Questions sets out to correct that imbalance. Drawing on a career spanning...

Somewhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries, in halls warmed by firelight and shadowed by war, a Norse skald set down one hundred and sixty four verses spoken in the voice of Odin himself. He called it the Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One. It was not a hymn and it was not a myth. It was survival counsel, the kind a father might give a son before sending him out into a hostile world: how to enter a stranger's hall without getting killed, how to spot a false friend before he ruins...

Every day your mind makes thousands of judgements before you are even aware a decision has been made. It decides who to trust in the first three seconds of a conversation, whether a plan is safe enough to try, and whether a nagging doubt about a colleague's motives deserves a second thought or should be dismissed outright. Most of us go through this process on autopilot, trusting the verdicts our minds hand down without ever asking how they were reached. Cultivating Metacognition: A Primer...

You know cool when you see it. Try to define it and the thing evaporates. David Tuffley's The Essence of Cool spends twenty chapters catching that elusive quality anyway, arguing convincingly that cool is not a genetic lottery or a pose borrowed from a magazine, but a learnable skill grounded in something far more useful than style: a particular relationship to pressure.The book opens with the central paradox that governs everything that follows. You cannot become cool by ...

In a Brisbane bookshop sometime in the 1970s, a slim volume practically jumped off the shelf into David Tuffley's hands. It was the Tao Te Ching, and what he found inside changed the direction of his thinking for the next fifty years. Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu's Timeless Classic for Today is the result of that lifelong engagement, a fresh rendering of the oldest book still in print anywhere in the world into language a twenty-first century reader can actually use.Written aroun...

Most of us have felt it before, even if we never had a word for it. A moment on a clifftop when the line between you and the sea seemed to dissolve. A strange spaciousness that opens in the small hours when the city sleeps. The sudden, unaccountable rightness of watching a child lost in play. The Japanese call this satori, the flash of intuitive insight in which the felt separation between you and everything else falls away, and something larger and calmer looks out through your eyes. Chri...

Almost everyone carries a quieter, harsher voice than the one they use with other people. Raising Your Self-Esteem is written for that voice, and for the person who has spent years believing what it says.David Tuffley opens with a claim that sets the tone for everything that follows: high self-esteem is not a privilege to be earned, it is the ordinary birthright of every person, and the negative self-talk so many of us live with is not proof of some inner flaw but a treata...

Meditation has a reputation for being complicated, requiring special postures, secret words, years of training with a teacher somewhere far away. David Tuffley's Meditation strips all of that away and gets to what he calls the distilled essence of the practice, a method simple enough to learn in a few minutes, though as he is honest enough to admit, one that can take a lifetime to make your own.The book's core claim is that inner peace is not something you acquire from out...

What if the leadership manual you actually need was written two and a half thousand years ago, in a language you have never studied, by a court archivist trying to end a civil war? That is the provocative premise behind Leadership & the Tao, in which Dr David Tuffley brings together two things rarely found in the same book: a fresh, plain English rendering of the Tao Te Ching and a rigorous academic survey of modern leadership theory, and shows that they are, in essence, describing the sam...

Intelligence, in the popular imagination, is a single number, fixed at birth and largely out of your hands. David Tuffley's Becoming More Intelligent argues that this picture is not just incomplete but actively unhelpful, and builds a genuinely practical case, chapter by chapter, for a richer and far more actionable understanding of what a mind can do.The book's foundation is the psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, the now well-established idea ...

Nearly nineteen hundred years ago, a former slave who became one of Rome's most respected philosophers dictated a short handbook on how to live well. It has never gone out of print. David Tuffley's Enchiridion of Epictetus brings that handbook into plain modern English, chapter by short chapter, with a commentary alongside each one that shows exactly how a piece of ancient Stoic advice applies to a life lived now.The Enchiridion, Greek for handbook, was compiled from Epict...

This eBook allows you to grasp the basic principles of Buddhism in just a few minutes.Much has been written about Buddhism and how to practice it. Readers will have no difficulty finding hundreds of books on the topic. It simply focuses on the essence of Buddhism, as expressed in the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. It is what the Buddha first talked about after he became enlightened – this is what makes it the essence.Reading this eBook should not conflict with y...