SHSU Common Reader 2025: I Never Thought of It That Way

Start building bridges instead of barriers! This essential guide offers a simple 5-part framework that will help you have honest and enlightening conversations despite deep and fundamental disagreements.
Divisions are on the rise around the world, and 2024 may well be a peak year. We're losing the ability to disagree without dehumanizing. There is a deep need for this practical and accessible guide to having challenging conversations in any situation, from the workplace to the classroom to the dinner table.
It's not about saying the right words at the right time but something vastly deeper. In this book, you'll discover the 5 pillars of respectfully disagreeing:
- Challenge your perspective
- Be the student
- Cultivate your curiosity
- Seek the gray
- Agree to respect
But this is not a weighty tome. Each chapter features a cartoon, and Justin Jones-Fosu tackles this serious subject with a playful and compassionate tone. For example, he writes I have become more and more intentional in my desire to respectfully disagree with others (except those who think putting ketchup on eggs is wrong; there is no hope for respect there).
With a wide range of examples and exercises throughout, this is a timely and reader-friendly handbook to disagreeing with someone's ideology while passionately pursuing their humanity.

Use the power of curiosity to transform challenging conversations into productive, meaningful, relationship-building experiences at work, home, or school.   As leaders, parents, or teachers, navigating difficult conversations is part of the job. How do we keep calm and achieve a productive outcome, all while keeping our relationships intact?   The secret is curiosity.   Curiosity is the innovation-driving, emotion-calming skill that comes so naturally to us as children, but gets so easily buried beneath our busy, multitasking lifestyles. The good news is that we simply have to relearn what we already know! In The Power of Curiosity, mother-daughter executive coaching team Kathy Taberner and Kirsten Taberner-Siggins walk you through the Curiosity Skills and introduce a step-by-step process to use anytime--but especially when challenging conversations arise. In The Power of Curiosity you'll learn: How to be fully present in every conversation, even when distractions abound The five listening choices you always have available at home, work, or school Specific calming strategies to access when negative emotions run high A step-by-step process to transform potential conflict into relationship-building opportunities.

What is Violent Communication?   If "violent" means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate--judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticizing others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry, using political rhetoric, being defensive or judging who's "good/bad" or what's "right/wrong" with people-- could indeed be called "violent communication."   What is Nonviolent Communication?   Nonviolent Communication is the integration of four things:   * Consciousness: a set of principles that support living a life of compassion, collaboration, courage, and authenticity   * Language: understanding how words contribute to connection or distance   * Communication: knowing how to ask for what we want, how to hear others even in disagreement, and how to move toward solutions that work for all   * Means of influence: sharing "power with others" rather than using "power over others"   Nonviolent Communication serves our desire to do three things:   * Increase our ability to live with choice, meaning, and connection   * Connect empathically with self and others to have more satisfying relationships   * Sharing of resources so everyone is able to benefit

When young children first begin to ask 'why?' they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity.These two manifestations of curiosity have a history of connection that goes back deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book (a collaboration between a painter and a physical scientist that uses illustrations throughout the narrative) sets out to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and science: the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity.