Rising Above a Toxic Workplace - Book Review

At work, do you ever feel insecure, overworked, underpaid, or under-appreciated?  Are you frustrated when you are unable to meet expectations, or experience emotional harassment?  Is your boss a control freak, or do you frequently feel manipulated?  Or maybe you just find it hard to cope at work but you cannot put your finger on exactly why it is so difficult?  Sometimes workplaces can become unhealthy, harmful to your emotional health, even toxic. 

But there are ways you can cope, rise above it, and take care of yourself and others who are struggling.  In the book Rising Above a Toxic Workplace: Taking Care of Yourself in an Unhealthy Environment, by Gary Chapman, Paul White, and Harold Myra explain what a toxic workplace looks like and shed light on how it happens.  Simply understanding why leaders may create a toxic environment can help us understand better how to cope.  The authors counsel how to maintain our sanity and how to be a light in a place of darkness.  They use many real-life illustrations along with a survival guide and toolkit at the end.  Most of all, they help us know when it is time to leave those types of workplaces.

Workplaces change over time, sometimes good to bad, sometimes bad to good, sometimes a roller coaster in which we need to hang on for the ride.  I feel like the authors quickly turn to getting off the roller coaster more than how to cope with the drops and hanging on for change.  Many of their illustrations are of people who leave their toxic workplaces and then find a new job and live happily ever after.  In reality, it can be just as easy to walk into another toxic workplace, or one that starts out healthy and then management changes.  The subtitle of this book would be more appropriate to say “how to know when to leave” instead of “taking care of yourself in an unhealthy environment”.  Still, I thought this was an enlightening book and found some wise advice within it. 


I received a complimentary copy of this book from Moody Press in exchange for my honest review.

Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday - Book Review

Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday is a compilation of Pope Francis’s morning homilies from the Vatican chapel, St. Martha’s Chapel, from March 2013 to May 2014, edited by Father Antonio Spadaro.  Pope Francis provides true homilies, not written speeches, to the ordinary people from a variety of walks of life who attend the mass.  The preface by Father Spadaro is nearly 50 pages long and provides an informative background on possible ways to read and understand the spiritual richness of the homilies, and how to draw a personal encounter with God through them.

Pope Francis’s messages are simple, gospel-centered, sometimes strong, but always positive too. He proposes what we can do better instead of telling us what we must do, providing a challenge for us to strive toward.  He is truly a compassionate spiritual teacher of living the spiritual life and living out the gospel.  Whether Catholic or Protestant, there is much here for thought, guidance, and encouragement.

If interested, check out the following links:
Read Chapter 1


I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for my honest review.