You're trying to help--but is it working? Helping others is a good thing. Often, as a leader, manager, doctor, teacher, or coach, it's central to your job. But even the most well-intentioned efforts to help others can be undermined by a simple truth: We almost always focus on trying to "fix" people, correcting problems or filling the gaps between where they are and where we think they should be. Unfortunately, this doesn't work well, if at all, to inspire sustained learning or positive change. There's a better way. In this powerful, practical book, emotional intelligence expert Richard Boyatzis and Weatherhead School of Management colleagues Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten present a clear and hopeful message. The way to help someone learn and change, they say, cannot be focused primarily on fixing problems, but instead must connect to that person's positive vision of themselves or an inspiring dream or goal they've long held. This is what great coaches do--they know that people draw energy from their visions and dreams, and that same energy sustains their efforts to change, even through difficult times. In contrast, problem-centered approaches trigger physiological responses that make a person defensive and less open to new ideas. The authors use rich and moving real-life stories, as well as decades of original research, to show how this distinctively positive mode of coaching-what they call "coaching with compassion"--opens people up to thinking creatively and helps them to learn and grow in meaningful and sustainable ways. Filled with probing questions and exercises that encourage self-reflection, Helping People Change will forever alter the way all of us think about and practice what we do when we try to help.

Thematic analysis, a process for encoding qualitative information can be thought of as a bridge between the language of qualitative research and the language of quantitative research. Author Richard E. Boyatzis helps researchers understand thematic analysis a process that is a part of many qualitative methods and provides clear guidelines about learning to develop techniques to apply it to one?s own research. Transforming Qualitative Information shows how to sense themes, the first step in analyzing information as well as how to develop codes, through the use of numerous examples from myriad research settings. Research design issues that are essential to rigorous and high-quality use of qualitative information are addressed, such as identifying, sampling, scoring and scaling, and reliability. This original volume confronts the debate between positivist and postmodernist looking at the research act in an innovative and fresh way. Boyatzis argues for an ecumenical approach to doing research. His book will be invaluable to researchers across a broad spectrum of disciplines and approaches.