Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, and Roger Fisher.  Published by Penguin Books, updated edition 2010.  $14.00 hardcover, 352 pages.  ISBN-13 978-0143118442

Avoiding difficult conversations is an everyday occurrence, and we generally don’t even know we are doing it. The authors from the Harvard Negotiation Project provide ways of reducing stress and increasing success with a step-by-step approach to having those hard conversations.  They’ll teach you how to start a conversation without being defensive, how to listen for what is not said, how to stay calm when being attacked or accused, and how to move from emotion to solving problems productively.