How to Get on with Anyone – Gain the confidence and charisma to communicate with any personality type? Review

By @SimonCocking review of How to Get on with Anyone – Gain the confidence and charisma to communicate with any personality type? By Catherine Stothart, available from Amazon here.

How to Get On with Anyone outlines the different interaction styles people have when they communicate and explains why these differences occur and what you can do in order to relate more successfully to other people.  It is packed with real-life case-studies along with interactive exercises and templates for real life situations. For more information, please see the press release attached.

Most people lack the tools to deal with awkward situations and difficult people. But what if you could find out the secrets of dealing with ANY personality type? How to Get On with Anyone will give you the knowledge, principles and skills you need to improve your interactions with everyone, build your confidence and change your life.

• Part One – work out which of the 4 different personality styles you are and understand how they each operate.
• Part Two – recognise the personality styles in others, better understand how to get on with different types and anticipate where conflict and problems may arise.
• Part Three – use the appropriate tools and strategies for typical situations including influence and impact, communication, power and control, and building resilience.

With a title like this a cynic might wonder if this is a modern day reworking of Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends And Influence People’, a handbook for exactly that, by slightly fawning methods. This book attempts to categorise people into a series of types, to then help you identify which type they are, and to then deal with them accordingly. Part of us then wondered if it was really possible to put everyone into a particular behavioural box. On the otherhand it is probably true that humans are less unique that they might like to believe that they are. It is also a reasonable insight to apply some emotional intelligence to assess the people you are working with to try and identify the best ways to deal with them. Great sporting coaches and managers have long recognised that to get the best out of different athletes requires different approaches, so too the best business leaders and founders have also managed to get the best out of the people who work for and with them.

In this way, with the reservations outlined above, this book then moves into exploring some of the different personality types. Thankfully there were regular and useful case studies to help illustrate her examples, and remind us of people like that who we have all crossed paths with. While some psychologists have debated whether ’emotional intelligence’ even exists, we’d be more inclined to accept and value those people who are able to apply behavioural insights to the the teams they work in. For as long as we have to work with other people, who are not the same as us – which will surely continue for as long as we are not solely work alone or with robots (and even then they may well have different personalities) then this is a useful and timely book to read.

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