Less than a week ago I was looking for books on etiquette because, frankly, that is not my forte. During this quests for book I feel over the book “I never thought about it that way” by Monica Guzman. It had good reviews and I needed a new audio book for commute to work so I got it from one of my Audiobook dealers (in this case Audible) and started Listening. And boy I was blown away.

Whilst the book is more on etiquette in conversations and arguments, it holds a treasure troth of lessons which you can utilise to become better at understanding other people from very different backgrounds. The focus in the book is mainly on political differences but it is clear that the lessons learned can be applied in other conversations as well.

Guzman was born in Mexico from which her parents immigrated to the USA. What might be curious to many about this is that Guzman is Liberal but her parents are Conservatives whom voted for Trump. She starts the book by outlining how some from her social sphere in her lovely liberal Seattle cannot fathom why she is still in contact with her parents.

She continues by outlining different scenarios for who to handle difference of opinion and how to address it. It in particular focus on how to evaluated what others say and try to understand their perspective, how to be a good questioners, and, in my opinion, how deescalated others and your own aggression in conversation.

In particular the concept of sorting, othering, and siloing gets a lot of attention in the book. Where sorting is who we associated with and whom we do not. Followed by othering where we differentiated between us and them. Although these two cause division enough the final of the three siloing is much worse. This is the concept of creating echo chambers where we only expose ourselves to people with similar opinions as ourselves. Although she do not state this out right in the book I feel like she is hinting that this causes greater divides in our society and in the end extremism across all topics, polotics and, opinions. Of the things you can learn in this book I feel the understanding of these three concepts and how damning they can be are the most important.

The rest of the book dives into concepts and examples that underlines the issues SOS as she call sorting, othering, and siloing and how to best meet these issues, how to be aware of them, and how to alleviate them and not just meet them.

All in all I believe this book should be mandatory reading for any whom want to participate in any form of debate or argument about any topic.

However, the books have a two short comings in my opinion. Firstly, it very focused on the united states of america. Which is fair as the is the home of the author. Yet, at times it feels like the author focuses so much on the states that it seems like this is the only place these issues exists. Whilst, I believe this is not the authors intend, I would liked to have seen a reach for a broader worldly audience. Maybe the author can do so in a more expand version of the book. Secondly, and what nearly stopped me for finishing listing. The author have a lot of focus on her own achievements, basically a lot of “I did this”, “I arrange that”, “I helped start X”, and so on. At times the book felt more like the author was promoting herself rather than focus on the topic of the book. I personally think that a reedited version of the book could cut down on this content rather significantly.

./Lars