It’s All About Relationships

IT’S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS!
New Ways to Make Them Healthy
and Fulfilling, at Home and at Work
206 Pages, $16.95
Paperback, 6.69 x 9.61
ISBN: 978-0-9896274-2-9

Karen L. Rancourt, Ph.D., has enjoyed over 50 years of varied experiences: elementary school teacher, college professor, corporate consultant, executive and career coach. She writes an advice column, Ask Dr. Gramma Karen, hosted by Mommybites.com, a national parenting resource. She is also a columnist for GRAND Magazine. All of these have added to her expertise in personal and professional relationships.

To state the obvious: Everyone wants to have great relationships. Conventional wisdom, supported by extensive research, shows that having good relationships is a major contributor to one’s overall health and productivity.

A common problem when dealing with relationship challenges, though, is that we are confused and unsure about what to do, and we often end up doing something that makes a relationship even worse!

In her book, IT’S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS! New Ways to Make Them Healthy and Fulfilling, at Home and at Work, Karen L. Rancourt, Ph.D., takes the uncertainty and thorniness out of problematic relationships. She also adds an understanding of what makes for satisfying relationships.

Using Dr. Rancourt’s 15 Building Blocks of Relationships, you will learn:

  • Skills needed to effectively manage all personal and professional relationships
  • How to replace randomness and indecisiveness in interpersonal interactions with confidence, focus, and direction
  • How to assess what is working in a given relationship and what is not
  • Easy-to-implement actions to get to desired outcomes in relationships—that is, to build, maintain, strengthen, change, or end them
The 15 Building Blocks of Relationships

Readers call the book “Readable,” “Actionable,” and “Empowering.” See what you think!

TEST DRIVE

Take a “test-drive” of IT’S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS! so you can decide if it will have some value for you. Take the book “around the block,” so to speak — kick the tires, see how it handles, see if it has the features you’re looking for.

READ AN EXCERPT: “On-Stage Self Versus Off-Stage Self”

READER COMMENTS

When the manuscript for It’s All About Relationships! New Ways to Make Them Healthy and Fulfilling, at Home and at Work was done, I reached out to readers of my advice columns as well as to professionals I knew with practices in the helping professions, e.g., therapists, counselors, psychologists, and social workers. I wanted those who would have either a personal or professional interest in the topic of relationships to provide me feedback. The comments I received were thoughtful and detailed, including specific examples of how they found the book readable, actionable, and empowering. Here are a few examples:

  • “I was especially taken with how well the stories/anecdotes are integrated with your analyses. That brings home the points you’re making so very well. In fact, for me that is the great organizational strength of the book.”
  • “I like the simplicity, directness, and clarity of your writing style and of the exercises.”
  • “The examples cover both personal and professional situations, which were fun and entertaining to read and helped put the text in real experiences.”
  • “Helped to organize my feelings into words, gave me a way to think about and talk about my relationships to myself and to others. I never realized before how important it is to have a lexicon for relationships.”
  • “Each chapter invites me to drill down a bit deeper, or to pick up where I’ve been stuck understanding possible confusion, avoidance, or general resistance to increasing healthy interactions.”
  • “I now am more able to understand the many facets of each type of relationship, being mindful of good reasons to keep them going or let them fall by the wayside.”
  • “I can now see that it makes sense to ask myself questions before certain interactions. How deep do I want this conversation to go? How much do I want to share? The concept of the two main types of behavior I can control [before I respond in an interaction] had never occurred to me.”
  • “I have already applied so many of the guidelines and building blocks from the book into my relationships. I now feel so good, honest, and true about actions I have taken in regards to certain relationships with the decisions I’ve made, how I arrived at them, and how I have acted on them.”