Sarah Beaulieu is an author and speaker with an impressive history of advocacy. She trains employers on sexual harassment prevention and response. Her work and expertise has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Boston Business Journal, Fox News, the Providence Journal, AskMen.com, Cognoscenti (WBUR), the Nonprofit Quarterly, Commonhealth (WBUR), Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Good Men Project, Huffington Post and the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She’s been a featured speaker at TEDxBeacon Street and the Business Innovation Factory Summit. Her book Breaking the Silence Habit: A Practical Guide to Uncomfortable Conversations in the #MeToo Workplace (Berrett-Koehler Publishers; February 25, 2020), is a five-part manual offering instructions for employers to facilitate what she calls “uncomfortable conversations” concerning sexual harassment in the workplace. These conversations will help to develop new and better ways of working together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: https://sarahbeaulieu.me/breaking-the-silence-habit
Building atop the already practiced foundation of current compliance with laws and regulations, Beaulieu adds a deeper more meaningful approach to employees valuing and respecting one another. She encourages employers to go beyond the dos and don’ts of compliance and navigate an uncertain, emotionally charged terrain. Beaulieu’s expertise comes from not only counseling and diving passionately into the issues at stake, but from personal and traumatic experience as well. In this transparent look at her own life, Beaulieu’s empathy for all those affected by the #MeToo movement is universal. The opening of the book is a bit repetitive and wordy, but once into the framework, her explanations are clear. She leaves the definition of harassment vague, suggesting the ‘uncomfortable conversations’ in each specific workplace will find their own borders. The book is well designed with a five-part framework for having conversations about sexual harassment: Know the Facts, Get Uncomfortable, Pause the Reaction, Embrace Practical Questions and See the Whole Picture. Each chapter is both introduced and summarized for easy reference. I might add also that the techniques she suggests will be beneficial for more than just sexual harassment issues but in other relationship difficulties as well. Beaulieu’s true scenarios she adds are compelling and support her thesis.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Silence-Habit-Uncomfortable-Conversations-ebook/dp/B07Y3Y56K4
In summary, Breaking the Silence Habit: A Practical Guide to Uncomfortable Conversations in the #MeToo Workplace is a well-designed workbook which offers practical advice for raising the bar in a working environment and which offers tools that can be used to implement mutual respect. A new, cutting edge concept that promises to advance humanity’s understanding of itself.
D.L. Gardner
