Situations Matter

We've all seen the recent TV show, "What Would You Do?" where the American public is secretly video taped to see what their reactions would be for a variety of situations, will people get involved or will they simply act like they don't know what is going on, or simply chose to ignore it.

It is more interesting to understand the dynamics behind why people will react one way in a situation that doesn't involve a group of people and in a completely different way when faced with group pressure. Most interesting too, is how people believe they will respond when simply presented with the situation without being present. So why do people do what they do and does it really matter?

In the novel Situations Matter, Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, by Sam Sommers, the reader can easily pass up this book based on the title alone. Yet giving yourself the time to begin reading this book, gets you hooked immediately. Even reading the back introduction made me wonder, just why I agreed to review this book in the first place, but once I started only lack of sleep in the midnight hour got me to put it down for the evening only to clutch it once I woke up again.

Throughout the book, Sam Sommers takes the readers into the different perspectives we don't often consider in any given situation. Take the following that made me rethink my own personal reactions to these day to day situations by forcing myself to see familiar situations from unfamiliar perspectives, to walk the proverbial mile in the proverbial shoes of another. When an accomplished doctor addresses graduation medical students, he always tells them that the best thing that can happen to them is to get sick. Nothing serious of course. Just enough for them to struggle to book a timely appointment, haggle with the insurance carrier, sit in waiting rooms - a refresher course on what it's like to be the patient.

If you teach for a living, then attend the classes of other teachers once in awhile, sitting quietly in the crowd to rediscover what separates the riveting lecture from the one that sends the audience scrambling for the Sudoku puzzle. If you're a customer service representative, wait on hold while the recording assures you that your call is important. If you're an airline attendant, fly coach.

If you're a student irritated that two hours have passed without an email response from your professor, stop to consider that your ninety-nine fellow classmates might be making simultaneous requests for attention. If you're a traveler at the lost luggage desk, remind yourself that this clerk isn't the one who personally sent your bags to St. Petersburg instead of St. Louis. If you're a patient nearing the end of your third hour in the ER, recognize that, painful as they may be, your two broken fingers don't require prompter medical attention than the asthma attack of the seven-year-old who just arrived by ambulance.

This book is filled with countless examples of how we fail to do the right thing and instead jump to conclusions without knowing all the facts, or even considering what the facts may be. The author wants to make sure that the readers don't lose sight of the small factors that have huge impacts on the people with who we interact.

I received this book compliments of TLC Book Tours and Riverhead Books for my honest review and really thoroughly enjoyed this book. The examples the author uses keeps the reader engaged and often questioning ourselves and wondering just how we would have really acted in any given situation, because after all, Situations Matter! A 5 out of 5 star recommendation and great for students studying psychology as well! For more information on this book, the author and where to pick up this amazing book, please click on the links below:

Situations Matter by Sam Sommer

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