Imagine walking up to a stranger on the subway and asking them for their seat. What about asking a random person on the street if you could borrow their phone? If the idea makes you squeamish, you’re not alone–social psychologists have found that doing these very things makes most of us almost unbearably uncomfortable.

But here’s the funny thing: even though we hate to ask for help, most people are wired to be helpful. And that’s a good thing, because every day in the modern, uber-collaborative workplace, we all need to know when and how to call in the cavalry.

However, asking people for help isn’t intuitive; in fact, a lot of our instincts are wrong. As a result, we do a poor job of calling in the reinforcements we need, leaving confused or even offended colleagues in our wake.

This pragmatic book explains how to get it right. With humor, insight, and engaging storytelling, Heidi Grant, PhD, describes how to elicit helpful behavior from your friends, family, and colleagues–in a way that leaves them feeling genuinely happy to lend a hand.

Whether you’re a first-time manager or a seasoned leader, getting people to pitch in is what leadership is. Fortunately, people have a natural instinct to help other human beings; you just need to know how to channel this urge into what it is you specifically need them to do. It’s not manipulation. It’s just management.

Have you ever had the feeling that you’re just not getting through to the person you’re talking with, or coming across the way you intend to? You’re not alone. Our usual approach is to just talk louder, to try harder to get our message through. This is almost always the wrong approach.

Why? Because other people almost never see us the way we see ourselves. Fortunately, these distortions in perception are systematic, understandable, and surmountable.

In my new book, I’ll show you how to communicate effectively—despite these unintentional (yet widespread) distortions of perception. By better understanding how communication and perception really work, you’ll learn to send the right signals at the right time, no matter who you’re communicating with.

Are you at the top of your game—or still trying to get there?

Take your cues from the short, powerful 9 Things Successful People Do Differently, where the strategies and goals of the world’s most successful people are on display—backed by research that shows exactly what has the biggest impact on performance. Here’s a hint: accomplished people reach their goals because of what they do, not just who they are.

Readers have called this “a gem of a book.” Get ready to accomplish your goals at last.

We all want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. But there are really two kinds of pleasure and pain that motivate everything we do. If you are promotion-focused, you want to advance and avoid missed opportunities. If you are prevention-focused, you want to minimize losses and keep things working. And as Tory Higgins has found in his groundbreaking research, if you understand how people focus, you have the power to motivate yourself and everyone around you.

Showing how promotion/prevention focus applies across a wide range of situations from selling products to managing employees to raising children to getting a second date, Halvorson and Higgins show us how to identify focus, how to change focus, and how to use focus exactly the right way to get results. Short, punchy, and prescriptive, Focus will help you see not just what’s going on around you— but what’s underneath.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to get people motivated. Anyone who tells you that you should do X to get the most out of your employees, your students, or even yourself, isn’t telling you that – at best – X only works for some of the people, some of the time. In this short guide, you’ll learn about the eight different types of underperformers and the specific strategies for lighting a fire under each one.

Do you ever wonder why Asian students are able to achieve so much more than their American counterparts? Even very smart, very accomplished people are very bad at understanding why they succeed or fail. In Succeed, award-winning social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson offers counterintuitive insights, illuminating stories, and science-based information that can help anyone:

Set a goal to pursue even in the face of adversity
Build willpower, which can be strengthened like a muscle
Avoid the kind of positive thinking that makes people fail

Whether you want to motivate your kids, your employees, or just yourself, Succeed unlocks the secrets of achievement, and shows you how to create new possibilities in every area of your life.