Nick Hutchison reviews Julia Freeland's Take Your Shoes Off First, a short book about understanding others by setting aside your own beliefs first. The core lesson: pause when frustrated, shed your assumptions, and step into someone else's perspective before trying to influence them.
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Raise your hand if you want to cultivate stronger relationships in your life and bridge that gap that divides a lot of people more efficiently. See, that's something that I learned in this book right here. And Book Thinkers family, today we will be reviewing Take Your Shoes Off First by Julia Freeland. Julia is the creator of Breakthrough Compass, which is a framework that you can leverage to do what I said before— cultivate stronger relationships, navigate uncertainty. And the subtitle of this book is A Short Story About a Simple Idea with the Power to Change Everything. If you've been following Book Thinkers for a while, you know that one of my favorite genres is fables or parables— short stories that are told in a fiction format but reveal really practical lessons that you can implement in your life. It's like the best of both worlds. The nonfiction lessons in an easy-to-digest fiction format. So I read this book because Julia reached out and asked me to review it, and I'm happy that I did. It's very short, only about 100 pages, and throughout this story you'll learn a bunch of different lessons, but the core theme is that you need to take your shoes off first. I'll take both of my moccasins off since I'm inside. I'm not wearing real shoes. I'm a little bit shorter now. What I'd like to do in today's review is walk through 3 of my favorite takeaways. I don't want to give any spoilers away because this is a work of fiction, so I'll give you 3 windows into what you can learn from this book, and then at the end, I hope I'll convince you that you should take a stab at it because, again, it's pretty short. So here we go. First takeaway, this comes from page 13. I thought this was a really cool framework. If you find yourself Frustrated in a situation and your intensity is rising like a fire and burning out of control, you need to do 3 things: stop, drop, and roll. Now, you might have heard that before. We all learned that when we were younger, but this framework is pretty cool. So stop first. Stop what you're doing, take a breather, and calm yourself down. Drop. Drop what you think you know and drop what you feel you must do. And any other story that is yelling at you, and then roll. Get curious and keep being curious until you start to see other possibilities. Oftentimes when we're in a moment of frustration, we only see one outcome. We tell ourselves a story, we create all this emotion around it, and then we know exactly what we need to do. But oftentimes that will lead us down the wrong direction. So you need to stop, you need to drop those beliefs, and then you need to get curious. When you start to think of, oh, what are some other perspectives through which I could view this situation, you start to disarm yourself. You get a little bit curious. Well, what might other people be thinking? What other ways could I view this situation? And that will also disarm you. It'll get rid of that emotion, and it will lead you to a better opportunity to resolve the problem. So I was really excited when I read that right on page 13. That's something that I can implement immediately. Now that stop, drop, and roll thing was baked into my brain when I was younger. I think now we can use it in a different situation. So that was pretty cool. I'll move on to number 2. Number 2, there was this example in the book where you could look at a cylinder and you could look at it from 2 different ways. If I held it like this, then you see a circle, but if I turn it this way from a distance, you see a rectangle. And the lesson there is that 2 people might be viewing the same situation from an entirely different perspective and see completely different things. Uh, let's see. Oh, I could use this Rubik's Cube. So if I'm showing you this side, you're seeing a lot of white and you're seeing a lot of yellow. But when I'm showing you this, I'm over here, I'm seeing white in the middle and I'm seeing some orange and red and blue. We're looking at the exact same object, but we're seeing things from a completely different perspective. 2 people can be right simultaneously, but they can be looking at a situation with different emotions and be frustrated that the other person can't see where they're coming from. That's something that I know I've needed to work on a lot in my life, and I'm beginning to understand through metaphors like that cylinder thing. When you're looking at a cylinder from the top, you're seeing a circle, but from the side you're seeing a rectangle. That happens in so many different areas of our lives. Ryan at Book Thinkers and I are business partners, right? We're equal business partners. We're working really hard behind the scenes to provide more value to authors and to provide more value to readers. And sometimes we see things from different perspectives. We've been working on getting more aligned, blending both perspectives, seeing things from each other's shoes. But before you step into each other's shoes, you have to take your own shoes off first, which is another really cool metaphor from this book. Bridge perspectives by disarming yourself. Again, that's another really cool perspective. And then number 3, I'd actually like to read you something from the end of the book. This is not a spoiler, but it's such a great lesson. It's defining how you can take your shoes off first. So here we go. To really open to unknown possibilities, it's important to recognize the beliefs you hold and develop a habit of questioning their relevance and how they shape what you see, feel, and understand. It's only when you are able to set your beliefs to the side that you can see beyond your understanding. Again, this is the main lesson from this book. Take your shoes off first. You need to take your shoes off first. Disarm yourself. Then you need to step into the shoes of your business partner, your spouse, somebody that you're in a relationship with, a stranger on the street. It doesn't really matter. And start to understand things from their perspective. Otherwise, you'll just be blind the whole time. Yeah, I'm stepping in your shoes, but I still don't see it. That's pretty common, I think, in a lot of relationships. But if you disarm yourself first, you take your own shoes off first, then you'll be much more open to seeing those other possibilities and to truly understand people. If you can understand somebody better, better than they understand themselves and articulate it in a great way, you'll have a customer for life. You'll get better buy-in from the people that you're working with. You have better opportunities to influence other people when you show that you truly understand the situation, and that takes so many different perspectives. What I really liked about sort of a metaphor in this book, you could see the, the painted toenails after the executive in this story gets a pedicure and he kind of opens himself up to the possibility that life is not black and white. There's a rainbow of possibilities open to all of us, and we need to take our shoes off first before we could see it. Anyway, I won't ramble anymore. Sometimes it's a little bit harder to do a review of a book like this because you can't give away all the lessons, right? It's a work of fiction. There's a story here. I don't want to spoil anything. But what I wanted to do, and I hope that I did, is I showed you some of the lessons that you can learn in this short story You should invest in the book. If you work in a larger business, you could give it to an executive team who battles all the time. If you work in a small business, you could give it to all employees since relationships are so much more intimate. If you're struggling in a personal relationship with a spouse or a loved one, you can both read the book and talk about the lessons and how you can disarm yourself— stop, drop, and roll— the next time you get in an argument. There are so many practical applications to a book like this. And again, even if people on your team or in your relationships aren't a big fan of reading. It's super simple, easy to digest. You could read it in one or two sittings. You could form a little book club around it. I recommend that you check out this book, Take Your Shoes Off First, Julia Freeland. And then Julia also has some prompts at the end of the book for group discussions or individual reflections, and she also has a wider variety of online classes and stuff. This whole Breakthrough Compass framework Check it out. Julia, thank you so much for encouraging me to read the book. I really enjoyed it. Now everybody else, go read something. Bye!
