Ray Bedard
CEO True Course Simulations
“I was really worried about the survival of my company. My worst regret is I thought I could solve the problem by myself, and I did not ask Michael to intervene earlier.”
Michael has been called James Bond With a Heart. For me, he is Mr. Rogers For Adults!
– Fred Forsythe
Sr. Vice President, Apple Computer (Ret)
“Michael showed me . . .
how to juggle what seemed like an impossible task . . . running a group of 330 staff.”
“I was going through a divorce and custody battle. This situation was very, very high level. It’s invaluable having someone like Michael to navigate very stressful high stakes situations . . . it makes all the difference in the world in the outcome.”
Michael demonstrates outstanding abilities as a strategist and negotiator. In one situation that I am intimately familiar with, he broke a log jam in a very important adversarial situation that could have had disastrous results. He accurately assessed the other side’s underlying assumptions and superbly crafted a letter that went right to the heart of the issue. It softened the adversary’s confidence enough to allow a vastly more favorable outcome to be negotiated.
– William E. JohnsonCEO, Scientific Atlanta (ret)(a Fortune 500 Company)
Garry Guan
CEO, Asian American Language Services
“I was facing a very dire situation . . . almost in a desperate, hopeless situation . . . and with Michael Norwood’s help, the project was rescued from the brink of disaster.”
Michael helped save a major venture I had going which nearly crashed and burned.
We’d be a whole lot better off as a country and as human beings if we all learned how to use Michael’s 5 Phases approach.
– Stan McMcMeekin4 time Telly Award Winner13 time Emmy Award WinnerCEO Anarchy Pictures
Michael Norwood has been an enormous inspiration to me.
There are striking parallels in his 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth and my Join-Up® methodology. Join-Up has replaced the need for the brutal horse-breaking methods man has used for 5,500 years. By getting the horse to want to cooperate, it allows a young horse to be saddled and ridden in just 30 to 40 minutes, rather than weeks.
The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth works similarly in human relationships. Whether between parents and children, with couples, in negotiations in business or between heads of state, these 5 Phases enable an evolutionary leap.
Michael’s largely non-verbal communication sequence works almost magically to get others to align with you and literally to speak your truth for you instead of the confrontational tell-the-way-it-is style of speaking your truth so prevalent throughout history and seen more than ever today. It’s as if your underlying thoughts have all along been their own, and their thoughts yours as well. This shifts the paradigm for how peace and harmony can realistically be achieved for Humanity.
– Monty Roberts,The original Horse Whisperer,Author of The Man Who Listens to Horses(N.Y. Times Bestseller for 58 weeks with 6.5 million copies sold)Honorary Knighthood by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth is a brilliant original method of healing separation and conflict in business, personal lives and if applied could transform politics and terrible ethnic conflicts. It offers an enlightened passage way to greater connectivity, oneness and unity serving the conscious evolution of humanity.
– Barbara Marx HubbardThe Foundation for Conscious Evolution
Michael Norwood’s The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth are desperately needed in today’s society.
This book is so important not just because its so timely, but also because it’s a needed antidote to the toxic, poisonous style of sharp confrontation based on aggressive attack.
Most people today focus on confrontation and demonization of anybody with a different opinion. That approach almost always produces poor results or no results. By contrast, The 5 Phases yield much better results, preserve and increase relationships, build trust, and provide a greater harmony and peace of mind for everyone involved in any discussion or negotiation.
– Chief Judge Paul MichelFormer Watergate Prosecutor,Deputy Chief and Koreagate Prosecutor for the United States Department of Justice,Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (ret)
This is an incredible book.
I had no intention of reading through it on this day, as busy as usual for me, but I could not stop reading one section after the other. I feel like throwing my arms around the author and giving him a big hug. And this from an author of 7 books and countless book reviews. So I know books.
No other book has ever had this effect on me.
– Dr. David RybackPsychologist, author of Dreams That Come True,Putting Emotional Intelligence to Workand 7 other books, 60+ professional articlesand numerous book reviews.
You would think The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth would be common sense – that everyone would use these 5 Phases.
But, having had the honor of working alongside some of the world’s greatest leaders, I have come to realize that those abilities and qualities are the rare gift of a few who come along once in a generation . . . those like Nelson Mandela . . . those one-in-a-hundred-million human beings who innately grasp and live by those principles, which author Michael Norwood now has encapsulated for everyone to discover and benefit from in their own lives and relationships.
I wish The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth had been written 50 years ago. I was a student then, just beginning my studies in Overseas Economic and Social Development. I would later serve as the head of USAID (US Agency for International Development) in South Africa from 1992 through mid-1996. I was under mandate from the U.S. Congress and State Department to help speed the transition in South Africa from apartheid to a democratic society and to help train the majority population for a leadership role in a post-apartheid South Africa. The USAID mission in South Africa had a budget of approximately $60 million annually to assist Mandela and his new government after more than a half-century of repressive and brutal white minority rule.
I also served as the acting mayor of Baghdad, Iraq and the acting governor of Baghdad province in 2004. That was after the U.S. Army took over Iraq and until we could help establish and train a democratic Iraqi government. It would have been nice to have had Michael Norwood sitting there on the sidelines, helping to keep us going. The 5 Phases are so essential in maintaining proper relationships and still move towards the common goal, in this case achieving a peaceful transition.
In both South Africa and Iraq, the “my way or the highway” approach of dictatorial regimes eventually fell, as do all regimes that rule by such primitive might-makes-right ways. The difference The 5 Phases would have made to those governments, or to those negotiating with them, would have been exceptional.
The 5 Phases are a prescription not just for striving toward world peace, but peace in all our personal relationships, as well.
– Leslie “Cap” DeanMayor, Baghdad, Iraq and Governor of Baghdad Province (2004)Senior Advisor to Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq (2007)U.S. Senior Foreign Service (ret.)U.S. Agency for International Development
As the former CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I know how important it is to speak your truth in turning around a struggling entity or in taking any company to greater heights of success. It is one of the most essential skills in transforming a culture and changing peoples’ ingrained behaviors, and yet not undermining those efforts by creating destructive animosity and division. This was one of the key reasons my team and I were able to turn Scientific Atlanta into a market leader in its businesses, convert its losses into strong profits, and quintuple the stock price over 7 years.
The principles Michael Norwood espouses in his book, “The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth,” will be of tremendous value to any leader, boss, politician, or Head of State in creating unity and harmony in their organizations. Indeed, I have found these principles to be transformative in any relationship – personal, business, political, parental, spousal, or educational. His principles transcend the fine line between tough bluntness and tactful diplomacy that turns potential adversaries into loyal partners, team members, or clients.
If this book had been required reading for society’s leaders decades ago, the world would be a better place.
– William E. JohnsonCEO, Scientific Atlanta (ret)(a Fortune 500 Company)
The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth would have been a huge help for me when I was in the military. I was a Captain in The Green Berets and the earlier training I received before Special Forces can be summarized as follows: “If it’s broke, hit it with a hammer. If you can’t get someone to do something, hit them with a hammer.”
Rather than being a hard ass, my guys would have loved it if I had been more aligned with this profound new way of Speaking Your Truth. The 5 Phases enables you to resolve conflicts and create stronger teams by moving all parties into a much more caring, sensitive and receptive mode.
Whether you’re a leader in Special Forces, a parent, a spouse, a business owner, or the President of The United States, The 5 Phases transforms the human tendency to use brute force, which pushes us toward divisive and polarizing approaches, to one that automatically produces unity, cooperation and harmony in any relationship. This improves the quality not only of your own life, but of everybody else’s as well.
– E. Thomas CostelloFormer Captain, United States Army Special Forces
Powerful and subtle. The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth whispers to the reader, “Walk with me, experience the magic of communicating beneath the surface.”
The intriguing and incredible well-researched analogies hold the curious reader hostage to the very end, making them want even more.
– Ronald Story
Capitol Records, former senior executive
In screenwriting the first goal is to find the voice that makes you a true original and then create stories that are true to that voice – and it turns out to be a lesson people need to learn to enrich their own lives. People have long been learning this from reading or watching the stories of characters who speak truth. What’s so special about Michael Norwood’s The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth is that he teaches us to learn to speak our own truth in our daily life.
Having been a female writer during a time in Hollywood before the #MeToo movement and before all the abuses by Harvey Weinstein and other well-known personalities came to light, I faced many moments when these lessons were necessary and I’m happy to see them in one easy to read collection, chock full of examples from stories we have all loved.
– Dr. Rosanne WelchProducer: Touched by an AngelScreenwriter: Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences, Beverly Hills, 90210Professor: History of Screenwriting, Stephens CollegeAuthor: The Monkees:Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
I believe Michael Norwood is one of the great writers of our time . . .
With The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth as your guide, when you inevitably find yourself in situations where there is conflict, competition, rivalry, tense negotiation or even war, you will be equipped to find resolution that creates harmony where everyone comes out ahead, feeling appreciated and respected, with their dignity intact.
I believe this book will change the world.
– Mike BresciaCreator of the Think Right Now MethodCofounder of Great Taste, No Pain
The principles Dr. Michael Norwood presents in The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth follows in the footsteps of three other people whom I knew and who where important contributors to our thinking about the human communication process. They include Carl Rogers and S.I. Hayakawa, co-founders of the Humanistic Psychology movement and Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, and founder of Logotherapy.
Cap Dean, the former head of USAID to South Africa who aided Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu in their fight against apartheid insisted I get to know Michael Norwood. His reasoning was my years of work studying the role of the unconscious and nonverbal behavior. Ten minutes after I met Michael, I understood what Cap had in mind. I heard the same wise principals again from some of the leaders in psychology and communication theory.
I suggest you get to know Michael as well, via his new book, revealing the wisdom of silence and the importance of the unconscious mind in nonverbal behavior.
– Prof. Barry Austin Goodfield, Ph.D.Former Advisor to NATO, and Profiler for theInternational Criminal Tribunal, The Hague,and founder of The Goodfield Method™
During 14-years as a polo player in a male-dominated sport, I was elected to the Guards Polo Club, Windsor. For 3 years I was the only woman among 130 men in Great Britain’s most prestigious club, which included His Highness Prince Charles and other Heads of State. It was challenging dealing with an ever-voracious press looking for gossip, and the high-wired act of communicating as a gentle-natured woman operating in a man’s world. There were many instances that needed to be negotiated in a diplomatic manner that otherwise could have made me a target of ridicule and unwarranted attention whether by the public, the press or by other players.
Later, in my career as a sculptress, which took me to Europe, the Arab Emirates and America, commissioned by Heads of State and Fortune 500 Companies, I was required to conduct myself in a way that was effective in a male-dominated world, yet still retaining my integrity as a woman. This was equally true working as a representative for the Peace Alliance in Washington, D.C.
I wish Michael Norwood’s book, The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth, had been available during all those years rather than having to learn the hard and often painful way. The book is an incredible roadmap for navigating the rocky terrain of interpersonal relations, communication and negotiation . . . and what’s extraordinary, with The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth, is discovering how to do so with few or no words at all!
– Susanna Holt, MRBSMember of the Royal Society of British Sculptors
Perhaps there has never been a more opportune moment in the course of civilization for a new paradigm like Michael Norwood’s The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth to come along. So many of our world’s conflicts that cause humanity’s suffering could be alleviated if more individuals, organizations and nations discovered this clear and compelling roadmap for manifesting agreement, harmony and peace.
The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth provides an extraordinary means to resolve issues with difficult people and in high-stake situations. It recasts the concept of Speaking Your Truth from a single, and often confrontational, act into a series of five profound and powerful phases. The naturalness of each step results in connectivity, collaboration and ultimately unity. And what’s amazing is, with The 5 Phases, this outcome unfolds as if it had been inevitable all along.
– Larry J. Rosenberg, PhD,Retired Marketing ProfessorInternational Management Consultant
The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth is not just for the avid reader of self-help books or those who enjoy a collection of gripping true stories they can’t put down until the last page. This book is for everybody who wants to have more inner peace, feel more in command of their behavior and decisions, and ultimately of their whole lives.
As part of a self-improvement group led by Michael Norwood, I have been living the 5-Phases way for several years now and reaped the benefits in all areas of my life. I worked on myself applying the principals and practices Michael presents in The 5 Phases. As a result, I have either experienced instant success or subtle shifts of improvement in relationships over longer periods of time. No doubt, The 5 Phases are an invaluable tool for leading a more joyful and successful life.
– Dr. Ingrid Broszeit-Rieger, PhD
Retired professorFamily Systems Theory and Psychoanalysis
Dr. Michael Norwood’s brilliant new book, The 5 Phases of Speaking Your Truth, offers a fresh, new approach to the subject of effective interpersonal communication.
Dr. Norwood has studied the successful communication methods of historical, spiritual and political leaders and researched key neurobiological processes involved in human communication in order to develop the powerful techniques introduced in the book. Dr. Norwood generously shares wonderful stories involving his own life experiences to provide clear examples of his techniques in action. This is a book that is not only a sophisticated, important addition to the self-help literature but also a true pleasure to read from beginning to end.
– Mark Banov, MD, MPH (Harvard School of Public Health)Medical Director, WellStep and the Atlanta Center for Adult ADHD
