"Love feedback, hate feedback, feel sort of somewhere in the middle, it still creates this sense of anxiety for everyone around."

Organizational psychologist Becky Westwood is an expert in social anxiety at work. And that gives her a unique persepctive on the situation guaranteed to created anxiety in ALL of us: giving and receiving feedback.

In her book Can I Offer You Something? Expert Ways to Overcome the Horrors of Organizational Feedback, she invites us to reject the grim reality of most workplace feedback processes and return to the original sense of the word: nourishment. It's refreshingly human, and might just save you some lost sleep, not to mention relationships.

This book was named Short Business Book of the Year, and we talk about what length is the right length for a book, and how the answers come as you write, not before you start.

So start.

"We need to think carefully about whether it's going to be the kind of pressure that creates energy and joy and diamond-style transformation, or the sort that sucks the air out of the room and makes things buckle and break."

Pressure is the new normal - in life, at work, in leadership, and also in writing. Other people put pressure on us, we put pressure on ourselves, we put pressure on other people...

This Best Bits episode explores how we deal with that, and also whether it's possible to use it well, and to find some joy in it. (Spoiler alert: it is.)

Hear from:

• Henry King on becoming 'change native'
• David Sinkinson on how to enjoy pressure in the moment
• George Walkley on turning negative feedback into fuel for progress
• Dominic Colenso on the transformative power of career meltdown
• John Amaechi on curating your own power and the discipline of writing
• Zoe Arden on the pressure to do justice to others in your writing
• Catherine Xiang on the pressures you don't even know are there.

Pressure is inevitable, how we respond is down to us.

' An author might be thinking, I can't wait till the book is out on a bookshelf... I would suggest focus on the experience of the writing and the pleasure of actually writing the book and the satisfaction you're going to get in doing that.'

David Sinkinson, SaaS entrepreneur, podcaster, and co-author of Startup Different (all of this done in partnership with his brother, Chris) is a big fan of business books. On long commute after long commute they taught him pretty much everything he needed to know to start and succeed with his own business, and one of the reasons he wrote his own book was a desire to pay that back.

One of the ways he does that is by rejecting the easy myths: he's open about the doubt, the missteps and the WFIO moments (you'll have to listen) along the way, and along with the practical wisdom addresses the emotional weight of building a business, what he describes as 'baked-in empathy'.

Having read a lot of business books is a great start when you're writing a business book, but nothing is ever going to make this easy. David has some great advice for anyone taking the job on (especially in partnership with a fellow author), and draws out the parallel with entrepreneurship: it's hard, you're constantly doubting yourself, but if you can let yourself appreciate the process while you're in it rather than obsessing about the outcome, you might just find it's one of the most grittily joyful experiences of your life.