Launch Day: Working With Feelings
"Just give a shit about yourself and others. I guarantee that effort will change things." - Isidora Torres
“When I first started writing this book, I was intent on making it a business book. But as I continued to write and hear from others, what started as a business book became a human book: an exploration of how we choose to care about each other.” - Isidora Torres, author of Working With Feelings.
When I first started thinking about what Parea could and should be, I got emphatic advice from people in the publishing industry: what you are doing from a content perspective is not what’s going to define Parea. There are millions of books in the world, most of which have never been read. Whatever book you think you’re publishing isn’t new, there’s another book out there, likely dozens of books out there, just like. They just haven’t found their readers.
Generally, I agree. There isn’t a shortage of good books, there’s an inability to connect readers with the types of books they actually want to read, which is the real heart of Parea: redefining the relationship between publisher and reader, surfacing books that readers want to read—books that are written by them and for them.
Working With Feelings is different, though. Call me naive, but I really don’t think there’s a single book in existence like this one. There are loads of business books, yes. There are even some written by women of color, thankfully. But what sets this book apart is that it’s not written by someone who’s already achieved pinnacle “business success” and is looking down on their readers, trying to inspire them to be just a *little bit better*, to *realize their full potential* so they can be just like the author. It’s written by someone who is you: someone who’s going through it like you are, someone who’s navigating challenges in real time, who’s managing up AND down. Isidora doesn’t claim to know it all and she doesn’t have a codified, productized, formulaic vision for “success”, whatever that means.
Isidora wants to help you, whoever you are, develop skills of emotional fluency and cultural humility. She leverages her experience as a seasoned HR & Ops manager and her in-progress master’s degree in mental health counseling to dive deep into what cultural humility and awareness are and why they’re essential for creating positive emotional values in the workplace. She gives you some guidelines and tips to follow to help create a culture of emotional awareness and empathy, whether you’re creating that culture in your immediate team as a manager, among your peers, or within your entire company if you’re a CEO.
On a personal level, this book means so much to me. I’ve held a lot of different roles at startups, mostly in the brand and communications side of things, but I’ve also spent a bit of time running HR teams and doing HR consulting. Besides founding and running a publishing house, it’s my favorite thing to do. I’m deeply passionate about HR (or if you’re in tech, People & Culture) because I care most about the people behind the business. I’m obsessed with people: learning about them, what motivates them, what makes them nervous, why they act the way they do, and I spend most of my days thinking about how I can empower people to do their best work. When I met Isidora she had all of these values and then some. After I worked with her for a bit, all I wanted to do was shout her wisdom and way of operating from the rooftops.
What Isidora has that I don’t is a remarkable ability to feel and demonstrate a full range of emotions (as a healthy human aught to) but to do it in a productive way at work. The way she navigated heartbreak at work gave other employees permission to do the same. The way she cultivated culture through COVID, Black Lives Matter, anti-Asian hate crimes, and so much more made her colleagues feel like work was a refuge, a safe place, somewhere they could show up being devastated by the weight of the world but still do the work that needed to get done.
Isidora is a force: she’s opinionated, she’s hyper-intelligent, she’s emotionally adept in ways that most people aren’t, she’s compassionate, she’s wise beyond her years, she’s honest, she’s humble, she’s curious, she knows what she doesn’t know but she’s willing to share what she does know.
Her book is like nothing else out there, and I truly believe that. There’s something in this book for everyone—whether you’re a lawyer in Portugal, an artist in LA, a designer in New York, a marketing manager in San Francisco, a teacher in Chicago, or a college student in Minnesota, there’s something in here for you. I say that because these are all people who showed up to the early focus groups for the manuscript and they all called the book “essential reading”.
It’s finally live, and I highly encourage you to pick up a copy. I hope you love it.