The Price of Nice: Why Comfort Keeps Us Stuck—and 4 Actions for Real Change
Amira Barger
Oct 2025 · Berrett-Koehler Publishers
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About this ebook
Winner of the 2025 North American Book Award Bronze Medal for Leadership and Management, selected by Porchlight Book Company as one of the Best Business Books of 2025, and recipient of the 2026 Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Nonfiction. Winner of the 2026 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award Winter Competition for Nonfiction Business/Finance.
“What’s wrong with nice?!” A simple and powerful question. It demands we interrogate the unspoken rules that shape our lives, often without our realizing it.
“It costs nothing to be nice!” What a travesty of logic. Niceness is not free—it comes at a steep price. It’s a velvet glove over an iron fist, stifling dissent, prioritizing comfort over progress, and conditioning us to accept the status quo. Niceness is one of the most insidious social constructs, keeping us compliant, silent, and complicit in inequity. If we don’t question it, we stay exactly where power wants us—agreeable, easy to manage, and stuck.
The Price of Nice is about breaking free. Amira Barger deconstructs our cultural obsession with niceness, exposes its hidden costs, and offers a practical framework for real change. With sharp analysis and personal insight, she helps readers disrupt the narratives that keep them stuck and reclaim their power.
Guided by four dimensions rooted in social psychology—think, feel, do, revisit—this book offers immediate, adaptable practices for creating change. Because breaking free isn’t only what you know—it’s what you do next.
If you're tired of “good enough,” this book will challenge you, change you, and call you to more.
“What’s wrong with nice?!” A simple and powerful question. It demands we interrogate the unspoken rules that shape our lives, often without our realizing it.
“It costs nothing to be nice!” What a travesty of logic. Niceness is not free—it comes at a steep price. It’s a velvet glove over an iron fist, stifling dissent, prioritizing comfort over progress, and conditioning us to accept the status quo. Niceness is one of the most insidious social constructs, keeping us compliant, silent, and complicit in inequity. If we don’t question it, we stay exactly where power wants us—agreeable, easy to manage, and stuck.
The Price of Nice is about breaking free. Amira Barger deconstructs our cultural obsession with niceness, exposes its hidden costs, and offers a practical framework for real change. With sharp analysis and personal insight, she helps readers disrupt the narratives that keep them stuck and reclaim their power.
Guided by four dimensions rooted in social psychology—think, feel, do, revisit—this book offers immediate, adaptable practices for creating change. Because breaking free isn’t only what you know—it’s what you do next.
If you're tired of “good enough,” this book will challenge you, change you, and call you to more.
Winner of the 2025 North American Book Award Bronze Medal for Leadership and Management, selected by Porchlight Book Company as one of the Best Business Books of 2025, and recipient of the 2026 Literary Titan Gold Book Award for Nonfiction. Winner of the 2026 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award Winter C...
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2 reviews
Literary Titan
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December 8, 2025
The Price of Nice lays out a sharp argument that our cultural obsession with being “nice” keeps us stuck in cycles of false comfort and stalled progress. Barger shows how niceness acts like a velvet glove over an iron fist and how it works as a social construct that preserves the status quo at home, in workplaces, and across society.
About the author
Amira Barger is the award-winning executive vice president of communications and head of DEI advisory at Edelman, one of the largest communications and public relations firms in the world. She is also a professor at California State University, East Bay, teaching marketing, communications, and change management. She holds a BA in marketing from Vanguard University and an MBA from LeTourneau University, and she has received DEI certifications from Cornell University, University of South Florida, and SDS Global Enterprises Inc. She currently resides in Benicia, California.
Amira Barger is the award-winning executive vice president of communications and head of DEI advisory at Edelman, one of the largest communications and public relations firms in the world. She is also a professor at California State University, East Bay, teaching marketing, communications, and ch...
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