I Decide Who Pushes My Buttons: 50 Sentences for Self-Confidence in Any Situation

by Karin Kuschik, Ben Posener (Translator)

The international bestselling guide to self-advocating, setting boundaries, and boosting self-confidence in personal and professional settings through fifty short, simple, and powerful sentences.

Too often we find ourselves tangled up in difficult situations, like miscommunications and misunderstandings. The urge to people please, minimize our feelings, and let others overstep our boundaries puts us in tough spots, and it can feel impossible to find a way out. Yet the answer is Just a short, to-the-point sentence used at the right moment can be the most powerful tool at our disposal.

In her international bestseller, Karin Kuschik draws on her two decades of experience as a leadership and life coach to demonstrate how a well-chosen sentence can provide much-needed clarity, offering up an effective solution even in the heat of the moment. Whether it’s a professional or personal conflict, these phrases are small but

This isn’t against you, it’s for me.I’d rather not promise you that.I understand you completely, and I would like something else.I’d rather be with myself for the moment.You’re right.Combining entertaining storytelling with practical tips and examples, I Decide Who Pushes My Buttons shows how purposeful words can have a freeing effect, making us strong, calm, and confident in the face of any challenge.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published November 4, 2025

Reviews

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Epic Tastemakers & William Morrow for my #gifted copy. My opinions are my own.

In this book, Kuschik presents 50 small sentences that she has found to have big impacts when it comes to communicating with clarity, setting boundaries, and experiencing appreciation. She and her coaching clients have found them to be useful as mantras. She presents an anecdote for each, and fleshes out how and why she has found each to work.

It gook me until the sixth or seventh mantra to figure out why this book was landing a bit sour--it was written by, for, and about another culture. The anecdotes she offers don't land exactly right with me (as a product of my US culture) because the cultural and societal expectations are completely different. Even the word choice and punctuation/layout are off. It feels like this book was translated directly from German to American English and no one edited it for paragraph breaks or cultural understanding. Given that I'm not the intended audience, it makes perfect sense that I find the way she approaches feelings and boundaries to be off key. After that I decided not to finish, but I did skim through the mantras and take and leave them according to my own personal code of ethics. Some do "translate" well and some don't, but all that I read were elaborated upon with thought and logic.

[Yessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kuschik's book of 50 mantras is pretty good, full of statements that we may not think to tell ourselves and contextualizing common phrases. It took me a while to get through though because this is not a linear book that builds on previous ideas. Each statement gets it's own little section, so as mentioned in the foreword, you can skip around to whichever statement is calling to you at the time. Each section gets an anecdote about how Kuschik came to identify the statement which kind of took me out a bit. I would skim until I got to the analysis of the phrase and how it can empower you. There's also the language in the book. It was hard for me to put my finger on what it was until I saw that this was translated. It seems like the translation was done very formally, even though some of the situations described were informal, or it could be just how people talk in Germany.

[Shannon Rochester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my digital copy in exchange for an honest review. This sounded like a book that would be right up my alley, and I guess, technically it was... but I just could not read it for very long at once. Parts of it seemed very text booky and parts of it seemed like I was at a therapist's office...at no point was it actually a "fun" book to read, though. I will say it will probably help a lot of people out there that hadn't already read so many books that cover the same sorts of scenarios...for me, so much of it was either already things I do or say or things I had read about.