In "You've Become a Dog No One Knows They Can Pet: The Gap No One Talks About" Randazzo weaves together personal experience transforming his life with a career in coaching. This book helps the reader transform their lives by blending Randazzo's experience with elements of spirituality, psychology, and poetry to help readers understand anger and learn how to transmute it into love. Randazzo is a great story teller and this book serves as a strong launching pad for individuals who want to improve themselves and how they show up in the world. Highly recommended.

Perfect balance of narrative, clear frameworks with diagrams, and calls to action in every chapter.

Phil has helped thousands of veterans, including me. His philanthropic efforts consistently put him in the room with the world's best and brightest for the last 15 years, plus. This book is like having him in your bag wherever you are.

Saved me time. Phil has plenty of experience and shares his takes in a very personal way. While geared to high achievers, execs, men with anger issues, we can all learn from his intelligent and vulnerable approach how to examine our inner lives and how to improve.

What sets this apart is how Phil tackles the unspoken battles behind outward success. Clear, actionable advice that helped me reframe my own challenges and build deeper confidence. Short enough to read quickly but packed with value that lingers.

If you’re a leader feeling isolated despite achievements, this is the book that closes the gap. If you’re a veteran like me, this book will really hit home. Buy it, you won’t regret it.

Phil Randazzo's conversational style of writing makes it easy to stay engaged (I read the book straight through in one sitting) and his personal examples make the concepts feel relatable and understandable.

Phil Randazzo, author of You’ve Become a Dog No One Knows They Can Pet, is a high achiever in the business world. As a result, he could have written a business book, a book on leadership, or any form of self-development book. Instead, he has taken a hard look at himself and written one to help leaders and high achievers where they likely most need it—in their relationships with their family members. As Phil’s subtitle states, this book is about “The Gap No One Talks About.” It’s about how to break the generational anger cycle you learned from your parents and grandparents and don’t want to pass on to your children and their children. As Phil states, he did not want his great-great-grandchildren, who might not even know his name, to inherit his anger.

The book’s clever title refers to how Phil’s wife and children were often so afraid of his bark and bite that they grew distant or tried to manipulate and manage him without his realizing it. As a case in point, Phil could go to work and make a ton of decisions as the leader, but when he came home and his wife asked him what he wanted for dinner, he blew up at her because he was too exhausted to make one more decision that day. Consequently, his wife began calling him at the office before he came home, under the guise of asking how his day was. What she was really doing was finding out what kind of mood he would be in when he got home. That way she and the children would know what to expect. Once Phil caught on to this, he felt ashamed and decided it was time to do better.

Phil wrote this book, as he states, for those who are tired—“Tired of being tired. Tired of the gap between who you are at work and who you are at home…. Tired of knowing better and still not doing better.” Phil knew he could go to all the coaching programs, mastermind classes, etc. and be inspired to do better, only to have something small trigger him so that he would react the way he always did. Finally, he realized he needed a map to the unconscious fears and beliefs he’d inherited that set him off. In this book, he reveals what those fears and beliefs were and how he’s learned to do better—finally.

I just finished listening to the audiobook and while I can’t say it has completely changed my life yet, simply because I haven’t had the time to put it all into practice, it has given me exactly what I needed, a mirror and a map.

What makes You've Become a Dog No One Knows They Can Pet stand out is the sheer level of vulnerability. The author doesn't lecture from a pedestal, he shares his own deep struggles and exposes the private vulnerabilities, fears, and hidden desires of other high achieving people who face the exact same gap between their professional success and their presence at home. Because these examples are so raw and unpolished they resonate instantly. It feels incredibly personal, meaningful, and impactful, like someone is finally putting words to the exact patterns people like us have been running.

I think the author's biggest hope for this book isn't for us to chase some fleeting 3-week breakthrough, but to stop rushing, notice the "furniture" we've inherited, and practice that split second pause right where it matters, at the kitchen table, in the car, and at the front door.

If you are tired of giving your best to the world and leaving the scraps for the people you love most, listen to this book. The real work starts now.