These are the 5 books related to leadership, business and coaching that I wouldn’t be without:
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Morgan Housel is a New York Times Bestselling author and distinguished Business and Financial Journalist. The book explores behaviours and values around finance and investing, including personal finances. It unpacks risk and probability and the impact of how we assess these on successes and failures. Crucially, he draws a line under the key point that people make decisions based on how they feel not on facts. Valuable lessons for us all in this book.
Atomic Habits
This book sets out the clearest breakdown of the psychology of human behaviours in the context of forging new habits and includes and useable, repeatable tools and templates that you can apply instantly. It’s pretty much the handbook for positive habit setting. It’s that effective I am considering making it mandatory reading for my coaching clients.
Self-coaching 101
This book contains a tool simply called “The Model“. The underpinning principle of the model is based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) which is the cornerstone of understanding the relationship between thoughts, feelings and actions. Neuroscience is catching up with Psychological theories and shows us through brain scan imaging that we can change our unhelpful limiting beliefs to ones which enable us to achieve our goals and dreams.
It’s not magic, it’s a process and the workbook teaches us the most basic and fundamental step. As I coach, I routinely use this model on myself, with my clients, with my Mum (who also has the book) and also with some Year 12 students in building confidence and resilience. The last time I worked with this year group one student was feeling very down after not getting the results he wanted in his mocks. The model enabled him to reframe his negative thinking so he could take more positive action.
Positive Intelligence
Those who are regular readers of my emails will know how much I love the Positive Intelligence® approach. Like Brooke Castillo’s model, it is grounded in the same principle that our thoughts and beliefs affect how we feel, and how we feel drives how we behave.
This book distills all of the principles of coaching that I have acquired over my two+ decades into one framework knitting together many interrelated concepts and tools. It is so simple to use it’s almost underwhelming. And that is why it is so powerful. Unlike many approaches to improving performance which are constrained to the office environment, these techniques can be used in any area of our lives and my friends, family members, clients, and business leaders I work with all use it interchangeably between them.
Too Proud to Lead
This last book was a Christmas present (I asked for it) and one that somewhat predictably, I could not put it down.
This book focuses on one of my favourite topics; leadership and the fine line between confidence and hubris which all too many of our business, political and global leaders frequently overstep. Ben Laker is a Professor at Henley Business School, renowned in the Leadership & Coaching world for it’s thought leadership in these areas. Ben Laker offers on-the-pulse insights using live business case studies that are familiar to us all.
If, like me you’re interested about the state of the world and its current leadership, then this is a must read.
Got the book but looking for some action and accountability?
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