Here are 100 books that The Leader on the Couch fans have personally recommended if you like
The Leader on the Couch.
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As a busy businesswoman and coach, I felt like I had always been pushing for what I thought represented success, racing from task to task, project to project almost without stopping to take a breath. Eventually that caught up with me and I found myself feeling over-stressed and unfulfilled. This was the catalyst that ignited a need to make some changes in my own life. I read these books to both learn and heal myself. They are all now books I refer to–to keep focused on a more mindful way of being and maintain my own self -awareness.
This is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it at least once a year to remind myself to be more present. I have found that when I allow my thoughts to silence and focus on the now, I feel a strong sense of freedom—freedom from self-created stress.
Reading this book has helped me to let go of many unhelpful thoughts and realize that I am so much more than the thoughts swirling around in my head. This is a simple yet profound book for which I am truly grateful.
**CHOSEN BY OPRAH AS ONE OF HER 'BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH'**
The international bestselling spiritual book, now with a new look for its 20th anniversary. Eckhart Tolle demonstrates how to live a healthier, happier, mindful life by living in the present moment.
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'I keep Eckhart's book at my bedside. I think it's essential spiritual teaching. It's one of the most valuable books I've ever read.' Oprah Winfrey
To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart…
My fascination with the intricate web of influence and its profound impact traces back to my immersion in literature. Through the immersive experience of reading, we embark on a journey into the minds of others, expanding our understanding and evolving our individual perspectives. My professional trajectory has been shaped by a relentless pursuit of understanding the dynamics of influence across people, processes, and technology. Coupled with experiences spanning all seven continents and interactions with tens of thousands of individuals, I've undergone a transformative journey. Yet, it's the collective success of individuals embracing their humanity, both independently and collaboratively within their spheres of influence, that fuels my passion for continual growth and improvement.
Leadership & Self-Deception is an essential lesson presented through a narrative about the triumphs and tribulations of a business leader. The story highlights a universal challenge—falling into a self-centered mindset, dubbed "being in the box" by the authors.
The book navigates through scenarios that confront readers' perceptions of personal relationships and problem-solving, often prompting uncomfortable introspection. However, its engaging narrative style effectively communicates enduring insights.
Within our organization, we recommend this book to all team members as a foundational resource for developing self-awareness, communication skills, and leadership abilities.
This third edition of an international bestseller--over 2 million copies sold worldwide and translated into 33 languages--details how its powerful insights on motivation, conflict, and collaboration can benefit organizations as well as individuals.
Since its original publication in 2000, Leadership and Self-Deception has become an international word-of-mouth phenomenon. Rather than tapering off, it sells more copies every year. The book's central insight--that the key to leadership lies not in what we do but in who we are--has proven to have powerful implications not only for organizational leadership but in readers' personal lives as well.
Leadership and Self-Deception uses an entertaining…
I’ve always been fascinated by how we can fulfill our potential in a way that allows us to thrive rather than burning ourselves out in the process. My motto is I’d like to ‘save the world, but be back in time for tea.’ My fascination has led me down all sorts of intriguing avenues. I’ve become a stand-up comic (and taken four solo shows to the Edinburgh Fringe), exploring how humor can help us tackle tough topics. I’ve researched mental health (I’m currently studying for an MSc in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health), I’ve studied elite sports, and I’ve been an Executive Coach to leaders of diverse organizations.
I’m not a fan of conflict (Who is?!), so I found this book incredibly helpful. I really liked the way the authors broke things down into simple buckets. For example, rather than thinking, ‘Why did that innocent little, tiny comment wind me up so much? I must be a muppet!’ It helped me to see the principles at play and, therefore, what I could do to keep thriving.
I use many of the techniques described here on a daily basis. They have helped me to stay true to what is important whilst maintaining rapport, to seek out valuable feedback without getting bent out of shape, and to deliver difficult messages more compassionately and effectively.
Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever.
The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation-especially difficult ones-leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers…
At 29 I was one of the first female traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, building my own all-female trading company. I lost everything in 1987, which gave me a stellar opportunity to understand my power to choose how I responded to the turmoil. Now, I’m an internationally credentialed Master Certified Coach, Board Certified Coach, University of Chicago-trained psychotherapist, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Over 25 years ago I founded my coaching company, Jody Michael Associates. We focus on building emotional intelligence, executive presence, and mental fitness. When we help our clients learn to lead lightly, they take themselves, their teams, and their organizations to new levels of awareness, discernment, and performance.
This classic has stood the test of time because it artfully intertwines psychology and business in a way few books do.
Dr. Abraham Maslow is known for his work on the hierarchy of human needs and self-actualization. I also like the fact that he had the experience – the street cred, if you will – as a factory worker, where he gained a very practical basis for his psychological theory and research.
This book offers great insight into what drives people at their core. It will make you a better observer of people and will give you greater capacity to understand yourself and others better.
A seminal work onhuman behavior in the workplace-now completely updated "At last! We have all been quoting Maslow for years and to now have such an excellent compilation of his seminal thoughts on management and organization comes like a timely gift from heaven. The values and principles he taught decades ago are even more relevant today." -Stephen Covey, author, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. "Maslow's book is a readable, impressionistic masterpiece that extolled the virtues of collaborative, synergistic management decades ahead of its time. This edition reveals just how much the management thinkers of our day, including Peter…
When I went back to school for my MBA, I was looking for a way to apply the passion I’d found for changing lives for a better world. Studying business started my journey toward founding Velentium, a medtech engineering firm, in 2012. The pandemic was a make-or-break season for every industry, medtech included. We were determined to do our part, but were faced with an unprecedented challenge: boost the world’s emergency ventilator production from hundreds per month to thousands per week—in just 28 days. We succeeded—and it was a spiritually moving experience. I wrote28 Days to Save the World in hopes of inspiring other organizations to punch above their weight class like we did.
From the author ofThe Dream Manager comes a book that will challenge and inspire the core of your organization. Kelly’s bread-and-butter as a business coach and motivational speaker shows in his writing style—be prepared to have the six key lessons reinforced through repetition (great for those of us who read in short bursts with lots of life happening in between). But this book has a strong practical aspect too. Applying its lessons will fill your to-do list for months to come!
Culture is about creating empowerment, not entitlement . . .
Culture is not about bringing your dog to work, free lunches, unlimited vacation, or even casual Fridays. Culture is not a collection of personal preferences.
Our thinking about culture has been kidnapped and polluted by the spectacular, attention-grabbing fads that 99 percent of organizations cannot implement. It is time to get beyond these "here today, gone tomorrow" illusions that foster entitlement, complacency, and mediocrity, so we can start implementing the timeless principles that are: The Culture Solution.
The six foundational principles of a Dynamic Culture are universal and unchanging. In…
I’m fascinated with the relationship between personal growth and professional performance. Why is it in the same environment, doing the same work, some people can excel while others struggle? Most chalk it up to external circumstances that can’t be controlled. Others focus on tactics. But I’ve learned top-performers are masters at the human side of their work–the way they think, lead and serve–and that’s what gives them their edge. All of my work centers around infusing hard skills with improved soft skills, and getting better results in the process. That’s the stuff I find delicious, and it’s what I speak and write about.
Many organizations pay lip service to “culture” without measuring it, managing it, or even knowing what it really is.
This book describes five different levels of culture, and what each one needs to evolve. Once you understand these cultures, you’ll see elements of them all around in other groups you participate in.
Ever since reading this I’ve worked to get any teams I work with to Level 5, and I’m grateful for now having some direction on how to accomplish this.
In "Tribal Leadership", management consultants Dave Logan and John King show corporate leaders how they can use tribes - the groups that naturally form within any company - to maximize productivity and profit within their own firms. Based on a rigorous eight-year study that covered more than two dozen companies and 24,000 people, "Tribal Leadership" includes interviews with leading business figures such as Brian France, chairman and CEO of NASCAR, and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, and shows leaders from companies of any size and of any industry that the health and success of their firms ultimately depend on the hundreds…
In 2014, I was laid off from my management role at Lowe’s Home Improvement. Instead of starting another job, I took several months to reflect on my leadership experiences and researched how leadership has evolved in the 21st Century. Based on a detailed analysis of 14 books, including the five I recommend, I wrote my first book that explains how to practice 21st-century leadership (now in its second edition). After publishing, I’ve written another leadership book, several blogs, and have been a keynote speaker. I now host the Unlabeled Leadership Podcast, which helps listeners learn how everyday people practice leadership.
A colleague of mine introduced me to this book and argued that Kouzes and Posner wrote the gold standard of leadership practices. After reading their research-based stories, I agree.
The authors write in a way that goes beyond theory by offering a practical guide by focusing on the five practices of exemplary leadership. These practices are applicable to anyone’s career! Through inspiring examples and actionable steps, I learned how to lead with integrity, inspire others, and drive higher performance more effectively.
Read the gold standard of leadership development. It can become your call to action!
The most trusted source of leadership wisdom, updated to address today's realities The Leadership Challenge is the gold-standard manual for effective leadership, grounded in research and written by the premier authorities in the field. With deep insight into the complex interpersonal dynamics of the workplace, this book positions leadership both as a skill to be learned, and as a relationship that must be nurtured to reach its full potential.
This new sixth edition has been revised to address current challenges, and includes more international examples and a laser focus on business issues; you'll learn how extraordinary leaders accomplish extraordinary things,…
As an organizational consultant, and a business writer, I’ve always been fascinated by Mark Twain’s comment that he would've written a shorter letter if he had more time. It’s a wonderful reminder that simplicity and clarity require hard work and won’t happen by itself. As part of the consulting team that worked with Jack Welch to transform GE in the 1990s, I saw firsthand that leaders actually have the power to simplify their organizations, and that it can make a huge difference. What they need is a playbook for how to do this, and that was my intention when I wrote Simply Effective. Since then I’ve seen “simplicity” become a driving force for business success.
Lisa Bodell is a fanatic about eliminating mundane and unnecessary tasks from your everyday routines.
In Why Simple Wins, Lisa provides a playbook to help you do just that – from getting control of your calendar to setting priorities to cutting back on meetings and emails. Having worked on some common clients with Lisa, I’ve seen the power of what she helps managers do – and I’ve seen how much synergy there is between our approaches.
It’s the kind of book that you’ll have no regrets about buying.
Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm. By learning how to eliminate redundancies, communicate with clarity, and make simplification a habit, individuals and companies can begin to recognize which activities are time-sucks and…
I have always been fascinated by psychology and the science behind why people are the way they are. This is probably why as a journalist, I’ve always been drawn to writing personal profiles of fascinating people, digging deeper into how they overcame various obstacles and setbacks. I have read so many leadership books that focus on success, but really found a gap when it came to those in-depth stories, which is why I wrote The Setback Cycle, a career advice book that focuses specifically on that messy middle part of leadership. My goal was to share the stories of people who overcame setbacks while offering an actionable framework that guides us through our own.
I loved Morra’s fresh take on reframing something previously perceived as a weakness and turning it into a superpower. She writes intelligently about how anxious people are equipped to lead and backs up her argument with rigorous research and quotes from credible experts.
I especially liked how she pointed out that anxious people are great at leading through crises because they spend so much energy preparing for the worst.
A timely and compelling guide to managing the anxiety that comes with succeeding and leading-from entrepreneur, mental health advocate, and top-rated podcaster Morra Aarons-Mele.
Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the world. But in our workplaces, anxiety has been a hidden problem-there in plain sight but ignored. Until now.
The Anxious Achiever is a book with a mission: to normalize anxiety and leadership. As leadership expert and self-proclaimed anxious achiever Morra Aarons-Mele argues, anxiety is built into the very nature of leadership. It can-and should-be harnessed into a force for good.
I’ve always wondered why meetings are so terrible. And, why we spend so much awful time in them. So, in my graduate studies, I decided to try to figure that out. What makes meetings good and what makes meetings bad? Then, over the course of a couple decades, I wrote what constituted about 25% of all the science on the topic of workplace meetings. It may be self-proclaimed, but I am the Meeting Doctor. Just like you go to a physician for an illness, I’m who people go to when their meetings are sick and need a cure!
Unfortunately, many of the organizations where people work and serve have allowed biases and stereotypes about people to creep in. I recommend this book because it provides leaders with the knowledge and tools to change that about your organization. To bring about inclusion among all employees in every role throughout the entire organization. As the meeting doctor, I can’t imagine a more pivotal place for inclusion than the workplace meeting, and this book gave me the information and ideas I needed to make that a reality in my organization.
In this groundbreaking new book, organizational psychologist and executive coach Gena Cox shows you how to lead an inclusive organization, from the top down, and to seek solutions to the racially based discontent that pervades many employees' experiences. Drawing on psychological science, corporate leaders, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), and her own experience in corporate America, Cox explains how to reframe the conversation, so you can more effectively guide the rest of the leaders in your organization. She helps you understand the key questions you should ask, the constituents you must address, and the difficult actions you must take to…
