Here are 82 books that The Proximity Principle fans have personally recommended if you like
The Proximity Principle.
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Estelle and I created the list of books based on our over 50 years of combined expertise in helping others to thrive in their careers. Our passion is facilitating the instruction, training, coaching, and professional development to help individuals reach their career goals. We wrote the book about thriving in careers and created a podcast about thriving in careers with over 30 episodes to help others reach their personal and career goals. At the same time, we want others to be their authentic self while thriving in their careers.
I really love this book because it changed the trajectory of my entire career. I was a business major in high school and continued as a business major while working on my bachelor’s degree. However, I did not feel that working only in business was my true passion.
The book explored not only job-hunting tools but also provided tools for reflection on deciding what you really want to do as a career. After reading this book, I earned a master’s and doctoral degree working with adult learners, which is my true passion. I love the book because its advice and guidance were relevant for being my authentic self and thriving in a career that best fits my skills and passion.
With timeless advice, up-to-the-minute insights, and more than ten million copies sold over fifty years, the world’s most popular and best-selling career guide is fully revised and expanded for 2022.
“One of the first job-hunting books on the market. It is still arguably the best. And it is indisputably the most popular.”—Fast Company
What Color Is Your Parachute? is the world’s most popular job-hunting guide. This completely updated edition features the latest resources, strategies, and perspectives on today’s job market, revealing surprising advice on what works—and what doesn’t—so you can focus your efforts on tactics that yield results.
I am a strategist, human resources executive, and business consultant who is passionate about helping people reach their potential, find enjoyable work, and perform their best. Born in Chicago, I grew up in New England and call Connecticut home with my wife Kathryn. I love learning and have found books to be the gateway to exploring innovative ideas, gaining insights, and achieving success. I am an avid tennis and squash player, and reader. I am part of an international book club that meets several times per year to explore diverse topics.
Getting your dream job is only the first step. You want to start strong and deliver value to the organization as quickly as possible. That is where Michael Watkins’ book comes in handy. When I was the head of talent management for a Fortune 50 company, we gave a copy of this book to each newly hired executive.
This book outlines how to promote yourself and learn your new role faster. It helps you analyze your business situation and choose the right strategy to get things done. Finally, it shares how to build a winning team that delivers results. You want your boss, peers, and subordinates to feel good about you. This book helps you achieve early wins, energize your team, and build your credibility.
Named one of 100 Leadership & Success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon Editors The world's most trusted guide for leaders in transition Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success. In this updated and expanded version…
I am a strategist, human resources executive, and business consultant who is passionate about helping people reach their potential, find enjoyable work, and perform their best. Born in Chicago, I grew up in New England and call Connecticut home with my wife Kathryn. I love learning and have found books to be the gateway to exploring innovative ideas, gaining insights, and achieving success. I am an avid tennis and squash player, and reader. I am part of an international book club that meets several times per year to explore diverse topics.
Beverly Kaye is a training and development icon who received the "Distinguished Contribution" award from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) for her impact on workplace learning over the past three decades.
Most career development and mobility books focus on getting a promotion or new job. But career mobility can also mean growing, stretching, learning, and transforming, without ever changing your job title, company, or location.
Kaye, Williams, and Cowart do an expert job of helping readers analyze their current situation and make good choices by balancing money and meaning. Whether it is time for you to grow right where you are by enriching your skills, making a lateral move, or stepping back and realigning your objectives - this book will guide you through it.
Move up or move out. When those two options appear to be the only ones, dissatisfaction grows and engagement suffers. In decades of studying careers around the globe, Beverly Kaye, Lindy Williams, and Lynn Cowart have found that, in fact, there are more options. And rethinking career mobility can lead you to them!
The authors show how managers, coaches, and employees can partner to determine what's best and what's next. Keep the same job but discover new ways to learn and grow? Explore moving to a position that could be a better fit? Step back…
I’m a human Venn diagram who has built a career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts. A classically-trained musician and theater director, I pivoted from the arts into the world of entrepreneurship and technology after earning my MBA from Harvard and worked as a serial entrepreneur. I’m now on the faculty of Harvard Business School where I'm the course head for the first-year MBA entrepreneurship course, oversee HBS Startup Bootcamp, and coach and mentor students as they figure out what brings them joy. An author and frequent public speaker, my latest book offers a new model for work and life that upends the notion they should have ever been at odds.
“Design thinking” is a phrase that’s become more common over the last ten years but it’s still mostly the domain of innovation and the startup world.
So when designers Bill Burnett and Dave Evans brought this way of thinking to tackle the question of designing a life of fulfillment and joy, it offered a truly fresh perspective. Experimentation, prototyping, constant iteration. These are the tools that allow you to learn and tinker and adjust as you go, ensuring the only true failure is settling for unhappiness.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times
Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.
Throughout my corporate experience, I’ve been frustrated with how access to good career advice has been reserved for the elite few. Careers aren’t always fair—who usually wins? Those with parents with successful corporate or professional careers, who went to an elite school, parents with a degree, and who were not a first generation at university or college, had access to a coach or sponsor, etc. Furthermore, I am still stunned with untrue or half-true advice like “good work speaks for itself” or “be your authentic self”. I like reading evidence-based books and not being lied to by “experts.”
This book came into my life when difficult decisions had to be made, and it turned out to be a sage advisor I needed then. It made me re-evaluate my commitments to myself, my partner, and my career, weigh the tradeoffs, and make the hard choices.
David Whyte made me challenge my disbalances between career and home, but most of all, he reminded me of the most neglected marriage with myself. This book invites a deep conversation about personal fulfillment whenever I open it.
A radical, "crystalline" (Elle) approach to integrating our work, relationships, and inner selves from the bestselling author, poet, and speaker.
The author of Crossing the Unknown Sea and The Heart Aroused encourages readers to reimagine how they inhabit the worlds of love, work, and self-understanding. Whyte suggests that separating these "marriages" in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself. Drawing from his own struggles and the lives of some of the world's great writers and artists-from Dante to Jane Austen to Robert Louis Stevenson-Whyte explores the ways these core commitments are connected. Only by understanding…
I grew up with low self-esteem. As an introvert, I found it difficult to make friends in school and I feel I wasn’t good enough for others. Even when I had my first job, I found myself tearing up in the restroom cubicle one day, feeling defective and unable to fit in. That set me off on a journey to improve my self-esteem. I began reading a lot and taking courses on this topic. For years, I felt more confident and worthy. However, it wasn’t until I had a depression that I was truly transformed. After I recovered, I become committed to living peacefully.
Even though many of us have an inner critic, the triggering event could be different. What I love about this book is it tells you what the triggers are, so you can stop the negative cycle.
This book has a questionnaire that helps you identify your most faulty patterns of thinking, also known as “life traps” in the book. There are a total of 11 life traps.
After completing the quiz, I found out that social exclusion, emotional deprivation, and subjugation are most likely to set my inner critic off. With this knowledge, I am more aware of my negative beliefs and how they got developed in the past. I am then able to change the narrative.
Learn how to end the self-destructive behaviours that stop you from living your best life with this breakthrough programme.
Do you ...
Put the needs of others above your own?
Start to panic when someone you love leaves - or threatens to?
Often feel anxious about natural disasters, losing all your money, or getting seriously ill?
Find that no matter how successful you are, you still feel unhappy, unfulfilled, or undeserving?
Unsatisfactory relationships, an irrational lack of self-esteem, feelings of being unfulfilled - these are all problems that can be solved by changing the types of messages that people internalise.…
My life was turned upside down because of a devastating divorce, becoming an empty nester, and my job as a theology professor ending. The identity crisis was real because the doing that gave me purpose was gone, yet God had a lesson and a purpose. I realized that what was left was more than what left me, and I understand that the key to resilience is your spiritual foundation. I believe the crown you wear is the treasure; elevation begins head first. Today, I empower women to live life confidently, on their terms, with peace and financial security. I help women reframe their stories, reinvent themselves, and reimagine their future.
I can’t say enough about this book, which encourages doing what others wouldn’t do to succeed. It probes you to constantly answer the questions posed by the author. I kept writing down the questions I wanted to ask others.
This book will take you and your business to the next level. It will build character and habits that not only help you become aware of what may be holding you back but also empower you to take the stairs as you climb up.
The New York Times bestseller that will help you get off the “escalator” and tackle the work that leads to real success
How do successful people achieve results? In short, they do it the old-fashioned way, with focus and self-discipline. Popular speaker and strategist Rory Vaden presents a simple program for “taking the stairs”—that is, resisting the temptations of “quick fixes,” eliminating distractions, and transcending personal setbacks in order to reach your goals.
Whatever your vision of success is, this proven program will help you get there—one stair at a time.
Though I’ve coached endurance athletes to world championships, I’m an expert on not working out. It’s what you do when you’re not training that matters most! All the books on this list teach habits that help you relax about things that don’t matter while guiding you to define what does matter and explaining ways to most efficiently focus your energies there. This jibes with my work as a yoga teacher: we seek to find the right application of effort, and to layer in ease wherever possible. I don’t think it’s stretching too much to call each book on the list both a work of philosophy and also a deeply practical life manual.
I think about this book every day, even though it was written almost 25 years ago, and the edition I read explained how to manage your paper file folders! (One of my most-used apps, the to-do manager Things, is built on this system.)
I love how much time this book has saved me as I juggle running several businesses, staying active in my hobbies, and running a household. Allen’s approach to capturing your ideas and then deciding how to organize them so that you can keep track of what needs your attention is both simple and really profound.
For athletes who need to be as efficient as possible to reserve time and energy for training, this book is a lifesaver.
The book Lifehack calls "The Bible of business and personal productivity."
"A completely revised and updated edition of the blockbuster bestseller from 'the personal productivity guru'"-Fast Company
Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen's Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. "GTD" is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.
Allen has rewritten the book from start to finish, tweaking his classic text…
The average person spends over 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime – that’s roughly one quarter to one third of a person’s life. I’m an academic researcher who studies work. I know how to design workplaces that are good for organizations (high productivity) and the people who work in them (high employee well-being). But if we leave it all up to senior management, we won’t generate positive changes fast enough. There’s a robust body of evidence that we can all use to make our local workplaces more supportive, inclusive, and fulfilling. I’m on a mission to make the world a better place, one workplace at a time.
We hear so much about flexibility at work, but most of the academic research is directed at senior managers (as in: “managers need to offer employees more flexibility”).
Professors Kossek and Lautsch deliberately flip that thinking. Their book is designed to help any employee become more mindful about how they can achieve better work-life balance – and to identify the changes that they can make to get there (even without their boss’s support).
This book inspired me to think about the very small changes that any of us can make in a workplace; it helped me to recognize that it’s not all up to the boss!
You are the CEO of your life: you, and nobody else. You can establish the new rules that will help you achieve true balance between work and the rest of your life. And if you don't do it, nobody else will. Now is the time to take control, and this is the book that will get you there. CEO of Me is like no other "work-life balance" book you've ever seen: there are no cliches here, and no one-size-fits all solutions. Instead, Drs. Ellen Kossek and Brenda Lautsch help you identify which of six worklife "patterns" you fit into and…
I have done some pretty cool things in the arts. To share a few, I’ve given TEDx talks, I have produced and co-starred in a film that made it to Cannes, I have written 11+ books (one of which was a Barnes & Noble # 1 best seller), I have spoken at SAG/AFTRA and Writer’s Guild, I am an entertainment attorney, and I have an album up on iTunes/Apple Music/Spotify, etc. I really love inspiring people, and helping them to achieve life dreams. I hope this list will help inspire some of you to go after your dreams, too, and with a passion!
As an artist, you’re the head of a company. Whether you realize it or not, you have staff: Photographers helping you, agents, managers, publicists, fellow artists, and the list goes on. You need to know how to manage these people in the most positive way possible.
I credit much of my success in the arts to acknowledging that I need to know how to work with and manage the people on my team. This book did not make me a master, but it’s one of the many books I’ve read on improving my people management skills. If you cannot work with and manage others, you will never get far in show business or any business.
This comprehensive yet inviting-to-read guide has been completely updated to cover today's most critical management topics--from company culture to new technologies.
About the Book Becoming a Successful Manager has all the tools and techniques for making a smooth transition into the role of manager. Drawing on both academic research and real-world experience, the authors teach readers how to apply what they call "The Discovery Method." Through practical exercises and thought-provoking questions, readers learn how to manage others as successfully as they have managed themselves. Updates include such timely topics as the evolving roles of managers, managing up, and other changes…
