Book Recommendations for Personal Development
Not just self-help. These are transformational ideas to create higher-order thinking.
This book shifted how I coach: from focusing on the next goal to supporting people to define their career purpose. I now ask, “What are you a future of? If your decision on your purpose changes the future of humanity, what would you declare who you are?”
Read for ideas on:
How human survival system and winning strategies limit what you achieve
The universal human paradigm of “should“s
Declaring a career purpose and possibility
Note: This book is kind of dense and may not make much sense for people just starting out in personal development. But if you stick with it, I’m sure you’ll get at least one mind-blowing insight.
With this book, I could mentally marry leadership development with the ideas of developmental psychology from Robert Kegan. The book has some excellent questions (page 64) for inquiring into your developmental stage and finding your growth edge.
Read if:
You want to coach and develop your reports as a leader. If you get frustrated by how some folks can’t understand certain perspectives, you’ll find out why in this book.
Self-evaluate your next growth edge.
You want to fully understand the idea of a self-transforming leadership.
Note: This book is kind of dense, too. Professional coaches might understand this better but it’s absolutely worth the time investment to understand people. It provides a developmental map, but don’t expect the ‘how’ of developing yourself. It’s hard to put that down in a book.
Near Enemies To The Truth by Christopher Hareesh Wallis
I was aware of Christopher Wallis’s teachings before he put everything down in this book. I met my teacher, Kavitha Chinnayain, through his community. To say that the miraculous encounter with his teachings changed my life would be an understatement. He challenges all the new-age spiritual memes and provides you with a more in-depth teaching. The chapters on surrender and non-duality opened up my mind to new insight into understanding reality.
Read if:
You want to understand how our egos (and groups of misinterpretations) take spiritual teachings and twist them into pitfalls to keep us exactly where we are.
You want to really grok why our job is to accept people (and reality) exactly as they are, why that’s the ultimate freedom and how to not become a doormat while doing that.
You want to dive into non-dual teachings, deepen your understanding of spirituality, and see how even the path is nothing special.
This is my go-to reference book for leadership coaching. Adam is my coach, and I adore him. So, I’m biased when I say his transformation method is powerful. I encountered and tried methods on a spectrum during my personal transformational journey. On one side, there’s the gentle nudge of therapy, and on the other extreme is what spiritual teachers do: take the rug off from under your feet and let you realize how the rug was an illusion. Somewhere in between is the ontological method, where Adam applies an equal amount of love and rigor to facilitate development. This book provides an introduction to such method.
Read if:
You want to understand more about yourself — the patterns you get into, your core essence, and some practices to take on to be more situated in your essence.
A window into giving in-the-moment feedback. Adam wrote a nice chapter about this.
To start seeing people as whole and resourceful, not as problems.
I read a lot of books for self-help and personal growth. But these are the ones I recommend as starting points to understand a fundamentally different way of leadership mind — leading from the inside out.