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This blog post is taken from our podcast of the same name which you can listen to here.
Are You Looking for a Good Book About Coaching?
We love a good book recommendation, and are often asked for them by our trainees. So, here you will find some of the books that could be added to your ‘to be read’ list, in relation to different coaching approaches – and we throw in a few extra that aren’t really coaching books, but we love them!
We fully recognise that you don’t learn to coach by reading a book; you have to practice coaching to improve your craft. The idea is that if you have an interest in coaching and maybe an interest in one particular area of coaching this article will help you to find some helpful books to read.
If you’ve got just an interest in coaching, if you are thinking about doing a coach training programme, or maybe if you want to go back to basics, try How To Coach by Bob Thomson
https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-coach-first-steps-and-beyond/bob-thomson/9781526484789
Bob Thompson was professor of practise at Warwick Business School and has been around in coaching for a long time. He has written, many books on coaching and this is an introduction to coaching and what is entailed.
If you’ve got no idea where to start and no idea what coaching is all about, then I this a great place to start.
Bob had a career in industry, he worked for an energy company, so probably comes at coaching from a more managerial perspective than where we would start. We are much more of a mix of life coaching and management coaching.
Next we have, Time To Think; Listening to Ignite The Human Mind by Nancy Kline
For people who aren’t familiar with Nancy Klein’s work, she was a Quaker, so very used to silence. Her coaching approach is very much around holding that space for people and sitting there whilst they think. And she has a process called Time to Think, and it is a bit of a process. The book’s worth a read. The idea that we can do good work in the coaching room by sitting and listening rather than thinking that we have to get involved, is a great starting point for coaches to flex away from how you would normally be in a general conversation. And how doctors would normally be solving problems.
You have to learn how to hold the space, to be silent, to let someone think. If you don’t learn how to do that, then you’re just going to keep rushing in and offering solutions and asking the next question and pushing on.
We don’t agree with everything that she does, but certainly do agree with her in terms of holding that space and not interrupting your clients.
While she doesn’t necessarily tie herself in to the person-centred coaching approach, (and she doesn’t include playing back in her process), if that approach appeals to you, this book is definitely worth a read and is quite powerful stuff.
Moving on to the solution-focused approach to coaching. There is a good book called Solution Focused Coaching in Practice by Bill O’Connell, Stephen Palmer, and Helen Williams
Quite a few of the books that we’re going to recommend are more textbooks, a ‘how to’ guide. They’re not books you’re necessarily going to sit down and read from cover to cover. This is one of those that you can dip into chapters. It’s a good reference book in that sense. Stephen Palmer’s name comes up a lot in coaching, he’s a coaching psychologist, so has thoughts on many aspects of coaching.
Positive Psychology in coaching is an area that we get asked for book recommendations a lot.
Positive Psychology in a Nutshell by Ilona Boniwell. It’s a very accessible book to get you started on this topic.
Positive Psychology Coaching in Practice Edited by Suzy Green and Stephen Palmer https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/positive-psychology-coaching-in-practice-suzy-green/3996488
This is a really useful books because it takes positive psychology and says, how are we going to use that practically in the coaching space?
Positive Psychology: Theory, Research and Applications by Ilona Boniwell and Aneta D. Tunariu
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/positive-psychology-theory-research-and-applications-ilona-boniwell/371360 Is one that Helen had read over and over again.
If you start to learn about positive psychology and you’re fascinated by it, this book is brilliant. It’s accessible, even though it is actually used at masters’ level as an academic textbook. It references lots of research, which our doctors like. It takes all the topics and digs into them, not really deeply, but there’s interventions for each one that you can explore and use. As a coach, you can read about a particular topic and then work out how you can incorporate that into your coaching.
That’s where coaching can be really exciting and really individual to the coach when you take the things that you’re interested in and weave it through what you offer and how you work. If you’re interested in looking at how positive psychology coaching can improve someone’s situation, and how that can be quantified or measured in some way, there are some really nice measurement tools to assess where they are at the start, and then to help assess them further down the line to see if those interventions and the coaching has been effective.
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching Techniques For Dummies by Helen Whitten
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Behavioural-Coaching-Techniques-Dummies/
Is another book to dip in and out of, perhaps to refresh your memory on certain aspects of cognitive behavioural coaching. Because it’s part of the ‘for dummies’ range, it has topics within it that are quite complete in and of themselves. You can dip in and refer to it, find an intervention or a concept or a model, something to inspire you, perhaps and just focus on that. If you’re thinking, where do I go to find out more about cognitive behavioural coaching? That’s a really good start.
Tom love Gestalt Coaching and his recommendation to explore this topic further is The Fertile Void; Gestalt Coaching at Work by John Leary Joyce
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-fertile-void-gestalt-coaching-at-work-john-leary-joyce/1985723
The author is a Gestalt therapist, but he’s been around coaching for a long time. He’s also a tango dancer. He’s done a few workshops on leadership and tango, how the two are related. . It can be one of those more difficult approaches to get your head around and he has some interesting thoughts on Gestalt, very much bringing it to life and making it accessible for coaches.
Transactional Analysis can be a heavy topic. Transactional Analysis Coaching; Distinctive Features by Karen Pratt
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/transactional-analysis-coaching-distinctive-features-karen-pratt/4842715 is one of the easier reads that is much more accessible than some.
She doesn’t go into some of the really in-depth dynamics of transactional analysis. She keeps it simple in a way that you would use it in the coaching room. She talks about the drama triangle, parent-adult-child model, and keeps it on quite a light level in a way that you would use it in the coaching room. We’re not doing psychotherapy in the coaching room. We are using some tools from transactional analysis that are going to help our coaches. And she definitely gives some ideas as how that might be done.
What Other Books Do We Love?
They’re our main book recommendations relating to the main approaches that we cover in the Transformational Coaching Diploma and those that we’ve talked about on the podcast and in our blog articles. If something piques your interest, you could go and find out some more. Or come on the course!
We’ve got some other books that we love that aren’t specific to a coaching approach.
Coaching Presence; Building Consciousness and Awareness in Coaching Interventions by Maria Iliffe-Wood
https://www.koganpage.com/hr-learning-development/coaching-presence-9780749470579
We know a lot of people who have read this. book and found it really useful to develop their own coaching presence and their own coaching style.
Presence; Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy
This is a collection of stories, and research from around the world, all about bringing your boldest self to your biggest challenges. It’s about developing presence, developing confidence. And there’s so much research in there, it can really help inform your coaching and give you some background knowledge on confidence and more.
Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/who-moved-my-cheese-dr-spencer-johnson/2195963
This is a lovely book. It’s nothing to do with coaching. And it’s everything to do with coaching.
It’s strapline is, ‘an amazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life’.
The whole concept of the book is that there’s a couple of characters in it that are mice, and Cheese arrives every day and they go and they find the cheese. They get through a maze and find the cheese at the end of the maze. And one day they arrive and the cheese isn’t there anymore. Someone has moved their cheese. And they go, ‘well, it’ll be all right. We’ll come back later. It’ll be here’. But it doesn’t arrive. They come back the next day it’s still not back. And then one of them decides, do you know what? I’m going to get my running shoes on and I’m going to go and find new cheese. And he goes off to find new cheese. And the other one sits there waiting for the cheese to arrive.
It’s an easy read and a very short book. But, if you’re going through change or you’re challenged by change in your life, maybe read it.
Agile Resilience: The Psychology of Developing Resilience in the workplace by Tom Dillon
This book is, of course, written by our very own Tom Dillon, with the series being edited by Bob Thomson. And Tom says
“Don’t let the title put you off. I think a lot of medics have a bit of a reaction to the word resilience because they’re told they have to be resilient in the workplace. But it’s really written from the perspective of employees in a system that demands them to do more than they perhaps should be doing with less and less resources. So it’s more about how you manage yourself to remain resilient for yourself despite the system. Ssometimes I think someone might have this in the workplace thinking that they’re going to get more out of their employees, but the messaging in here is, look after yourself, do less because you can’t do it all. And there’s some really great tools that I share.”
If you have any book recommendations, we would love to hear about them, especially if they’ve helped you with your coaching practice.
To find out more about our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma click through here
