15 Vital Books For The Wellness Coach: Straight Off My Shelf – Part Two
Continuing our “must read” list of vital books for wellness coaches here is the second set, the books focusing on life coaching foundations and skills.
Coaching Foundations and Skills
7. Co-Active Coaching, Whitworth, Kimsey-House & Sandahl
8. Becoming a Professional Life Coach, Williams & Menendez
9. Leadership From The Inside Out, Kevin Cashman
10. Taming Your Gremlin, Rick Carson
7. Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life, 2nd Ed., Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House & Phil Sandahl. This book did indeed help define the coaching profession. It’s authors became the founders of The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and in this work set down the cornerstones that shape the coaching mindset. A great book to bone up on your coaching skills and to learn what the essence of coaching really is.
8. Becoming a Professional Life Coach: Lessons from The Institute For Life Coach Training, Patrick Williams & Diane Menendez. Pat Williams is one of Life Coaching’s pioneers and his earlier book (along with Deb Davis) Therapist as Life Coach was one of my favorites as I made the shift from psychotherapist to coach. Becoming A Professional Life Coach largely supplants this earlier book and provides the wellness coach with not only great skill building but lots of very practical guidance for practicing their coaching.
9. Leadership From The Inside Out: Becoming a Leader For Life, Kevin Cashman. What’s a leadership book doing on this list? Well, Kevin Cashman is a coach and a darned good one. His approach to leadership is to help people be who they truly are, to get beyond any persona to the authentic self within. It’s about being the kind of leader that other want to follow. Cashman beautifully explores attaining mastery in seven areas of life: Personal,Purpose,Change,Interpersonal, Being, Balance and Action. Great stuff for any client.
10. Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way, Rick Carson. Whenever the wellness coaching client takes on change their own personal “Gremlin” or “inner-critic” will be there to oppose it, even if it’s the best thing in the world for that person. Our client’s have plenty of external challenges to their attempts at change, but the internal ones can be the most devastating. This great little book shows us how to spot the gremlin early and get it out of the way (as we get out of our own way!). Truly a must read. I know lots of coaches who supply their clients with copies of this book when folks sign on to coaching.
Again there are plenty of other great coaching books out there to learn from, but these are ones you can really sink your teeth into and feel like your inner-learner just got nourished. Behind all of these volumes are other more root-source books like Carl Roger’s On Becoming A Person, and Maslow’s Toward A Psychology of Being. Perhaps we’ll blog about those classics someday too.
In our next post we’ll delve into our last two categories, vital books for the wellness coach having to do with health challenges and with the process of wellness coaching itself.
Share your comments here. Read-on! Be well!
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