100 Books Like Who

This book literally changed my life and my relationships with myself and others forever. Before this book, I was living my life through the filters of my stories of right and wrong, how things ‘should’ be done, and doing my best to trust my instincts and intuition. I underestimated the power of words, including my words. I made assumptions about people and situations, and autopilot guided my path through the best and worst of challenges and opportunities.

This book, along with the Fifth Agreement, opened my mind to the human condition of subconscious programming. I read the book, listened to the book, and listened to the book while reading the book to deeply embrace the truths presented.

Thanks to all books published by the Ruiz family, which share the Toltec traditions with the world, I have found grace and compassion for the weight and impact of my own stories,… show more.

This book has been a go-to for years, as I really appreciate Simon’s guidance to ALWAYS clarify the mission and purpose of any organization before digging deeper into the strategies and action plans to advance the mission.

All too often, my bias for action had driven me to jump into the work of creation and delivery. If every single player on the field with me wasn’t 100% bought into the game we were playing, why we were there, and where we wanted to be in the future, we wasted precious time and resources.

Simon Sinek taught me to pause and bring great intention to the enrollment in the mission of any venture. I also appreciate his insights into the stretch zone where people are most effective driving change. We don’t want to be cozy or panicked at work, but stretched in pursuit of meaningful change, and always better together.

I was very fortunate to have a coach from the Covey organization for a few years named Andy Cindrich, and I’m forever grateful for his help to shift my own paradigms around trust. 

I’d been raised with the story ‘Losing trust is like a house burning down… you can try to rebuild it, but it takes 18 months and it’s never quite the same…’ Through The Speed of Trust, I learned managing trust is a skill. When we embrace trust falls courageously and sort through the gap and pain with care and intention, we end up grateful for the problems and issues that allow us to show our character, reinforce our values, and elevate relationships. 

I wish for everyone to have these tools in their pockets, not to maintain perfect trust, but to fix things fast when they inevitably get messy between us humans.

I have probably purchased 150-200 copies of this book over the years, and it has been required reading for anyone in or supporting my last teams. 

The Empowerment Dynamic is an easy read about two guys who meet at a beach on a fateful day, and the story unfolds with excellent advice to eliminate drama from our lives.

When we adopted these best practices, the little dramas that are like cancer inside of companies shifted victims to empowered creators, perpetrators to challengers, and rescuers to coaches. 

Empowerment is a mindset, and the shifts outlined in TED are not only powerful – they’re also very easy to embrace and implement. This is the best $10 you can spend on Amazon to improve outcomes at work and in life!

There is an entire industry that talks very positively and upbeat about finding jobs, and we tend to think of job search as a good thing–good for people and good for organizations–that helps us grow and develop.

Ilana Gershon is an ethnographer, and she moved into groups of people trying to find new jobs. These aren’t the hot-shot computer nerds who happen to have the very specific skills in demand right now; they are average people looking for all the other jobs.

She finds the process is full of snake-oil advice (“find your superpower”!) and false optimism from pop-psychologists who suggest you can just will and network your way to a better job. It is a frustrating process made almost completely opaque by employers who reveal little and provide no feedback to job candidates.  

This is one of the books that first got me into coaching—and here I am, coaching over twenty years later! I love it because it is short and to the point but still gives lots of examples, which helped me understand the concepts. I also found the author very generous in sharing lots of hugely practical tools.

I think my biggest  ‘Aha’ moment was this book showing how the gap between what we want to achieve and where we are now can have many different forms—that a block can be purely about confidence or lack of accountability—it may well not be a lack of knowledge or skills. I think coaching is an invaluable skill for every walk of life, and this book helped me start my coaching journey. 

I demolished this book in an afternoon. I loved the conversational tone and simple, actionable takeaways. I have several pages earmarked and phrases circled throughout my own copy.

I have taken note of many of the example questions provided in the book to take and use in meetings and events. 

I love frameworks. Especially ones that make simple and clarifying distinctions about our complex inner life. That’s exactly what Chamine has done with this book. When I read this book in 2012 and completed the accompanying free online assessment to identify my saboteurs, I was greatly humbled by the sobering accuracy of how I self-sabotage.

While reading the book, I was engrossed in the combination of logic, science, and stories helping to illuminate how and why we all have a unique mix of these universal saboteurs: Controller, Stickler, Hyper-Achiever, Restless, Hyper-Rational, Victim, Avoider, Pleaser, Hyper-Vigilant. I learned how to identify when I was coming from a place of self-sabotage and what to do to overcome unhelpful habits, (i.e., strengthen my PQ muscles).

It was fun, engaging, and motivating to read, and the practical tips made this book incredibly useful. I use his framework in conjunction with my own to make… show more.

Efficiency has become the catchword and hell-hound in our society. And in Hiroko Oyamada’s mordant fable, efficiency has taken on the form of a sprawling factory, a city unto itself, which is regulating, ordering, and arranging its brave new world one rote directive after the next.

Here’s what I saw when metaphysically touring the interior: An emaciated Kafka stooped over one of the desks, half-obscured behind a tower of documents, staring out bleary-eyed at the ledge of a window where black birds are gathering.

Across from him, a nerve-bitten Nietzsche paces, furiously smoking a cigarette, and refashioning his notions of the abyss to fit the conditions in which he finds himself atrophying. The abyss, now an omnipotent complex, an unnamable morass with a bottomless capacity for soul-feeding.

People are no longer staring into the abyss, they are wearing it, breathing it, speaking it, and perpetuating its slow-drip filtration to the… show more.

Nelson believes that “how we view our work and how we do our work matters a great deal more than we might imagine” (14). A common tendency for me has been to view Sunday as worship and rest, and then I am off to work on Monday.

Nelson constructively bridges this gap with theological depth and practical counsel. He clarified God’s purposes for work in a way that helped me make the most of it while simultaneously joining God in his work.

Nelson notes how work shapes us; through it, we can shape the world around us and contribute to the common good.