Books!
Rising Strong, Brené Brown. The art and effort of vulnerability.
Top Dog, Po Bronson & Ashly Merrimen. What is failure and what is success? Why failure is essential to sustainability.
The Speed of Trust, Steven Covey. Creating an environment of trust and the capacity of conversational intelligence to enhance business. A so-so intellectual explanation about what is actually a much greater topic.
Discover Your True North, Bill George. The importance of Being in figuring out what you want to do. Sort of an intellectual cop-out for the shallow person. A pretty good primer.
Shift, Peter Arnell.- a perspective on management
Awareness, Anthony De Mello – Essential. Spiritually – what it is and consideration of how to get there. The illusion of happiness, the misery of attachments.
The Way to Love, Anthony De Mello – a Catholic mystic Indian monk. What makes us miserable; what are attachments; the difference between happiness and unhappiness; why happiness is an illusion. A primer to keep in our car, on the bed-stand, in our pocket. Short and yet cosmically endless.
Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCulloch – An unfortunately redundant though accurate history of the concept of being right for the sake of being in control by provoking misery and making others wrong in the process of making stuff up along the way. Christians killing Jews, Muslims and Christians for not believing the made-up stuff. A lesson in self-awareness: Why we should question our beliefs, behaviors, attitudes and assumptions and why we believe stuff we don’t even know we believe in.
Becoming Steve Jobs, The evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. Jobs’s transition from making it happen to the success and luck of letting it happen. This biography completes Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson. The most talked about biography of Steve Jobs, a ‘must read’, and a great one at that but not the very best.
Pastrix, Nadia Bolz Weber – Practicing Christianity with empathy in the present, as it might have been in the first 100 years. Refreshing!
Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari – A history of the Homo Sapien and why our beliefs are not so important or profound.
Sacred Selfishness, Bud Harris – Caring for our selves as emotional beings. One of my favorites.
Family Secrets, The Path from Shame to Healing, John Bradshaw – Understanding those things ‘we don’t talk about’, figuring out what really happened and ‘its’ impact upon us.
Adult Children of Alcoholics, Janet Geringer Woititz – The pervasiveness of alcoholic personalities and why we maintain a societally ‘drunk’ life-view.
AWOL on the Appalachian Trail, David Miller – the book that inspired me to do a solo sectional hike on the AT which began as a physical endeavor and became a spiritual life-changer.
Codependent No More, Melody Beattie – Overcoming the codependent dynamic; dancing the dance and how prevalent codependence is.
David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell – The importance of understanding success and confusing success as something other than luck – a perfect illusion.
Other Gladwell rereads:
BLINK, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell, What we don’t know we know. Intuition and the enormous role it plays in our lives and our real self. My favorite Gladwell read.
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell. The role connection plays in everyday society on a commercial scale. What makes some organizations powerful.
Conversational Intelligence, Judith E Glasser – Why conversations are basically everything; how conversations influence our neurology; the power of serotonin, dopamine, cortisol and a host of other hormones in our outcomes.
Healing the Child Within, Charles L. Whitfield, MD – The impact of generational behavior, attitudes and beliefs and what we can do about it.
Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek, Empathy and trust, leadership at all levels.
Knights Without Armor, A Guide to the Inner Lives of Men, Aaron R Kipnis, PH.D. The dichotomy of men and boys, fathers and sons, leadership and abuse. Independence and discovering our real self through all the muck.
Taming Your Gremlin, A Surprisingly Simple Method of Getting Out of Your Own Way, Rick Carson, An entertaining and touching way of getting at our inhibiting beliefs instilled by some of the influential adults in our lives.
How To Raise An Adult, And Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success, Julie Lythcott-Haims, Understanding helicopter-parenting and the damage created by our “gifted” children obsessions and how all this shows up in life.
The Road to Character, David Brooks – A series of stories of seemingly unremarkable people doing seemingly unremarkable things who made a huge impact despite challenging beginnings in life, extreme upsets and terrific headwinds.
The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller – We are really doing to our ‘gifted’ children. Goes great with How to Raise an Adult.
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Ken Wilber, Hierarchies, holons, Kosmos. The quadrants of individual and cultural effectiveness from a spiritual perspective.
A History of Everything, Ken Wilber, A shorter and discussional way to get to Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
The Simple Feeling of Being, Ken Wilber, Journal entries by Ken Wilber. Thoughtful and inspiring, especially toward Wilber’s ‘Why’.
A History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson. I have re-read this many times. It is a practical and entertaining history of how we got here; what we’ve done; and why we should not take being here for granted – in any capacity.
The Wright Brothers, David McCullough. The emergence of the Wright Brothers in fixed-wing controlled flight and the end of Samuel Pierpont Langley. The “WHY” of leadership
The Big Leap, Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level, Gay Hendricks. Getting past our inhibiting beliefs to be our powerful self, leadership, how we ‘serve time’, and how we can move forward.
You Just Don’t Understand, Women and Men In Conversation, Deborah Tannen. A good look at the impact of our statements, actions and conversations with others, when we think we are being helpful and when we are not. The beginnings of being self-aware from a psychological perspective.
Fire In the Belly, On Being a Man, Sam Keen. About being and becoming a man. What it means. What is required of us. Assumptions/reality.
TED Talks – http://www.ted.com
Brené Brown: The Power of Vulnerability
Vulnerability is our “most accurate measurement of courage” and the birthplace of innovation creativity and change.
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability
Brené Brown: Listening to Shame
Shame is the absence of connection. What causes us to lose connection? How does shame manifest in life?
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame#
Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action
What Apple Computer, the Wright Brothers and Martin Luther King have in common and why some leaders are able to inspire. And others are not. What, How, What and the “Golden Circle” of biological reasoning. (There is a connection to Ken Wilber in here.)
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
Simon Sinek: Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe
Why Good leaders make others feel safe, how that trust is earned and what that does in the customer value proposition. Southwest Airlines, among others. Why leadership is not a rank.
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe
Sheryl Sanberg: Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders
The Facebook COO explains why there are too few women in leadership roles and what we can do about it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders
Scott Dinsmore: How to Find Work You Love
Leaning your ladder against the wrong wall of success and Why enduring the job you don’t love is like saving up sex for old age. Great delivery!
http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_dinsmore_how_to_find_work_you_love
Barry Schwartz: The Way We Think About Work Is Broken
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_we_think_about_work_is_broken
The Work – Success Myth
Michael Kimmel: Why Gender Equality is Good For Everyone – Men Included
Men have privilege and control backwards – How feminism sets men free. One of my very favorite Ted Talks
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality_is_good_for_everyone_men_included
