Resources

Karen & Henry Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl

The definitive textbook of Co-Active coaching — a model built on the premise that clients are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Covers the four cornerstones of Co-Active coaching and the five coaching contexts through case studies and exercises.

Karen and Henry Kimsey-House

A five-dimensional model of leadership that moves beyond hierarchy to explore how leaders can operate simultaneously from the dimensions of leader-within, leader-behind, leader-beside, leader-in-front, and leader-in-the-field. Practical and philosophically grounded.

Ann Betz and Karen Kimsey-House

Explores the intersection of neuroscience and coaching, connecting ICF competencies to brain science and showing how whole-brain, somatic approaches deepen coaching impact.

The Arbinger Institute

Through a business fable, this book reveals the single biggest problem leaders face — being 'in the box', treating others as objects rather than people. The shift out of the box transforms leadership from the inside out.

Robert Anderson and William Adams

A comprehensive framework mapping how leaders evolve through reactive, creative, and integral stages of consciousness. Backed by thirty years of research with 100,000+ leaders, it offers both a developmental map and practical tools for transformation.

Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson argues that many organizational problems are not problems to solve but polarities to manage — ongoing tensions between two interdependent values, like stability and change. Offers tools to see, map, and leverage these polarities over time.

Shirzad Chamine

Presents research showing that most people operate only 20% of the time at peak performance — sabotaged by negative mental patterns. Chamine's PQ model identifies ten mental saboteurs and offers a practical system to build mental fitness through daily practice.

Julie Diamond

Julie Diamond distinguishes between rank (formal or social power) and role, and shows how unconscious privilege and rank distort relationships and organizations. Essential reading for coaches working with leaders on how they land in the world.

Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman & Kaley Warner Klemp

Fifteen commitments that mark the threshold between reactive and conscious leadership — from radical responsibility to playing full out. Designed for leaders willing to examine the unconscious agreements running their organizations.

Richard Rohr

A collection of meditations and poetry from one of the leading voices in contemporary Christian contemplative practice. Rohr invites readers into a spacious present-moment awareness beyond doctrine — what he calls 'the naked now'.

angel Kyodo Williams

Confronts the racial homogeneity of American Buddhism and argues that the liberation promised by the dharma is incomplete unless it addresses systemic racism. A call for a dharma that does not bypass the body politic.

Don Miguel Ruiz

Drawing on ancient Toltec wisdom, Don Miguel Ruiz identifies four agreements that, if practiced, can transform life from suffering to joy: be impeccable with your word, don't take anything personally, don't make assumptions, and always do your best.

Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön guides the reader into the heart of Buddhist practice for difficult times — showing how the places we fear most are the exact places where genuine warmth, compassion, and awakening become available.

Eckhart Tolle

Teaches that identification with the thinking mind is the root of human suffering, and that liberation is found in present-moment awareness. One of the most influential spiritual books of the past thirty years.

Michael Singer

A systematic guide to loosening identification with mental and emotional patterns — from the vantage point of the witnessing consciousness. Simple, clear, and transformative.

Thich Nhat Hanh

A compassionate guide to healing internal and collective divisions through the Buddhist practice of interbeing. Thich Nhat Hanh presents healing as both personal and communal.

Pema Chödrön

Draws on Tibetan Buddhist teachings to guide readers through difficulty and uncertainty — arguing that willingness to stay present in groundlessness is the foundation of genuine compassion.

Dan Siegel

Reframes the adolescent brain as undergoing a profound neurological remodeling that generates essential human qualities: novelty-seeking, peer-orientation, intensity, and creative exploration — if adults can meet teens with curiosity rather than control.

David Whyte

Through poetry and personal essay, David Whyte explores what it means to take one's soul seriously in the workplace — tracing how the call of the unknown is not an obstacle but the very path of creative professional life.

Debbie Ford

Debbie Ford's foundational guide to shadow work — the practice of accepting and integrating the parts of ourselves we have denied or rejected. Shows that the qualities we most condemn in others are often the shadow aspects of our own unlived potential.

David Whyte

An earlier David Whyte book exploring poetry, mythology, and the courage required to bring one's full self into organizational life. Uses Shakespeare, Beowulf, and Dante as a mirror on the psychological demands of the modern workplace.

Ocean Vuong

A letter from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother, this novel-in-letters ranges from the tender to the brutal — tracing war, addiction, poverty, and queer desire. A meditation on the body, grief, and what it means to survive.

Brené Brown

Brené Brown identifies ten guideposts for wholehearted living — ways of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness rather than shame. Courage, compassion, and connection, she argues, require the willingness to be imperfect and vulnerable.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

An extended meditation on a single poem exploring what it truly means to show up in life with authenticity, grief, desire, and full presence intact.

Glennon Doyle

Glennon Doyle's memoir-manifesto charts her path from addiction and performance to an honest, uncontained life — including leaving her marriage for a woman she had just met. A defiant invitation to stop taming yourself for others' comfort.

Emily Folk

An exploration of values-based decision-making and what shapes our sense of meaning and purpose.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

A feminist Jungian classic tracing the Wild Woman archetype through folk tales and myths from across cultures. Shows how women's instinctual, creative nature has been tamed — and how reclaiming it restores vitality and soul.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Weaving together Indigenous Potawatomi teachings and Western botany, Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how plants have much to teach us about reciprocity, gratitude, and what it means to be in right relationship with the living world. A luminous work at the intersection of science and ceremony.

Edgar Villanueva

Edgar Villanueva, a Native American philanthropist, examines how the nonprofit and philanthropy sector perpetuates colonial patterns of power — and proposes seven steps to heal these structures and redistribute wealth in ways that restore dignity and justice.

adrienne maree brown

adrienne maree brown argues that pleasure — sensuality, joy, desire — is not a distraction from justice work but its very foundation. Drawing on science fiction, Black feminist thought, and embodied practice, she invites readers to center pleasure in their political lives.

Ijeoma Oluo

Ijeoma Oluo addresses the most common questions white people have about race with clarity, compassion, and directness — from police violence and the n-word to intersectionality and privilege. A practical guide for difficult but necessary conversations.

Dolly Chugh

Dolly Chugh, a social psychologist and professor at NYU Stern, offers a practical guide for being 'good-ish' — good enough to keep growing — on issues of bias, privilege, and systemic inequality. For people who care about being better but don't know how to act.

Bayo Akomolafe

Bayo Akomolafe writes to his young daughter from a post-humanist, African philosophical standpoint, questioning the linear progress narrative and inviting attention to what is wild, uncertain, and alive at the edges of the known. A poetic disruption of Western modernity.

Debby Irving

Debby Irving reflects on fifty years of unknowingly perpetuating racism through her own whiteness — tracing how she was shaped by segregation, privilege, and a culture that rendered racial injustice invisible. A memoir for white readers beginning to see.

Robin DiAngelo

Robin DiAngelo coined the term 'white fragility' to name the defensive reactions white people exhibit when their racial worldview is challenged — and shows how these reactions work to protect white racial comfort at the expense of racial justice.

bell hooks

bell hooks examines how patriarchy damages men — how it demands emotional shutdown, disconnects men from themselves and others, and fuels the violence that harms everyone. An unflinching analysis and a call for men to choose love.

The Arbinger Institute

A follow-up to Leadership and Self-Deception, presented as a leadership fable. Explores how we can move from a warring heart to a heart at peace — and why this inner shift is the prerequisite for genuine change in families, organizations, and the world.

Henry Cloud and John Townsend

Henry Cloud and John Townsend offer a Christian psychological framework for understanding and establishing healthy limits in relationships — at home, at work, and in the self. A practical guide to taking responsibility for your life while releasing responsibility for others'.

Melody Beattie

The book that defined codependency — a pattern of excessive emotional reliance on others for self-worth. Beattie offers a practical path to detachment, self-care, and genuine relationship based on her own recovery from codependency and addiction.

Harville Hendrix

The classic text behind Imago Relationship Therapy. Hendrix argues that romantic attraction is driven by an unconscious search to heal childhood wounds — and that conscious partnership can become a vehicle for growth and healing.

Terrance Real

A groundbreaking book on male depression, Terrance Real argues that men are conditioned from boyhood to deny vulnerability, and that covert depression — expressed as rage, addiction, and disconnection — is epidemic in men and those around them.

Esther Perel

Esther Perel challenges the idea that intimacy and erotic desire are natural companions in long-term relationships, arguing instead that desire requires distance, mystery, and transgression — and that love's security can actually extinguish the erotic imagination.

Andie Nordgren

Andie Nordgren's short but influential text challenges the hierarchy of relationships that privileges romantic love above friendship, family, and community. It invites readers to question which relationships 'count' and why — and to design their own relational values from scratch.

Amy Gahran

Amy Gahran maps the 'relationship escalator' — the default cultural script of dating → commitment → cohabitation → marriage → children — and interviews hundreds of people who have chosen different paths, documenting what thriving outside the default looks like.

Tian Dayton

Tian Dayton, PhD applies the latest trauma research to adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families — documenting how relational trauma becomes encoded in the body and nervous system, and offering a path to recovery through group work and psychodrama.

Dr. Shefali Tsabary

Dr. Shefali argues that parenting is not about raising children but about raising the parent. Children mirror our unresolved patterns — and their 'misbehavior' is often an invitation for us to heal.

Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton

The defining guide to ethical non-monogamy, covering jealousy, communication, multiple loves, and the practical art of honest, consensual non-monogamy.

Dan Siegel

Twelve practical strategies for helping children integrate their brains, regulate emotion, and build the neural architecture for resilience — told through accessible stories from clinical practice.

Charles Eisenstein

Traces the mythology of money from gift economies to interest-bearing debt, and sketches what a sacred economy might look like — one that honors gift, commons, and the interconnection of all life.

Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein maps the shift from what he calls the 'Story of Separation' — the worldview of isolated selves competing for resources — to a 'Story of Interbeing' in which healing, justice, and ecological sanity are not only possible but inevitable.

Lynne Twist

Lynne Twist argues that the toxic myths of scarcity — 'there's not enough', 'more is better', 'that's just the way it is' — drive both personal anxiety and global injustice. She offers a path to sufficiency, gratitude, and aligned use of resources.

Dr. Robin Youngson

Dr. Robin Youngson, an anesthesiologist, argues that modern healthcare has sacrificed compassion for efficiency — and that restoring care to the center of medicine is not idealistic but evidence-based and systemically necessary.

Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté weaves together memoir, neuroscience, and clinical narrative to explore addiction — showing it not as a moral failure but as a response to trauma, early attachment wounds, and the loss of connection with self and others.

Resmaa Menakem

Resmaa Menakem offers a body-centered analysis of racialized trauma — exploring how white supremacy and its violence live in the nervous systems of Black, white, and police bodies alike. Proposes somatic healing practices as a path to collective repair.

Philip Shepherd

Philip Shepherd proposes that the Western fragmentation between head and body — and between the individual and the world — is the source of our deepest suffering. He offers somatic practices to restore embodied wholeness as a foundation for presence, creativity, and belonging.

Bessel van der Kolk

A landmark synthesis of neuroscience, psychiatry, and somatic therapy showing how trauma physically reshapes the brain and body — and presenting multiple pathways to healing including yoga, EMDR, theater, and neurofeedback.

Staci Haines

Connects personal trauma to collective and structural violence, arguing that healing must address both the individual body and the social conditions that cause harm. A foundational text for trauma-informed, justice-oriented coaching.

Francis Weller

Maps the five 'gates of grief' most Westerners never pass through. A fierce and tender invitation to mourn fully — and discover what is renewed in that passage.

Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté draws on decades of clinical practice and medical literature to show how chronic illness is often the body's way of saying no to what the mind has suppressed — stress, unexpressed emotion, and the denial of the self's true needs.

Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer et al.

A collaborative work from MIT's organizational learning faculty exploring the interior condition of leaders. The authors trace how genuine change in organizations begins with a shift in consciousness — from problem-solving to presencing, or the capacity to sense and actualize emerging futures.

Frederic Laloux

Laloux maps the evolutionary history of organizations — from red to amber to orange to green — and presents a new stage he calls 'teal': self-managing, holistic, and driven by evolutionary purpose. Based on case studies of companies operating at this level.

David Bedrick

David Bedrick draws on Jungian psychology and Process Work to argue that social change work requires the same inner shadow work as personal development — that activists who ignore their own psychology replicate the very dynamics they oppose.

Meg Wheatley

Argues that genuine conversation — not technology or strategy — is the only way to address complex social problems. A practical invitation to reclaim deep listening and collective sense-making.