Practicing

Centering: Six Direction Breath: In this simple practice, you will experience a greater sense of calm and clarity, expanding where stress leaves you contracted. It’s highly effective and will help rewire your default stress reactions to a more even, less toxic level. I teach it to most of my clients with great success.

Self-Compassion Exercises: we drive ourselves to exhaustion and burnout in the belief that being hard on ourselves is the key to success. This stress activates our autonomic fight-flight-freeze system with negative impact on our physical, mental and emotional well-being. Self-compassion exercises activate the soothing limbic system and give us greater peace of mind and resilience. I have witnessed remarkable transformations in people, including those experiencing stress and in leadership positions by using some of these exercises from Dr. Kristen Neff. Compassion Focused Therapy is now recognised the world over as highly effective and is now used in the National Health Service.

Tara Brach. Tara Brach's teachings blend Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to our inner life and a full, compassionate engagement with our world. Full of talks and meditations. 

Insight Timer (app). Home to over 4 million mediators and with every possible shade of meditation practice to suit all tastes. Free.

Inner Ally visualization. When we let our Inner Critics dominate, we lose confidence, lower our resilience, and we keep ourselves small, rather than living our more expansive, truer selves. One of the most powerful tools I use with myself and my clients strengthens our conscious connection with our Inner Ally - that part of ourselves that offers us wisdom, clarity, compassion and courage, but from which we can become disconnected. It's a part of ourselves that is always available to us and that unconditionally accepts who  we are. I frame this visualisation with a brief context and preparation, and then end with some suggestions of how you might use what comes up for you in your daily life to support you. It takes about 13 minutes altogether.  

Questions for Self-Reflection and Setting Goals: this is a shortened version of the intake questionnaire all my clients fill in when they start coaching with me. They help you identify your major goals and offer an opportunity for powerful self-reflection.

Reading

99u (website) provides actionable insights on productivity, organisation and leadership to help creative people push ideas forward.

The Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace: How to Resolve the Heart of Conflict. Why an outward mindset creates great teams and organizations, and helps manage conflict.

Angeles Arrien, The Four-Fold Way. In a refreshingly clear manner, anthropologist, educator and corporate consultant Arrien shows us how we can harness the power of four archetypes (Warrior, Healer, Visionary, and Teacher) to live in harmony and balance with our environment and with our own inner nature.

Michael Atavar, How to Be an Artist, 12 Rules of Creativity, and Everyone is Creative. Atavar is a sympathetic and generous coach helping you nurture your creative potential.

Brainpickings (blog) Maria Popova's rich cross-disciplinary round-up of books, websites, videos, archives and artefacts offers sources of philosophical, cultural and psychological inspiration. 

William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. A classic guide to help you cope with the difficult, painful and confusing times in your life. 

Brené Brown, Dare to Lead. Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts.

Pema Chödrön , When Things Fall Apart. For anyone suffering a setback or a life-changing event that requires resilience.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. An influential approach to understanding creativity, including strategies for enhancing it as a vital means to enriching your own life, regardless of whether your creativity has an impact on the wider world.

Jim Dethmer, Diane Chapman and Kaley Warner Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. Leadership coaches lead us through the steps that help us reduce burnout and improve outcomes for individuals, teams, organizations, and the planet.

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. A remarkable and essential book by a concentration camp survivor who saw having purpose as the path to a meaningful life.

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Art of Dying. This powerful book contains accounts by the dying and those who have been with the dying in their final hours, and demonstrates that we can face death with a peaceful and untroubled mind.

Stewart D. Friedman, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. 360 degree leadership is about more than what happens in the office as explained by the wildly popular Wharton School of Business professor.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. Fromm offers inspiration and insight into what we expect from love and what we can put into it Essential reading.

Peter Hawkins, Leadership Team Coaching, Third Edition. A roadmap to develop leadership teams.

Stuart Heller and David Sheppard Surrenda, Retooling on the Run. Embodied tools and techniques for real change for leaders with no time.

Jackee Holder, 49 Ways to Write Yourself Well. A brilliant resource full of exercises to help you harness the science and wisdom of writing and journaling.

James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the ages of thirty-five and seventy - the so-called "mid-life crisis" - when we question the choices we have made, realise our limitations and feel "stuck". Hollis explores ways we can grow and evolve to fully become ourselves.

Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity. An organisation management consultant outlines her research on effective career transitioning with lots of ideas and exercises.

Tom Kelley and David Kelley, Creative Confidence. Founders of creative powerhouse IDEO, the Kelley brothers remind us that we all have ideas and insights to offer in the creative and innovation process.

Karen and Henry Kimsey-House, Co-active Leadership. A visionary five-dimensional approach that recognises that leadership has to be fluid and flexible and the roles leaders and followers play must shift to suit the situation.

Henry and Karen Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandal and Laura Whitworth, Co-Active Coaching, Third Edition. The finest coaching skills bible from my teachers.

Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. As change proliferates in our lives and our organizations, we must prize each other's minds above all else. Kline's steps to create a Thinking Environment can dramatically improve the way people think and thus how they work and live. 

Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations. How we can create a radically more soulful and purposeful way to run our business and nonprofits, schools and hospitals.

Peter Levine, Healing Trauma. With one fully integrated self-healing tool, Levine shares his essential methods to address unexplained symptoms of trauma at their source - the body - to return us to the natural state in which we are meant to live.

Steven Levine, A Year to Live. A practical guide on how to live life as if you only had one year left.

Ken McLeod, Wake Up to Your Life. If you are ready to get serious about developing a meditation practice, then this is an invaluable guide.

Loretta Malandro, Fearless Leadership: How to Overcome Behavioral Blindspots and Transform Your Organization. Clear outline of common leadership blind spots and how to transcend them.

Janice Marturano, Finding the Space to Lead. A powerful guide to integrating the practice of mindfulness - meditation and self-awareness - into the practical issues of everyday life of leaders.

John P. Milton, Sky Above, Earth Below. Milton distils principles and practices of using nature to connect more deeply with ourselves.

Arnold Mindell, The Deep Democracy of Open Forums. Practical steps to conflict prevention and resolution for the family, workplace and world.

Kristen Neff, Self-Compassion. Without the practice of self-compassion, we risk burnout and poor leadership, and we and others suffer.

Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak. With wisdom, compassion and gentle humour, Palmer invites us to listen to our inner teacher and follow its leadings toward a sense of meaning and purpose.

Wendy Palmer and Janet Crawford, Leadership Embodiment. Leaders do not operate from the neck up; our leadership embodiment and presence is our leadership.

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft. Plotkin skilfully interweaves the tools and insights of depth psychology with the mysteries of wilderness rites to create a contemporary path of initiation into adulthood.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. "Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers, rather live the questions themselves. Perhaps you will find yourself gradually living the answers once day."

Anne Rød and Marita Fridjhon, Creating Intelligent Teams. How to understand and lead the systemic dynamics of your team.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication. Words matter. Find common ground with anyone, anywhere, at any time, both personally and professionally.

Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action. Sinek explores the single element that defines great leadership.

Starhawk, The Empowerment Manual. A practical guide for groups seeking to organize with shared power and bottom-up leadership to foster vision, trust, accountability, and responsibility. 

Hal and Sidra Stone, Embracing Our Selves. This insightful book introduces you to your sub-personalities - the many "selves" within - and helps you discover what each needs and what each has to offer, providing a foundation for understanding and self-acceptance. 

Richard Strozzi-Heckler, The Leadership Dojo.  Building from his martial arts and somatic coaching background, Richard presents key principles such as shugyo or self-cultivation to help develop a body-based leadership practice with a moral and spiritual vision, efficacy, responsibility and commitment.

Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit. One of the greatest choreographers of her generation, Tharp believes that anyone can be creative, but we have to prepare for it. 

Bronnie Ware, Five Regrets of the Dying (blog). A palliative care nurse reflects on the five most common regrets of those on their death beds. A powerful reminder that what we may consider important today, may not be so relevant in the big picture of our lives. Don't miss.

Ginny Whitelaw and Betsy Wetzig, Move to Greatness. Learn to recognise, balance and develop the four basic energy pattterns to lead and live wholly.

David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea. Whyte's invitation to enter into "an imaginative conversation about life and work" will challenge and delight those wondering about the role of work in their lives.  

Watching

Brené Brown studies human connection--our ability to empathize, belong and love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, that those who experience love and belonging in their lives feel worthy of love and belonging. 

Our world prizes extroverts, but Susan Cain makes the case for the superpower of introversion.

The Creative Brain: How Insight Works. A brilliantly entertaining and informative BBC Horizon documentary follows scientists studying the mental processes involved in creativity.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow".

Most people instinctively avoid conflict, but as Margaret Heffernan shows us, good disagreement is central to progress. She illustrates (sometimes counterintuitively) how the best partners aren’t echo chambers -- and how great research teams, relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree.

What's the secret to unlocking the creativity hidden inside your daily work, and giving every great idea a chance? Harvard professor Linda Hill, co-author of "Collective Genius," has studied some of the world's most creative companies to come up with a set of tools and tactics to keep great ideas flowing -- from everyone in the company, not just the designated "creatives."

Nobel laureate and founder of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy and our own self-awareness.

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories--and maybe a way forward.

Ken Robinson believes that everyone is born with extraordinary creative capability and finding purpose is essential to knowing who we really are.

What makes a great leader? Management theorist Simon Sinek suggests, it’s someone who makes their employees feel secure, who draws staffers into a circle of trust. But creating trust and safety — especially in an uneven economy — means taking on big responsibility. He also has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question: "Why?"