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To bring some lightness and fun to our book recommendations, it wouldn’t be complete without this one. Not only a cheerful children’s book, we can all benefit from the great insights this book shares on the highs and lows of life. Along the theme of teaching our athletes to be resilient, use it as an activity or case study on how to bounce back from a poor performance.
If you are interested in emotional intelligence, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman answers everything you need to know on the topic. It isn’t for the faint-hearted and you’ll know what I mean when you see the thickness of it and the size of the print. But it is the ultimate guide and reference point and we highly, highly recommend it. Make sure you mark the pages in the book or on your device as you go, as it is a book that you’ll want to go back to time and time again. Goleman is the man on emotional intelligence! (Click here to read our article about Emotional Intelligence where we refer to this book.)
‘Deliberate practice’ is probably one of the most important concepts that have a significant impact on sporting success and improving skill acquisition.
Overall Strengths Based Leadership is an excellent book about the benefits of focusing on and working on people’s strengths. It shares an enormous body of research on leadership and real life examples. There is an excellent chapter about why people follow, which is a must read for everyone. (Click here to read our article on the book’s chapter about Why People Follow)
An interesting book with many fascinating coaching stories, well worth the read for those who love getting an insight into other sports programs. Read our book review for a more detail. Upfront, you should know that this is a business book that looks at the sporting world for ways that the business world can improve individual and team performance. This book hasn’t been written for sports people, but as someone involved in sport, it is still extremely valuable and you’ll end up with many pages marked.
Legacy by James Kerr comes highly recommended from the whole team at Athlete Assessments. Some books on leadership and culture can be dense reads you feel forced to slug through, Legacy is compelling reading. It is very easy to read in a day or over the weekend.
No question, the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle is a must-read. Not only is it a wealth of excellent research that is explained extremely well, it is a “how to” for elite performance. I’ve read it a couple of times, just so I extracted as many lessons as I could. Brilliant! (Click here to read our book review of The Talent Code)
We loved Coyle’s The Talent Code and this is an excellent follow up with its 52 Tips for improving your skills and performance. Even for the ‘non-reader’, by reading a tip each week (there are 52 in total) you’ll have benefitted from this tremendously over an entire year. Insightful, relevant and extremely practical – say no more… (Click here to read our book review of The Little Book of Talent)
his is our top recommendation for the year. An excellent book about the transformation of a disjointed group of individuals into a high performing team who ultimately achieve success – who doesn’t love a book about that? What is most interesting are the insights into the use of DISC to enable the coach to better manage, communicate with and lead the individual team members. It also highlights why and how they grouped similar DISC profile players into pods within the team.
Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants Click here to buy David and Goliath now. Why we recommend it: If you loved