Chapter 6: Top Five Coaching Books

When you ask most of today’s most successful professional coaches which book on coaching made the biggest impact on their practice, they will point you towards Co-Active Coaching. Inspiring and easy to read, this book covers all of the most common coaching models and techniques that are use by modern life and business coaches.

No matter what coaching model you choose to use for your business, knowing when and how to ask the right types of questions is the cornerstone of every successful coaching practice. Coaching Questions is entirely devoted to the art of questioning and includes excellent examples of the types of questions a coach should use in nearly every coaching situation.

Sir John Whitmore was one of the first public figures to bring professional coaching to the business world. In his classic Coaching for Performance, Whitmore discusses how the techniques and concepts that sports and life coaches use with their clients can serve as the catalyst for transformative change in the workplace. This is arguably the most scholarly book on coaching available.

Hargrove’s Masterful Coaching should be considered required reading for all coaches who intend on coaching teams. In this book, he makes the argument that coaching is not a career that you train for as much as it is a role that you become. A considerable portion of his book is devoted to coaching to organizations.

Gallwey is considered many to be the founder of the professional coaching movement due to the revolutionary change in sports coaching inspired by the books he wrote on tennis and skiing during the 70s. In The Inner Game of Work, Gallwey extends his ideas about coaching to the modern workplace to help managers and leaders bring out the best in their team by coaching them to overcome their inners fears, doubts and limiting assumptions.