The 25 Best Life Coach Books to Read This Year
There are countless books out there on coaching, self-growth, development, and achieving goals. We’ve compiled this list of our favorite life coaching books covering a variety of topics. Every book offers a unique perspective and voice, and it’s important to find the right path that works for you. Remember there are quite a few different types of life coaching. We won’t always find the right book the first time, so remember to keep at it! For ease, we’ve broken the list into three categories:
- Self-Development Books
- Life Coaching Workbooks
- Books for Coaches
Self-Development Books
These are general books on various forms of self-development, covering a range of topics. One thing these books have in common is their power to help you make the changes in your life that you wish to see. There are many benefits to reading these books, just as there are many life coaching benefits. Find the book that seems to speak to you, and take action today.
Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be
Girl, Wash Your Face is a #1 New York Times Bestseller for a reason. With a fair amount of self-disclosure and examples from her own life, author Rachel Hollis shares about the ways we keep ourselves down in life. She shares her experience growing to create her own website and media company, and how we call can work toward freedom from the boxes in which we put ourselves.
Practicing Mindfulness: 75 Essential Meditations to Reduce Stress, Improve Mental Health, and Find Peace in the Everyday Kindle Edition
Practicing Mindfulness was written by one of our very own coaches and founders, Matthew Sockolov. The book contains powerful mindfulness practices in super easy-to-follow chapters for those new to meditation and mindfulness. With the guidance in this book, you can bring mindfulness to all aspects of your life.
Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life
As the name suggests, Unfu*k Yourself is a book that takes a tough love approach to self growth. Author Gary John Bishop shares his seven assertions, and a no-BS way to move forward in life. If the softness and gentleness of other coaching books just doesn’t work for you, this book will help you kick your ass into gear with love and encouragement!
The Self-Love Experiment: Fifteen Principles for Becoming More Kind, Compassionate, and Accepting of Yourself
The Self-Love Experiment is one of our favorite books on self-development for one simple reason: it stresses the importance of self-love and helps us to drop the idea that caring for ourselves is negatively selfish. With this book, you can find ways to be kinder and more patient with yourself without being too indulgent.
Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior Kindle Edition
Get Out of Your Own Way is a wonderful guidebook to working with a ton of behaviors most of us experience. Addressing over 40 individual patterns of behavior, the book looks at things like fear, guilt, envy, inaction, obsession, and other self-defeating behaviors. This book can be quite eye opening, and may help you dig a little more deeply into the roots of the difficulties you’re facing.
Wellpreneur: The Ultimate Guide for Wellness Entrepreneurs to Nail Your Niche and Find Clients Online
Wellpreneur is a book especially for entrepreneurs and business people in the health and wellness industries. Acting as a bit of a business coach, this book offers all you need to have a true actionable plan. Find your niche, attract the right target audience, and get the support from your system you have in place. If you’re a yoga teacher, fitness blogger, or nutritionist, we cannot recommend this book strongly enough.
Making Habits, Breaking Habits
Making Habits, Breaking Habits is exactly as it sounds: a guidebook to breaking unhealthy habits and building new ones. However, it’s not just your normal guide. Psychologist Jeremy Dean explains the neuroscience behind our habits, the autopilot we often experience, and how we can use this information to actually make changes. This book offers hope, teaching us how to let go of self-destructive habits, build new ways of living, and investigate who we identify as ourselves.
The Power of Self-Coaching: The Five Essential Steps to Creating the Life You Want
The Power of Self-Coaching is one of the best general coaching books out there. Reading this book, you will discover a five step program to identify problem areas and build healthier behaviors in your life. Dr. Joseph J. Luciani has studied clinical psychology and practiced for over 25 years, and brings true expertise, understanding, and wisdom to his writing.
How to Achieve Your Personal and Professional Goals is a super pragmatic guide to everything about goals. You will learn the art of creating the right goals, how to build habits that push you toward your goals rather than hold you back from them, and deal with the fears, self-doubt, and harsh self-talk we often face in our path to achieving.
Life Coaching Workbooks
These are workbooks that offer activities and exercises. Although any book on life coaching may be seen as a bit of a workbook, these are true workbooks. They are designed for you to follow along, interact with the book, and take action.
Style Your Mind: A Workbook and Lifestyle Guide For Women Who Want to Design Their Thoughts, Empower Themselves, and Build a Beautiful Life
Style Your Mind is simply our favorite life coaching workbook right now. It is a workbook and guide created especially for women, although some of our coaches have used it as inspiration for all of their clients. It’s a book that focuses on lifestyle coaching, but many of the activities, inspirational thoughts, and assignments have proven useful to women who wish to grow in any aspect of their life. We also love the name!
Life Coaching Activities & Powerful Questions
The book Life Coaching Activites & Powerful Questions is a wonderful book that works well for both coaches and clients. It’s full of explanations, interactive exercises, questions, and more. Whether you’re a life coach or somebody interested in self-development and growth, this is definitely a workbook that will support you.
The Self Confidence Workbook: A Guide to Overcoming Self-Doubt and Improving Self-Esteem
The Self-Confidence Workbook is one of the best life coaching workbooks out there in our opinion. It’s perhaps the most far-reaching book in that it really can be used for almost any situation. Learn to dive more deeply into your passions and experience, get to know yourself, and find activities and tasks to grow in your confidence and esteem.
The Life Coach Workbook: Teach Yourself
The Life Coach Workbook is a workbook made specifically for individuals, and not for clients. It contains self-assessments, tests, activities, exercises, and much more. With the extensive and simple explanations, this workbook will help you lay a stable fondation of growth in your life and take action toward becoming the new and improved you!
The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery
The Road Back to You is a workbook that utilizes the popular Enneagram methodology. Using the ancient Enneagram system to find your personality type, the Road Back to You will help you to utilize this knowledge about yourself to build healthier habits, gain self-confidence, and move toward growth in all aspects of your life.
Life by Design: 52 Lists, Questions, and Inspirations for Finding Your Happiness
Life by Design is a unique book on this list in that it acts as a type of a journal. It’s a great daily book to use to investigate your path of self-growth. With 52 weeks of activities, themes, and lessons, this is a fantastic interactive workbook to use to investigate your life over the coming year.
A Leader’s Life Purpose Workbook: Calling and Destiny Discovery Tools for Christian Life Coaching
A Leader’s Life Purpose Workbook is one of our favorite life coaching workbooks for the faith-based coach. It has over 60 individual exercises and activities that span a broad range of topics. The book will help individuals discover who they truly are, what their calling may be, and what God has planted within.
The Coach U Personal Development Workbook and Guide
The Coach U workbook is truly one of our favorites. The major downside is that it is more expensive than other options. However, it was put together by an insightful team of well-respected experts from Coach U, and is a great tool to have. It is made specifically for life coaches, and we always recommend our coaches have a copy!
The Intuitive Eating Workbook: Ten Principles for Nourishing a Healthy Relationship with Food
As the name makes obvious, The Intuitive Eating Workbook focuses on nutrition and eating. For any life coaches or individual working with food, this is an absolute must-have. Reading and working with The Intuitive Eating Workbook will give you the ten principles, as well as actionable items and plans for you to rock.
Recovery & Life Coaching: The Official Workbook For Coaches and Their Clients
Recovery & Life Coaching is, as the name suggests, a workbook specifically for recovery coaches. It is used by those recovering from addiction, professionals working in inpatient and outpatient treatment settings, group facilitators, and invididual recovery coaches. This book offers instructions and practice for finding a healthy and sustainable recovery from addiction.
Books for Life Coaches
These are books specifically for life coaches. Of course, anyone can read these books to implement the plans into their own life. However, these books were written specifically with coaches and leaders in mind, and any coach can benefit from adding new tools to their toolbox!
Co-Active Coaching: The Proven Framework for Transformative Conversations at Work and in Life
Co-Active Coaching is in its Fourth Edition, and is praised as the “bible of coaching guides” by one prominent endorser. It includes exercises, activities, worksheets, and all you need to strengthen your coaching toolset. The Co-Active Coaching model is unique, and definitely something you should investigate in your coaching practice to see if it useful for your clients.
Becoming a Professional Life Coach: Lessons from the Institute of Life Coach Training
Becoming a Professional Coach is the handbook from the Institute of Life Coach Training, and an incredibly useful resource. The book goes through the basics, including ethics, positive psychology, different modalities of coaching, and more. This is one of our favorite books for life coaching as it is easy to digest, and separated into accessible sections to develop specific coaching skills.
Transformational Life Coaching: Creating Limitless Opportunities for Yourself and Others
Transformational Life Coaching by Dr. Cherie Charter-Scott is one of the most well-respected coaching books on the market. She’s appeared on many popular shows such as Oprah, the Today Show, and more with her success in this method. The book advocates for a pro-client environment, discusses creating a solid foundation in your own life, and leads the reader through some marketing and business tips.
The Prosperous Coach: Increase Income and Impact for You and Your Clients
The Prosperous Coach is unlike most of the other books on this list in that it specifically focuses on building your business. It does contain many tips and sections on workign with clients, but the overarching theme is to build your private practice. For any coach who wants to grow their income, this is certainly a must-read book.
Coaching Questions: A Coach’s Guide to Powerful Asking Skills
The title of Coaching Questions says it all. This book focuses on the importance of asking the right questions at the right time in your coaching practice. Any coaching course will likely teach you about this process, and this book dives in a little deeper. This is a great book for new and experienced life coaches alike.
The Life Coaching Handbook: Everything You Need to Be an Effective Life Coach
The Life Coaching Handbook is a powerful book by Curly Martin offering a set of ideas, methods, and tools for becoming a coach. Based on the methodology of NLP, the Life Coaching Handbook is one of those books that every coach really should read and have in their library during their coaching career.
If there’s a great book you know of that we missed on this list, email us at Support@Shifts.coach and we will read it!
