The Knowledge Vault
Welcome to The Knowledge Vault! Your transformational journey has only just begun. The old patterns, mindsets, habits, beliefs, emotions and values that held you back are slowly but surely being replaced by newer and more empowering ones, as you transcend into becoming the person you have always aspired to be.
If this is your first time visiting our website, we hope you have been inspired to take your personal and professional development to the next level. For all those who have engaged with us previously or are still doing so, we are optimistic that you have benefitted from taking our training programmes and partnering with us as coaching clients. We would be thrilled to deepen our relationship with you as you continue to grow and transform. In service of your continuing education and evolution, we recommend you peruse the following books.
Spiral Dynamics
by Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan
“Spiral Dynamics” introduces a new model for plotting the enormous economic and commercial shifts that are making contemporary business practice so complex and apparently fragmented. Focusing on cutting-edge leadership, management systems, processes, procedures, and techniques, the authors synthesise changes such as: increasing cultural diversity; powerful new social responsibility initiatives; and, the arrival of a truly global marketplace.
A Theory of Everything
by Ken Wilber
In A Theory of Everything, Wilber uses clear, non-technical language to present complex, cutting-edge theories that integrate the realms of body, mind, soul, and spirit. He then demonstrates how these theories and models can be applied to real world problems and incorporated into readers’ everyday lives. A concise, comprehensive overview of the “M Theory” and its application in today’s world, by a renowned American philosopher
Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World
by Jennifer Garvey Berger
As opposed to showing readers how to play the role of a leader in a “paint by numbers” fashion, Changing on the Job builds on theories of adult growth and development to help readers become more thoughtful individuals, capable of leading in any scenario. Employing real-world examples, author Jennifer Garvey Berger offers a set of building blocks to help cultivate an agile workforce while improving performance.
Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation
by Daniel J. Siegel
From a pioneer in the field of mental health comes a groundbreaking book on the healing power of “mindsight,” the potent skill that allows you to make positive changes in your brain–and in your life.
Using case histories from his practice, Dr. Siegel shows how, by following the proper steps, nearly everyone can learn how to focus their attention on the internal world of the mind in a way that will literally change the wiring and architecture of their brain. Through his synthesis of a broad range of scientific research with applications to everyday life, he has developed novel approaches that have helped hundreds of patients. And now through his book “mindsight” can help all of us master our emotions, heal our relationships, and reach our fullest potential.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving–every day. If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviours that lead to remarkable results.
The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure and Mobility in the Workplace
by W. Timothy Gallwey
A groundbreaking guide to overcoming the inner obstacles that sabotage your efforts to be your best on the job. No matter how long you’ve been doing it or how little you think there is to learn about it, your job can become an opportunity to sharpen skills, increase pleasure, and heighten awareness. And if your work environment has been turned on its ear by technology, reorganisation, and rapidly accelerating change, The Inner Game of Work offers a way to steer a confident course while navigating your way toward personal and professional goals.
Coaching For Performance: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership
by Sir John Whitmore
Coaching for Performance is the definitive book for coaches, leaders, talent managers and professionals around the world.
An international bestseller, featuring the influential GROW model, this book is the founding text of the coaching profession. It explains why enabling people to bring the best out of themselves is the key to driving productivity, growth, and engagement. A meaningful coaching culture has the potential to transform the relationship between organizations and employees and to put both on the path to long-term success.
The Tao of Coaching: Boost Your Effectiveness at Work by Inspiring and Developing Those Around You
by Max Landsberg
The book’s premise is simple: that to become an effective coach, managers and leaders need to master only a few techniques, even though mastery obviously requires practice. Each chapter focuses on a specific technique – or Golden Rule – of coaching to help practice make perfect.It demonstrates that coaching is not simply a matter of helping others and improving performance, but is also a powerful force for self-development and personal fulfilment.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
by Simon Sinek
People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers had little in common, but they all started with WHY. They realised that people won’t truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind it.
START WITH WHY shows that the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way — and it’s the opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organisations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.
Geeks and Geezers
by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas
This work presents a model that predicts who is likely to become, and remain, a leader, and why. It is based on a cross generational study of two groups of leaders: geezers, whose experiences were shaped by the Great Depression and World War II, and geeks, the children of TV and computers.
The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind
by B. Alan Wallace.
Meditation offers, in addition to its many other benefits, a method for achieving previously inconceivable levels of concentration. Author B. Alan Wallace has nearly thirty years’ practice in attention-enhancing meditation, including a retreat he performed under the guidance of the Dalai Lama. An active participant in the much-publicised dialogues between Buddhists and scientists, Alan is uniquely qualified to speak intelligently to both camps, and The Attention Revolution is the definitive presentation of his knowledge.
The Transforming Power Of Affect: A Model For Accelerated Change
by Diana Fosha
A groundbreaking examination of the transformational power of affect and a technique for harnessing it in the psychotherapeutic setting
Fosha’s original technique for catalysing change mandates explicit empathy and radical engagement by the therapist to elicit and harness the patient’s own healing affects. Its wide-open window on contemporary relational and attachment theory ushers in a safe, emotionally intense, experience-based pathway for processing previously unbearable feelings.
How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation
by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
Why is the gap so great between our hopes, our intentions, even our decisions-and what we are actually able to bring about?
In this intensely practical book, Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey help each of us arrive at our own particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between what we intend and what we are able to accomplish. It provides you with the tools to create a powerful new build-it-yourself mental technology.
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization
by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
Unlock your potential and finally move forward.
In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs–along with the collective mind-sets in our organisations–combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, they give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organisations forward with us. This persuasive and practical book, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.
In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life
by Robert Kegan
Robert Kegan applies his widely acclaimed theory on the development of human consciousness to the mental complexity of adulthood. As parents and partners, employees and bosses, we constantly confront a bewildering array of expectations, claims, and demands in the various roles we play in our lives. Our frequent frustration in trying to meet these complex and often conflicting claims results from a mismatch between the way we ordinarily know the world and the way we are unwittingly expected to understand it.
Leadership on the Line, With a New Preface: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change
by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky
Leading requires taking risks that can jeopardise your career and your personal life. It requires putting yourself on the line, disrupting the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. Those who choose to lead plunge in, take the risks, and sometimes get burned. But it doesn’t have to be that way, say renowned leadership experts Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky. In Leadership on the Line, they show how it’s possible to make a difference without getting “taken out” or pushed aside.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
by Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow
The guide to approaching leadership in a rapidly changing world.
When change requires you to challenge people’s familiar reality, it can be difficult, dangerous work, especially as you push through major changes. But as a leader, you need to find a way to make it work.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a hands-on, practical guide containing stories, tools, diagrams, cases, and worksheets to help you develop your skills as an adaptive leader, able to take people outside their comfort zones and assess and address the toughest challenges.
Narrative Coaching: The Definitive Guide to Bringing New Stories to Life
by David B. Drake
This book is an indispensable resource for anyone who works with people’s stories and wants to develop themselves so they have more impact. Narrative Coaching is timely because it works at the level of identities, addresses the collective narratives that shape our stories, and expands the roles and modalities we can use to bring about transformational change with individuals and teams.
Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence
by Rick Hanson
Hardwiring Happiness lays out a simple method that uses the hidden power of everyday experiences to build new neural structures full of happiness, love, confidence, and peace. You’ll learn to see through the lies your brain tells you. Dr. Hanson’s four steps build strengths into your brain to make contentment and a powerful sense of resilience the new normal. In just minutes a day, you can transform your brain into a refuge and power centre of calm and happiness.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
by Carol S. Dweck
Carol Dweck introduced the world to the ‘growth mindset’. In this brilliant book she illustrates how people with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.
The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results
by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter
Join the global movement that’s making corporations more people-centric to achieve great results.
The Mind of the Leader concludes that organisations and leaders aren’t meeting employees’ basic human needs of finding meaning, purpose, connection, and genuine happiness in their work. To solve the leadership crisis, organisations need to put people at the centre of their strategy. They need to develop managers and executives who lead with three core mental qualities: mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion. The Mind of the Leader represents a radical redefinition of what it takes to be an effective leader.
One Second Ahead: Enhance Your Performance at Work with Mindfulness
by Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter and Gillian Coutts
What can we do to break the cycle of being constantly under pressure, always-on, overloaded with information and in environments filled with distractions? The authors propose that we need to learn to work differently so we are more focused, calm and have less clutter in our mind so we can better manage our time and attention. One Second Ahead provides practical tools and techniques as well as real-world examples and lessons from organisations that have implemented mindfulness on a large scale. With the new mindset proposed in One Second Ahead, readers will be able to put an end to ineffective multitasking, unproductive meetings, poor communication, and other unhealthy workplace behaviours by applying mindfulness to everyday work life.
Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
The landmark work on mindfulness, meditation, and healing.
Based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction programme, this classic, groundbreaking work shows you how to use medically proven mind-body approaches to counteract stress, establish greater balance of body and mind, and stimulate well-being and healing. By engaging in these mindfulness practices and integrating them into your life, you can learn to manage chronic pain, promote optimal healing, reduce anxiety and feelings of panic, and improve the overall quality of your life, relationships, and social networks.
An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization
by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
A Radical New Model for Unleashing Your Company’s Potential
A Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO) is organised around the simple but radical conviction that organisations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. It means fashioning an organisational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations. This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone.
Conative Connection: Uncovering the Link Between Who You Are and How You Perform
by Kathy Kolbe
A critically acclaimed bestseller in hardcover, “Conative Connection” introduces the rediscovery of “conation”, the domain of the mind that dictates how we act. Kolbe has developed a simple method to quantify an individual’s approach to action, and she shows how to harness rather than work against innate and highly individual creative instincts.
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching: Distinctive Features
by Michael Neenan
Cognitive Behavioural Coaching: Distinctive Features Sets out the key theoretical and practical features of CBT and discusses how they integrate into the generic model of coaching. The book covers the four key elements in developing a coaching relationship, provides psychological and practical problem-solving models, shows how to deal with stuck points in coaching and identifies which individuals are unsuitable for CBC. The book demonstrates the smooth transition of CBT into CBC, and coach–coachee dialogues are interspersed throughout the text to show CBC in action.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining examination of human behaviour, both good and bad, and an answer to the question: Why do we do the things we do?
The result is one of the most dazzling tours d’horizon of the science of human behaviour ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do…for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace.
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
by Martin E. P. Seligman
Flourish builds on Dr. Seligman’s game-changing work on optimism, motivation, and character to show how to get the most out of life, unveiling an electrifying new theory of what makes a good life—for individuals, for communities, and for nations. Flourish refines what Positive Psychology is all about.
While certainly a part of well-being, happiness alone doesn’t give life meaning. What is it that enables you to cultivate your talents, to build deep, lasting relationships with others, to feel pleasure, and to contribute meaningfully to the world? In a word, what is it that allows you to flourish? Flourish is a watershed in the understanding of happiness as well as a tool for getting the most out of life.
Emotions Revealed, Second Edition: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
by Paul Ekman
Renowned psychologist Paul Ekman explains the roots of our emotions―anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness―and shows how they cascade across our faces, providing clear signals to those who can identify the clues. Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System offers intense training in recognizing feelings in spouses, children, colleagues, even strangers. In Emotions Revealed, Ekman distils decades of research into a practical, mind-opening, and life-changing guide to reading the emotions of those around us.
Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence
by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee
Primal Leadership affirms the importance of emotionally intelligent leadership. The book vividly illustrates the power—and the necessity—of leadership that is self-aware, empathic, motivating, and collaborative in a world that is ever more economically volatile and technologically complex. This groundbreaking book remains a must-read for anyone who leads or aspires to lead.
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)
by Chade-Meng Tan
With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneers, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work. Now, readers everywhere can get on in a course in health, happiness and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world.
The Attention Economy : Understanding the New Currency of Business
by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck
In today’s information-flooded world, the scarcest resource is not ideas or even talent: it’s attention. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Davenport and John Beck argue that unless companies learn to effectively capture, manage, and keep it–both internally and out in the marketplace–they’ll fall hopelessly behind. Drawing from exclusive global research, the authors show how a few pioneering organisations are turning attention management into a potent competitive advantage and recommend what attention-deprived companies should do to avoid losing employees, customers, and market share.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg presents a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to achieving any goal and long-term success lies in understanding how habits work. As Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.