It’s been a while since I recommended a few books and seeing as we are slipping into the summer months, with the possibility of having more downtime, here are a few suggestions that may pique your interest. 

‘Why we sleep’ by Mathew Walker. This was suggested to me by a coaching supervision colleague and I am finding it fascinating.  Neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker provides a revolutionary exploration of sleep, examining how it affects every aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels and our health in general

One of the most insightful books I’ve read recently is by Tony Schwartz, the author of ‘The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working’.  This is a fascinating take on this topic of how building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth which requires a blend of individual and organizational components: an environment that feels safe, a focus on continuous learning, time-limited experiments, and continuous feedback.

And an oldie, but a good one – David Maister’s outlines his Trust Equation in his book, ‘The Trusted Advisor’ (2000) is as relevant as ever.  His Trust Equation states that trustworthiness is equal to the sum of credibility, reliability and intimacy divided by a person’s self-orientation.  So, where this comes into play within companies is to evaluate the scores – the aim being high credibility, reliability and intimacy, and low self-orientation.  This is a trending topic now in leadership, business and politics but what is interesting is that the meanings in his equation are almost entirely personal, not institutional, so it’s really about people trusting people so expect a future blog on this.