Category: Personal and Professional Development Book Club

Post event update Brené Brown has spent years researching vulnerability, shame and how they relate to wholehearted living. You can see her speak about this on a video which has 'gone viral' here https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability. Daring Greatly in a nutshell: Vulnerability and shame are uncomfortable emotions, and we do an awful lot to avoid them. Building resilience [...]

Post event update: Start with Why was a book with a very important message - if you start with WHY you are doing something, everything else falls into place and decisions become a lot easier. For example, if Company XYZ has a mission to make the best THING to help customers with their BLAH, any [...]

Post event update: This was one of our most harrowing reads; Victor E Frank's account of his life in a concentration camp, and how he and his fellow prisoners survived the torture, the cold and the starvation and lived to tell the tale. The clue is in the title; Frankl - a psychotherapist who studied [...]

Again, an enjoyable discussion which I have summarised here. What is Kaizen? Kaizen is a process of improving a habit using very small steps. Small steps can lead to big changes. Kaizen disarms the brain’s fear response making change come more naturally. By asking small, gentle questions, we keep the fight-or-flight response in the ‘off’ [...]

Post event update: We had a great discussion about the points made in this book, which we thought would be better titled 'the subtle art of carefully choosing what to give a f*ck about'. Points we discussed were: Mason's premise is that problems are inevitable, but that we can choose our problems by choosing what [...]

Post event update: Well, this book definitely seemed to receive a reception a bit like Marmite; people either loved it or hated it. The two camps fell into "I just want my personal development books to tell it to me straight" vs "I loved thinking about what all the metaphors meant and how they could [...]

Post event update: We thought this book was a really useful way to break down how people communicate differently, and how best to reach out to your partner (or friend, colleague, etc). Perhaps a bit simplistic in places, but it has saved marriages! We didn't think it was necessary to read the entire series of [...]

Post event update: We had an enjoyable debate about this book. Are the principles still useful to follow? We thought they were still very much taught to us in management training and followed in workplaces, so they have definitely withstood the test of time. Once we'd got past the 1930s language and culture we thought [...]

Post-event update Hmm...we were not enamoured with this book...ironically we found it a little boring! The audible version didn't seem to work as well as the book version, so I'm glad I read the paperback for once! Sandi focussed a lot on the negative effects of boredom. For example, in the workplace boredom leads to [...]