In Fall 2010, I started doing improvised music with the Mop & Bucket Co. Looking into ways I could progress in my learning outside of rehearsals and performances, I discovered these three books by Michael Pollock, musical director of The Second City Los Angeles. They provide excellent, simple and understandable advice and instruction on...
Zen and the Art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career DesignBy Laurence G. Boldt This is one of those rare books that puts things together from so many different areas and does it so well that it might take reading dozen of other books to get the job done otherwise....
What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the BetterBy Dan Baker A great and easy to read look at how to deal with negative things in our lives and move toward happiness. Full of great explanations for why we get stuck and how we can get...
Now, Discover Your StrengthsBy Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. Based on decades of research by the Gallup Organization, this book shows how focusing on enhancing people’s strengths is a much more effective approach toward satisfying experience than working with weaknesses. The book is mainly about the world of work, but what it...
The Appreciative Inquiry HandbookBy David L. Cooperrider, Diana L. Whitney, and Jacqueline M. Stavros A complete guide to planning, designing and completing Appreciative Inquiry initiatives, from short introductions to long-term undertakings. Provides lots of information to help you understand AI and how it works, as well as many tools to assist you in its...
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal ExperienceBy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi A landmark in its focus on what works well for people, it practically founded the field of Positive Psychology. Flow is that feeling of being “in the zone” that comes only from using our abilities in ways that are intrinsically satisfying. It is the place where...
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and InventionBy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Building on his work on flow, the author explores what lies behind discovery and invention by studying interviews with a number of people internationally renowned in fields from the arts to the sciences to business. Learning from what has worked well for these...
The Thin Book of Appreciative InquiryBy Sue Annis Hammond A brief but solid introduction to the ideas and practice of Appreciaitve Inquiry.Purchase at:
Who Do You Think You Are?By Dr. Nick Isbister and Dr. Martin Robinson Tapping very much into positive psychology and the appreciative perspective, the System of Identifying Motivated Abilities has been used for decades to help people and companies find out what motivates them and how they can use that knowledge to achieve more...
The Systems Thinking Playbook: Exercises to Stretch and Build Learning and Systems Thinking CapabilitiesBy Dennis Meadows & Linda Booth Sweeney Systems theory is a field that tries to explain how things work in general, drawing parallels across different areas to show that similar structures create similar dynamics no matter where they occur. This kind...
