Coaching Books

I have counseled top athletes from around the world from a wide variety of
sports. I believe this book is a useful tool for athletes who want to
learn more about the mind body relationship and who want to perform better.

Reviewed by Vicki Landes for Reader Views (10/07)

Ever heard the saying `it's all in your head?' Author Roy Palmer has taken that phrase and is literally running with it. As a teacher of the Alexander Technique, he explains why and how in his book, "Zone Mind, Zone Body: How to break through to new levels of fitness and performance - by doing less!"

As an athlete, Palmer understands the need for continual improvement; but what happens when your skill plateaus? He insists that this peak can be overcome but not by training harder. Instead, "Zone Mind, Zone Body" explains how to train smarter - by paying closer attention to one's own movements and staying in `the moment.' He calls achieving this elevated state `The Zone' and explains that many athletes have experienced it, but it's only to their surprise. "Athletes will suddenly find themselves in it. Then as soon as they acknowledge it, they lose it." Palmer strives to teach focus and awareness of the body and surroundings, making this physical nirvana more attainable on purpose, and with purpose.

Although written with the serious sports participant in mind, "Zone Mind, Zone Body" can be applied by the casual player and the non-athlete as well. Palmer's small adjustments to normal or unconscious movements alleviate unnecessary stress to the body and minimize energy wasted on avoidable tension. Further, he notes that these techniques can even be used during everyday repetitive tasks such as mowing the lawn!

"Zone Mind, Zone Body" is an enlightening read that will inspire the frustrated athlete, better train the novice enthusiast, and teach anyone to live in this open-minded `moment.' Palmer's strategy, although seemingly beyond one's reach at first, is vividly described with plenty of practice exercises and pictures for the reader to really feel what he's getting at. His style is one of encouraging enthusiasm - the testimony of a tried-and-true believer - keeping the reader interested in delving deeper into these `mind over matter' principles.

Author Roy Palmer isn't your typical sports fanatic. He's a transcended athlete - finding that indescribable place where time, ego, and fear become hushed as a synergy of mind and body take over. Where the moment is only about the athlete and his game and where sport is not just about physical endurance but about using the intellect and muscular mechanics to push ourselves further than we ever thought possible. "Zone Mind, Zone Body" is simply brains and brawn in one.

A great book with interesting examples on how we all have been in the zone not knowing what it was or why we got there. With the examples in the book you will get an idea of what happened when you were in the zone and how you get there more often.

Roy has captured the essence of the Zone experience. As a professional athlete I know what it's like to be in the Zone but I also acknowledge how fleeting it can be. I'm incorporating Roy's techniques into my own play with definite positive results.
David Balbi

Roy Palmer's, Zone Mind, Zone Body presents a unique examination of the link between thought and movement. Written with the casual and the competitive athlete in mind, Palmer demonstrates that working harder is not working smarter when it comes to training. In clear, concise language, Zone Mind, Zone Body instructs how to find "The Zone" of peak athletic performance purposefully rather than by haphazard accident. Based on the most current research and years of practical experience in the field with world class athletes, Palmer has created a work that presents his self-awareness techniques in a manner that is easy to read and even easier to implement .
Beginning with basic exercise theory and quickly moving past the fundamental training philosophies of old, the author captures the reader with vignettes of famous athletes and their accomplishments while in "The Zone". Most exercise physiology books feel like treks through a college anatomy and physiology course, it is not often that a book comes along that is free of technical terms yet still communicates to the reader the science and theory like Zone Mind, Zone Body does. Palmer does an excellent job of analyzing what is "The Zone" and how the average athlete strives to get in it. Through observation, experimentation, and practice, Palmer's techniques will help you reach "The Zone" more often. His time proven techniques are a boon for those who have reached a training plateau or are plagued by poor form, lack of confidence, and lack of motivation. Zone Mind, Zone Body provides the reader with a method to reflect on motives, attitudes, and techniques so you can get out of whatever training slump you are currently in and move on to a more confident level of performance.
Zone Mind, Zone Body promotes taking responsibility for your training and developing abilities through your own deliberate efforts. Palmer believes that training is part of your personal development and as such should be approached with the same calculated efforts one puts into training for one's intellectual pursuits. Similar to cognitive skills development, athletic skills development requires both confidence and a performance consistency based on continued improvement and learning. According to Palmer, "through mindful practice and attention to detail anyone can reach the Zone". Useful, interesting, and instructive, Zone Mind, Zone Body is a practical and complete how-to manual to develop focus and self-awareness.

This book allows you to see flaws in basic movement patterns and shows you how to correct them. It might not seem important but it could be the difference in being injuried or not.

Funny how a book needs a DVD to help demonstrate. So get the DVD too. Not much to say other than a good reference, the value is in the whole book.

This book changed the way I look at fitness and is appropriate for the weekend warrior or professional athlete. The author's expertise is expressed in such a manner that comprehension and practical application is easily reached.

Push your body to its limits and get the most out of it with these training drills. As a physical therapist, the author shows you the safe way to workout.

This is an OUTSTANDING complement to the DVD. I hoped that the DVD and book would not merely be redundant...and they aren't! The overlap to some extent so that you can get results with only one or the other, but I am VERY glad to have both. They fill in some gaps that each has.

This book provided alot of helpful insight from the mind of an individual who has already achieved success in the field I want to pursue myself. This is a good book to read if you're curious to see a realistic day-in-the-life look at the entrepreneurial track of fitness training. It also gives good tips for those that wish to work in established gyms as well; however, the entrepreneurial info is what reeled me in.

I really enjoyed reading this "Dummies" book. The author put lots of practical stories that really made the points. While I won't be training others for profit, I've already started working with other missionaries that want to get healthy. The book already has given me several ideas about how to work better.

This book does not really teach you the basics of becoming a personal trainer, but yet it teaches you how to start your business as a personal trainer. Was not what I thought based on the title.

Not really what I was looking for, but I started reading and its a great book, I really recomended to all beginners and experience, it has all the information you'll ever need, trully a well written and great referance book to have.

This is a very easy to read primer for those considering a career or hobby in personal fitness. It gives a nice overview of what the career is like and what it will take to gain a certificate and proceed to line up those all important clients. I also learned a few things that can be incorprated into my own liftness lifestyle.

This book uses great examples to explain the value of different levels of smarts. In the ancient hunting and gathering age, it's almost impossible for a hunter to get 1000 times of games more than his peer did. But in the Internet age, an expert programmer can easily make 1000 times of IT performance higher than her peer does.

The related critical issues come along: (1) How to distinguish different levels of knowledge? (2) How to find the right knowledge workers with required level of intelligence? (3) How to develop the deep smarts and their knowledge masters? (4) Finally, how to use those deep smarts to accomplish the organization's goals?

In the future editions, I would like to see the authors elaborate more on item (3) and (4) which are lightly exploited at the current version. Even for the item (1): how to distinguish different levels of knowledge? I think more quantitative and qualitative analysis may be introduced for better measurement and clarification. For example, how to measure the productivity of the software programmer is a tough task. (It's certainly not measured by the lines of code written per day.) In the senior corporate management and politics, it becomes extremely hard for rigorous performance measurement.

In a word, the deep smarts make good to great happen. The level 5 leaders in the greatest companies deploy and enable their organizations' deep smarts and constantly out-perform the rest. Therefore, it would be great worth exploring the general mechanism of deep smarts.

In Deep Smarts, the authors demonstrate a brilliant capacity for translating complex concepts into practical ideas for managers. Finally, here is book that addresses directly some of the challenges in knowledge transfer at a critical time for professions in all sectors of society. The authors tackle a very difficult problem: how to understand expertise; but then they go the additional step and discuss how to develop useful practices for sharing expertise across organizations. Leonard and Swap show how and why expertise can and should be captured before knowledge 'walks out the door.' The book aggregates and synthesizes years of primary and secondary academic research, but you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you took a close look at the extensive citations. In addition, there are many case examples that tell the story in a compelling and highly readable manner.

Some may see this as a book for HR, training&development, or knowledge management... it is for all three of these domains and the one that ties them together: strategy. As expertise is more greatly valued as the enduring resource for sustainable economic advantage, knowledge-based organizations will turn increasingly to their communities of practice, in which resides the expertise that is the wellspring of innovation.

This book is in the area of Knowledge Management. Similar to many other business books, it is based on empirical research performed by the authors.

The authors first define what they mean by "deep smarts" through reviewing different levels of expertise. Then they introduce the main thesis of the book. Expertise is acquired by an individual through active knowledge building. This includes getting first-hand experience and the transfer of knowledge from coaches or through other means. However, in such a process, the amount of knowledge that is actually internalized is also influenced by one's own beliefs and other people via their social influences.

The authors have led me to a significant understanding of why it is so hard for some people to learn, despite the fact that, their need for the relevant knowledge is very obvious already. Important factors include their lack of knowledge receptors and the knowledge to which they are exposed being contrary to their existing beliefs and assumptions.

This book is a great help to coaches, teachers, and consultants in helping them learn more effective methods of transferring knowledge to their students or clients in various situations.

For as long as anyone can remember leaders have been struggling to describe and to manage a mysterious kind of knowledge that people cannot readily pass on to others. It has been called wisdom, tribal knowledge, and tacit knowledge. Authors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap put this elusive kind of expertise in an organizational context and call it deep smarts.

One of the best ways to describe deep smarts is to provide an example of what it can do. They write, "When knowledge is fragmented, it takes deep smarts to aggregate it, make sense of it, see the relevant patterns, and act on it." So deep smarts is what it takes to define a path through confusion by sensing the connections in a blizzard of information. Wouldn't we all like to have that ability and have it flourish in our organizations?

Deep Smarts, the book, stands out among its peers in the rapidly growing field of knowledge management books on the strength of several virtues that are expressed in the subtitle. The authors show the reader how to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom, with `how to' being one of the key elements.

Cultivating deep smarts in an organization requires serious commitment from a manager. The manager must study it enough to understand its nature. It also requires a big investment in other people in order to give them the opportunity to develop deep smarts, which is to say, to move beyond ordinary levels of competence. Finally, the manager must maintain an environment that supports learning rather than stifling it. This means maintaining an environment of candor, fairness, and mutual respect. Anything less stifles learning and discourages the development of deep smarts.

Swap and Leonard provide an abundance of rather specific guidance on the `how' component. They do not leave the reader to invent the implementation process. The tasks they prescribe are not easy, however, and this is why the skillful development of deep smarts is rarely accomplished by organizations.

There are plenty of books on knowledge management, but Deep Smarts fills a unique niche for the working manager who faces the real life challenge of building a smarter organization by virtue of providing a helpful vocabulary, a useful conceptual framework, and real life examples of success and failure in knowledge management. This is a "best-of-class" book for both the scholar and the practitioner who is accountable for the bottom line.

By far the most useful and insightful book I've read in years. It changed the way I think about my organization and my career.

Leonard and Swap have shown that deep smarts, the experienced-based knowledge held by individuals in a firm are vital to an organization's survival as well as to an individual's success. I've heard much about the necessity of "cultivating talent" or "managing knowledge" without any real insight into what constitutes talent or what kind of knowledge is important. The result I've seen has been impractical (but often very expensive) efforts to codify any available organizational information without any sense of how valuable or accessible it is.

Leonard and Swap dig deeper into the real meaning of knowledge. Their research has identified what kind of knowledge creates competitive advantage, and more importantly, how leaders can cultivate and retain this knowledge. I don't know anyone in business who has not been confronted with the realization that vital experience has not been captured or passed on...when someone retires, leaves a position or leaves the company. And most of us have experienced a competitive threat based on superior expertise. But the solutions proposed usually aren't based on an understanding of how people actually learn (rather than how we wish they would) and don't often result in the development of judgment and wisdom. This book gave me a whole new way of thinking about expertise and how to leverage it. Deep Smarts also spoke to me on a personal level. I found their suggestions for how to build personal deep smarts an extremely useful approach to my own career development.

I also appreciate that this book is grounded in rigorous research. Based on hundreds of interviews, it provides the kind of insight that comes from real people, managing real organizations. It is no wonder their suggestions and guidance are so actionable. For once, I feel like a management book has been written for managers! This book is a must for anyone serious about the reality of managing knowledge assets and intellectual capital.

This is an awesome book! If you have watched the Dog Whisperer at all, this book parallels Cesar's style and helps with the interview and talking to people one on one when figuring out what is really going on with the dog and human. If you truly want to help people and their dogs this a good book to get your confidence up and in their door.

I've been a professional animal trainer for 20 years and I still found this book very helpful. I was a psychology major in college and knew much of the stuff in the book, but I was fascinated by the way Nicole applies many of the principles for dealing with people, to dog training. Everybody can learn something new from this book, and the tips on dealing with the individual personality types was described in detail and applied to a dog training setting. Even the concepts I already knew about were enforced in this book and it helped me to refresh my memory and once again work on my people training skills...because as they say...it really IS not the dogs, it's the people.

Although I not a "clicker trainer" (I use those "mean methods"), I enjoyed this book. It has helped me to become a better group training instructor. The author and I might disagree on dog training methodology but we do agree on the people training methods. I have been able to manage the training groups better, with people and their dogs having better learning success. This is a good book for anyone who instructs the public in dog training no matter what method they use.

I have been working with dogs for over 30 years and a service dog trainer for the last nine. I have just started my own private training business and this book was a refreshing read. Having worked with many people and their dogs, I could relate to many of the personalities described in the book. Reading this book was positive reinforcement for me and helped me realize that I have many of the tools to get my business up and running. It gives lots of helpful suggestions on how to work "with" people, encouraging them to understand and hopefully agree with you even if your suggestion differs from what they originally thought; making them think it was their idea. Expect the unexpected when working with people and their dogs. Relax and get ready to smile and learn.

This is a good book to help teach those at the "other end of the leash." Information can be direct but most communication is by perception.

Hi the Author and Amazon team, you should correct the publishing date.

In my MBA program I have encountered endless writings on management theory. This book puts it in simple language. There is no buzz or catch words, just the real stuff. Get rid of the countless 300 hundred page books and go with the one that gets to the real points in 150.

This book is perfect for every manager who wishes to increase his/her capacity as a manager, but doesn't want to read countless pages on the "A, B, C's" of Management. Alex Malone conveys his message in a personable way that most managers will identify with, relaying personal experience and learnings that we can relate to and learn from to become better people managers. This book is definitely not the "same old thing" and offers a unique viewpoint into effective people management. Even highly experienced managers will find themselves easily identifying areas for improvement, resulting in stronger management skills and more productive teams. Highly Recommended!

If you are a team manager or aspiring to become one, 'Managing Your Greatest Assets' will likely promote thought, provide insight and evoke unexpected laughter. The author skillfully describes numerous experiences while evolving as a manager with refreshing clarity and warmth. He shares his successes, failures and practical lessons intelligently in a concise and very readable style. I highly recommend this book. Well done, Alex.

I have not read this book yet, but will bet it is right on the mark. Alex and I worked together through his learning years (side by side). The environment, business state and people challenges taught us both alot. The successes were many and achievements great. In the end, Alex gets his biggest kick out of watching people develop and grow. Today many of those folks are at a place they could never of imagined. Having work beside, watched and contributed, I am absolutely thrilled to see Alex share his values and approach.

Congrats ! my friend. You have made a difference.
Don

This certainly ranks up there. My other choices for 2007, hands down:

1) How To Ace Your Way Through College & Still Have a Life
2) The MLA Handbook
3) Fiske Guide to Colleges

Dr. Vernon M
Cambridge, MA

Get out the highlighter and post its if you have a college bound child is high school. This is the best book I've read on the grueling process of college admission. It is specific in it's suggestions for every type of student.

Great book. We learned a number of admissions tips and strategies that helped our son get into college.

We will certainly hold on to the book and reference it when our sophomore starts filling out her applications.

This book is right up the alley for all those helicopter parental micromanagers out there in cyberspace. If you are one then great, this is the book for you. If you are a student, pass on it as it speaks to only the parent. There are much better student guides out there than this. The book speaks to what active role(s) the parent should take to help get their child into the right college. I bought it thinking it would be a great guide for students and parents alike. It is not. It is a guide for omnipresent, low hovering, fueled up Moms and Dads. Good luck kids! May you find out who you truly are at the campus of your dreams - hopefully far away from your "life coaches".

The best thing about this book is that it tells you what colleges NOT to apply to. It shows you how to match your GPA/SAT scores with colleges that are looking for students in that range. If your GPA is 3.2 and you want to go to Stanford, you are not going to get accepted so don't waste your time, emotions and money applying there. Look for colleges who take 3.2 GPA students. It also cautions you against applying to schools whose GPA range is way lower than yours. The authors suggest that you will be bored in such a school.

This book's target audience is clear: the baseball coach who wants to be told what to do and when. With a few minor exceptions, it presumes that you will be able to teach the fundamentals of the game. What it does not presume is that you will know how to put together a practice. The book takes you through a nice progression of practices, introducing a variety of basic baseball drills. A coach could use this book to plan their season's practice successfully. The pointers on how to deal with your parents and players, which take up large sections of many youth coaching books, are here, sprinkled throughout written in Bartlett's engaging tone. In fact it is Bartlett's clear and interesting prose which raise this book above being merely a coach's cookbook. Recommended mostly for the coach with a good degree of baseball knowledge and some idea of how to interact with kids as a coach, who is weaker in how to use those skills to coach a successful team.

I've been coaching youth baseball for several years now. I got this book at the start of the 9-10 yr. group winter ball season. It has some great ideas on how to manage and run the practices and interact with the families. It has some really good drills that the kids like to complete. Not much on specific mechanics and skills, e.g. you won't find how to teach a kid to pitch, or what specifically to look for in a struggling batter. If you're a little nervous about moving up a level, or how to fill up your first several pracices, I recommend this book.

I had been looking for a book on how to conduct practices with 9-10 year old players. This book's title was "perfect". It outlined my first 5 practices and gave me precise instructions on how and when to conduct each drill. I consider myself a knowledgeable baseball guy but always had trouble on what drills to run for this age group. This book gives easy to understand detail of each drill with diagrams when needed.

I have just completed my fifth practice and have had parents of the players come up to me and tell me that they think my practice and drills are great. I owe it all to this book.

The twinkie eating contest at the end of the first practice was a player favorite. Also, as a graduate of Eastern Illinois University, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the author was from Charleston, IL.

There are numerous books out there for coaches that have the same goal as The Perfect Season: to arm the coach with tons of drills at his disposal to get the most out of his players. Unlike other books, these drills aren't needlessly complicated, don't require all kinds of pricey equipment that isn't standard in your bag (you probably want to purchase a tee and some simple cones, but that's all I needed), and won't confuse your children as they try to execute them.

Also, Bartlett provides solid estimates for the time to complete every drill, allowing you to mix and match to meet the needs of your team and your timeframe. I've found myself falling in love with many of the drills, and the players do enjoy them. This book doesn't eliminate time spent standing around, but it reduces it exponentially.

The drills are good for all ages, as even high school players would benefit from some. However, it's perfect for coaches in 9- and 10-year old leagues, where kids are first able to bunt and steal and coaches struggle to teach and strategize these new tools. If you coach in a league for 9- and/or 10-year olds, I would recommend you order this immediately. Everyone will benefit from it, but that demographic needs it.

This is a fine, middle-of-the road book on coaching kids. It's especially aimed at coaches of 8 to 10 year-old teams. After reading all the 5-star reviews, I was expecting a tour-d-force and this book, while valuable, simply is not that special.

It has some interesting drills for young players, but is devoid of any real baseball skills descriptions. The book focuses on the basic throwing, catching, and hitting skills. It all flows together if you're a post-Tball and pre-skilled-play coach. It does have some handy cut-out diagrams and a very good bibliography.

This book also has some good tips for dealing with parents. However Dr.Fortanasce's "Life Lessons from Little League" is a much better book on a coach's relationships with his players and their parents. Similarly, Ripkin, Bouroughs, Cluck, Kendall, Voorheis and others all have more in-depth books on baseball skills.

Check out Amazon and look at the wide range of coaching books available.

Positive Psychology as an exciting field on its own its own; and Robert & Ben have taken the field to a practical level. Anyone even without any previous knowledge of Positive Psychology will be able to understand and apply the principles described in the book.

I love this book! I am an experienced executive coach -- have worked with over 250 leaders in a 10+ year period as a certified coach, and this book adds an important and new dimension. There is language and perspective that will broaden and deepen your coaching with clients. I am not a psychologist, and the entire field of positive psychology is relatively new to me -- I've been learning about it for the past 18 months or so. I find this alignment between positive psychology and professional coaching to be very powerful. I recommend this book for all coaches!

This is a terrific tool for anyone who wants clear, practical ways to create more happiness in their own life and is coaching others to do the same. As a life coach and psychotherapist I really appreciate how the information presented and its applicability to my work. I love the way the authors have taken so many of the compelling and salient findings from the field of positive psychology and translated them into effective techniques and applications for coaches. This sure has made my job easier. I like being able to draw from recent scientific evidence when formulating interventions with clients. Using this book, I am showing my clients how to practice happiness on a daily basis and how to relate every choice they make to the growth of their happiness, rather than what detracts from it. I highly recommend it.

Typeface gives the `aged' look to give the impression of wisdom and for such a new science (about 10 years old) this contradicts what the author is trying to get over as a new dynamic science for wellbeing.

Spacing, I bought a hard copy which is 1½ spaced to give the impression it has more contents that it really does contain. I wish they had produced a paperback half the thickness and half the price.

Not sure where the author takes us. Nothing definite and certainly feel a protectionist attitude by not wanting to `give away' tests to the reader which contradicts the title `Putting the science of Happiness to work for your clients'?

I find the use of the word and meaning `intervention' a little hard to swallow and off-putting. Positive Psychology does not `remove' root causes' but averts to appreciation of strengths. I cannot imagine asking a client to think of happiness during a panic attack?

As a general book on coaching it does the job of providing ideas and suggestions and explains empirical validated tools, simply and effectively.

I would have liked to see such a book offer tons of tests free of charge if it was to live up to its title Putting the science of Happiness to work for your clients.

Mike Whitenburgh
Psychoanalyst.

Until this book, there was not an accessible source to which the coaching psychologist with an interest in applying positive psychology in their coaching practice can readily turn. And what might coaching psychologists be looking for in a book that purports to do this? An understanding of the scientific backbone of positive psychology? Ready applications to coaching psychology practice? Top tips and recommendations for applying positive psychology in the coaching psychology engagement to leverage strengths, enhance well-being, and drive performance? Or all of the above?
The coaching psychology community is fortunate to count Robert Biswas-Diener and Ben Dean amongst its numbers. For not only have they created and delivered a book that ticks all of these boxes, they have done so in a way that makes it a joy to read and an education in itself. They are uniquely qualified to do so. Robert has literally traveled to the furthest corners of the globe in his quest to understand subjective well-being and character strengths across hugely diverse cultures, including Greenland (where he worked with traditional hunters), Calcutta (where he worked with prostitutes), Israel (where he studied empathy in the West Bank), Kenya (where he worked with Maasai tribal people), and the American heartland (where he worked with the Amish). Ben developed and delivered the hugely successful Authentic Happiness Coaching program with positive psychology founder Martin E. P. Seligman, as well as running his own coach training organisation, MentorCoach, for over a decade. Their combined experience, expertise, and insight are apparent throughout the book.
Positive Psychology Coaching begins by taking a look at the coaching paradox (coaching has not yet reached its own full potential, despite helping others to achieve theirs) and the positive psychology solution (positive psychology can provide more of the theoretical, empirical, and conceptual maps that it is argued coaching needs to achieve its potential). It then explores happiness, positioning it as the goal that we rarely talk about but the pursuit of which we all engage in. The next two sections examine the two major foundations of positive psychology coaching: happiness and character strengths. Chapters three and four examine the core factors that influence happiness, as well as what we can do to cultivate them more, before considering specific tried-and-tested happiness interventions that readily lend themselves to the coaching psychology engagement. Chapters five, six and seven examine the application and use of strengths within coaching, dividing the focus between social strengths (fairness, social intelligence) and personal strengths (curiosity, optimism, creativity). The closing two chapters dive down into focusing on how coaches can help clients craft a perfect job before taking a bird's eye view of what the future of positive psychology coaching might hold.
Throughout, the book is replete with gems and insights that any coaching psychologist could use on any day of the week in any coaching psychology assignment. One of my favourites is reframing the family / work / exercise trade-off (i.e., I find it difficult to exercise because it takes time out of being with family or being at work) to a family / work / health trade-off (i.e., exercise enhances health, and health means we are better with our families and at work), making them complementary rather than competitive. On a personal level, that one really worked for me!
Positive Psychology Coaching is also seeded with the experiences and perspectives of positive psychology authorities from around the world, with the authors selecting key quotes from interviews conducted with these people to enhance the reader's understanding of what positive psychology coaching is all about and why it works. And periodically throughout, we are offered boxed review points for easy reference, and top tips for applications in our coaching work. This makes the book a valuable quick reference resource while preparing for a coaching session, as much as a volume to be read through. The appendix sets out a variety of ideas and offerings that can be tailored to individual coaching psychologists' needs and preferences for designing and delivering positive psychology coaching sessions, including strengths-based conversations, appreciative questioning, and the use of positive psychology assessments.
While ten positive psychologists would likely provide ten different answers as to what should be included in a consideration of positive psychology and coaching psychology, it would be churlish to criticise the book on these grounds. It doesn't include a section on flow, but it does address time orientation. It doesn't examine wisdom, but it does explore savouring. What is most important though, is how Biswas-Diener and Dean weave such a smooth narrative from the first page to the last. When starting reading, one is left feeling as if you are joining Robert on one of his famous journeys, and by the conclusion we not only arrive where we set out to be, but we have seen some fantastic things - and learned some important lessons - along the way. Positive Psychology Coaching is simply the best resource for coaching psychologists who want to introduce more of the positive into their practice. This review was published in the International Coaching Psychology Review (March 2007).

It is a NYC staple for healthy eating and the stuff is very healthy but tastes soooooooooooooo good! If you ever get to NYC get to a PUMP Energy Food, there are 3 or 4 in Manhattan and the stuff is great and the book contains almost everything they make and it isn't hard to make really healthy nutritious meals with flavor.

The book, like the restaurants, has tremendous, healthy and delicious recipes. They may take some getting used to for the uninitiated, but this is a great book that adds to a grea lifestyle. Who doesn't want energy? And, it works. I suggest the desserts.

This cookbook has many recipes which are easy to cook, healthy to eat, and tasty to enjoy. It's also a good cookbook to have handy in a household with vegetarians and meat eaters.

I'm a big fan of The Pump in New York City -- I eat there every chance I get. This book is a good companion for fans of The Pump or for anyone looking to cook easy-to-make, simple healthy foods that do not require egg yolks, salt, butter or oil or other unhealthful ingredients. I liked the little blurbs on the sides of the recipes by famous clientele of the Pump. This is from a "mom and pop" type of store -- so the book is not written too professional, its more like a friend talking to another friend -- not a bad thing at all. The Dynamite Chicken Pita (#42) is a must try.

This is a very good recipe book for those who are busy and have very little time for cooking. In addition, you need not worry about the nutritional content of the recipes; it is very healthy without the exaggerations of a health nut. Those who are image driven may be disappointed at this book because it has no illustrations of the foods in the recipe. Over all, if your concern about general health this is a great recipe book for you.