The Life Coaching Library

• Becoming a Professional Life Coach by Patrick Williams (4 stars) provides lots of interesting tools for experienced coaches as well as an introduction to life coaching for newcomers to the field. It's a good choice for professional life coaches. The book presents the essential elements of ILCT's life coach training program in a content-rich form that emphasizes tools, reasearch and practical exercises for using coaching to help others understand and live their life purpose. It includes sections on basic coaching practices, advanced techniques like endorsing and reframing, life purpose and values discovery, and changing mindsets and attitudes.
• The Path by Laurie Beth Jones (4 stars) provides inspiring and practical advice to lead you through every step of defining and fulfilling your mission. With more than ten years' experience in assisting groups and individuals, Jones offers clear, step-by-step guidance that help you create a mission statement in a matter of hours rather than a month or years.
• Powerful Questions: Coaching Visionaries by Tony Stoltzfus includes input on several advanced techniques for coaching leaders toward a vision. Each skill is then demonstrated in extended, live coaching sessions, with leaders who dream about changing the world. You'll learn to coach visionaries with three powerful asking approaches:

  - A Strengths Inventory helps the leader think through what they bring to the visionary task.
  - Crafting Your Ideal Role lets a visionary create a role that really fits.
  - Make or Break Factors is a great technique for helping younger leaders move forward aggressively when the fulfillment of their dream is a ways off.

• Blueprint for Life (4.5 stars) is an excellent tool for helping groups or individuals clarify their life purpose and set goals to walk it out. This 8-week coached or self-study course includes a well-thought-out set of life purpose exercises, 5 audio CDs by well-known speakers like Andy Stanley and Bruce Wilkinson, and various self-discovery tools like a gifting assessment, life purpose journal and goals wall chart. The overall quality of the materials and packaging is superb, and it's an incredible bargain, too.
• Asking Profound Questions (4.5 stars) is a compact, high-impact booklet by Bobb Biehl, a well-known speaker and consultant on life- and business planning. In it he has captured over 100 jewels from his own experience of asking profound questions. The booklet also contains samples and of several planning tools and rules of thumb for asking, planning and deciding.