Photo by René Ehrhardt

I created a list of my favorite personal development books.  I cycle through a lot of books for improving effectiveness in work and life.  Below is an organized set of some of my favorite personal development books.  I lean towards books  on personal excellence, looking for key principles, patterns, and practices.  This includes anything from improving interpersonal skills to thinking skills. 

One of the way I find the best books is I ask the smartest people I know, which books changed their lives or improved their effectiveness?  It’s one of best short-cuts for finding the real gems.  It’s also how I find a lot of books that some people have never heard of.

Top 5
While it’s hard to narrow down to a top five, I can say that these books are full of insights and actions that are useful for day to day:

• Brilliant NLP: What the Most Successful People Know, Do and Say
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
• Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst
• Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life  
• Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More

Categories
I’ve organized the books below into the following categories:

• Body
• Business
• Communication
• Conflict
• Emotional Intelligence
• Getting Results
• Goals
• Interpersonal Skills
• Intellectual Horsepower
• Intuition
• Leadership / Management
• Learning
• Life
• Marketing
• Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)
• Presenting
• Strengths
• Wealth
• Work
• Writing

Body

• Shed 10 Years in 10 Weeks – how to use supplements, exercise, and sleep to lose 10 years of fat, gain 10 year’s of muscle, improve your skin, and get the mental edge.
• Stretching Scientifically: A Guide to Flexibility Training (4th Revision ed) – how to test your potential flexibility and how to stretch to achieve your maximum flexibility most effectively.
• The Power of Physical Intelligence: 10 Ways to Tap into Your Physical Genius – how to improve your physical potential using Mind Maps, how to improve your other intelligences using physical intelligence, how to improve all aspects of your physical health.
• UltraLongevity: The Seven-Step Program for a Younger, Healthier You – how to improve and manage your immune system, how to breathe, eat, sleep, dance, love, soothe, and enhance your way to a younger you.
• YOU: The Owner’s Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition: An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger – learn how your key body parts and systems work, learn relevant diseases, learn the impact of genetic and lifestyle influences, food supplements and habits.

Business

• A Simple Statement: A Guide to Nonprofit Arts Management and Leadership- how to write a powerful mission statement.
• businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right–Now, and No Matter What! – how to make winning business decisions, how to have colleagues trust your judgment and leadership, how to leverage and utilize your talents, how to become highly influential and relevant, how to create business value.
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t – how to take a good company to greatness, how to focus on the few things that have the greatest impact, how to use the Hedgehog concept (what are you the best in the world at, the most passionate about, and drives your economic engine.)
• It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small…It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business – how to improve your business models or create new ones, how to get to market faster, how to sustain speed, how to make fast decisions.
• Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service – how to improve customer service, how to create stories your customers can tell others, how to create an environment of delivering great customer service.
• Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes – how to create a balanced scorecard, how to link intangible assets and value creation, how to manage four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes, how to use strategy maps to link internal processes to desired outcomes, how to use strategy maps to improve investments in human, informational, and organizational capital.
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – learn the steps in the life of a business, from entrepreneurial infancy, to adolescent growing pains, to maturity, how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, how to distinguish between working on your business and working in your business.
• Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More- how to understand and leverage the Long Tail, how to use the 9 rules for operating in a Long Tail economy. 
• The Well Timed Strategy: Managing the Business Cycle for Competitive Advantage – how to recognize and leverage business cycle risks and opportunities, how to leverage timing to maximize your return on investment, learn when to make your best business moves.

Communication

• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex – how to communicate more effectively, how to improve empathic listening,
• Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion – how to listen better and always be heard, learn what never to say, how to engage people through empathy, how to stop verbal attacks.

Conflict

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High- how to handle difficult conversations, how to create dialogue, how to improve emotional safety, how to create mutual respect.
• Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion – how to win more anger-free arguments, how to use “code” language to appeal to specific groups, how to control the argument, how to give a persuasive talk, how to control the mood.
• Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, The (4th Edition)- how to expand the pie of resources, how to claim resources, how to increase your power and influence, how to build trust and relationships, how to read nonverbal behavior and deception, how to test your own rationality and judgment, how to manage the tension between cooperation and competition, how to prepare for negotiations more effectively.

Emotional Intelligence

• Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition; Why It Can Matter More Than IQ – how to improve self-awareness, how to improve motivation, how to improve influence, how to improve conflict management, how to improve team building.
• Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated- how to improve your thought patterns, how to improve your motivation, how to deal with guilt, how to build self-esteem, how to beat “do-nothingism”, how to nip negative feelings in the bud.
• Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life – learn how to recognize your “explanatory style” and how it influences your life, how to boost your mood and your immune system with healthful thoughts, how to practice the thought patterns that encourage optimism, how to break the “I-give-up” habit, how to change your interior dialogue and experience the astonishing positive results.
• The Emotional Energy Factor: The Secrets High-Energy People Use to Beat Emotional Fatigue- how to diagnose your own emotional fatigue, how to turn a pressure situation into one that energizes you, how to eliminate toxic relationships, how to free up time and get things done.

Getting Results

• Managing Your Mind: The Mental Fitness Guide – how to build self-confidence and self-esteem, how to manage your time, how to overcome anxiety and depression, how to deal with your anger, how to take control of your present and your future, how to free yourself of fears and worries, how to come to terms with loss and trauma.
• Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed- how to make your life a masterpiece, how to master your mind, how to master relationships.
• Optimal Thinking: How to Be Your Best Self – how to optimize your thinking, how to optimize your feeling, how to optimize your relationships, how to optimize your workplace setting.
• Overachievement: The New Science of Working Less to Accomplish More- how to use stress to be your best, how to factor practice from performance, how to design effective thinking routines, how to dream big.
• Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth- learn the 7 principles of growth (truth, love, power, one-ness, authority, courage, intelligence), how to create value and earn abundant income, how to resolve conflicts between intuition and logic, how to attract the right relationships, how to achieve goals, how to wake up with motivation and enthusiasm. 
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People- how to put first things first, how to begin with the end in mind, how to use empathic listening, how to balance self-renewal, how to think win/win.
• The 8th Habit Personal Workbook: Strategies to Take You from Effectiveness to Greatness- how to find your voice and help others find theirs, how to create a compelling scoreboard, how to find the third alternative, how to model character and competence.
• The Power of Focus: What the Worlds Greatest Achievers Know about The Secret of Financial Freedom and Success- how to focus on your strengths and eliminate everything that is holding you back, how to change “bad” habits, how to balance between work and family life.
• The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal – how to manage energy, not time for peak performance, how to manage your energy at the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual level.
• Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller–Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century- how to multiply your brain power, how to negate destructive thinking, how to conquer your fears, how to use your imagination, how to inspire yourself, how to organize and use knowledge. 
• Your Road Map for Success: You Can Get There from Here- how to plan your own success journey, how to focus your thinking, how to plan your approach, how to build important professional relationships, how to live out your dreams. 
• The 80/20 Individual: How to Build on the 20% of What You do Best- how to accomplish more by doing less, how to use your “20 percent spike” to increase your performance and your wealth, how to double your time, how to nurture the “vital few” areas and eliminate the areas that waste money and time.

Goals

• Goal-Free Living: How to Have the Life You Want NOW! – how to use a compass, not a map to let yourself wander and try new things on the way to fulfilling your aspirations, how to trust that you are never lost and use every wrong turn as an opportunity to learn and experience new things, how to leverage unexpected possibilities, how to want what you have, how to seek out adventure.
• Who Are You and What Do You Want? – how to define yourself and your needs, how to gain clarify about your purpose, passion, and values.

Intellectual Horsepower

• 7 (Seven) Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Multiple Intelligences- learn the 7 distinct ways of being smart (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal), how to determine your strongest and weakest intelligences, how to develop each kind of smart.
• Mind Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain – learn the geography of your brain, learn how the visual system works, learn how attention and awareness work, learn how you integrate your sight, touch, and language, learn how your brain sees your body, how to apply your reasoning to solve everyday problems, learn how you learn, learn how people read faces and emotions.
• Mind Magic – how to improve your intelligence through adaptability, creativity, and information management, how to improve focus and mental performance by making your emotions work in greater harmony with your intellect, how to tap into your creative centers and increase your innovation, how to gain confidence for higher intellectual and professional achievement.
• Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain – how to use mnemonic tricks, how to perform complex math in your head, how to use innovative brainstorm methods, how to effectively capture new ideas, how to communicate in creative ways, how to make better decisions, how to improve mental fitness.
• Six Thinking Hats – how to think better, how to use deliberate role playing to improve your thinking, learn how to create a climate of clearer thinking, improved communication, and greater creativity, how to make better decisions in work and life.
• Smart Questions: Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results
• Tactics: The Art and Science of Success – learn the styles of success, how to stimulate success, how to focus, how to design a strategy, how to make a decision, how to handle risk, how to choose the right people, how to communicate, how to think on your feet.
• The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers – learn the neurology of memory, learn about absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence.
• Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (2nd Edition) – how to generate new ideas at will, how to find new ways to make money, how to create new business opportunities, how to improve the innovation and power of your ideas, how to create new products, services, and processes, how to improve old products, services, and processes, how to develop solutions to complex business problems, how to revitalize markets, how to see problems as opportunities, how to become more productive, how to be the ideas person in your organization, how to figure out breakthrough ideas.

Interpersonal Skills

• Antipatterns: Identification, Refactoring, and Management (Auerbach Series on Applied Software Engineering) – how to recognize 48 common problems in your work environment, how to improve interaction with clients, customers, peers, supervisors, and subordinates.
• Coping with Difficult Bosses – how to understand difficult bosses, how to deal with difficult bosses, how to cope with Ogres, Fire-Eaters, and Bullies, how to cope with Stallers, Wafflers, and Super-Delegators, how to cope with Power Clutchers, Paranoids, and Perfectionists, how to cope with Know-It-Alls and other Experts, how to cope with Scalawags, Schemers, and Skunks.
• Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst- how to identify the 10 most unwanted behaviors and how to deal with each of them, how to be persuasive and use your influence, how to turn conflict into cooperation, learn how difficult people think, what they fear, and why they act the way they do.
• Get Them On Your Side- how to assess allies and resistors, how to build coalitions, how to negotiate support, how to understand the agendas of others. 
• Masters of Networking: Building Relationships for Your Pocketbook and Soul- how to build a successful networking lifestyle through effective communication and long-term partnerships, learn how the world’s best networkers leverage and maintain their networks.
• Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships – learn the accuracy of first impressions, learn the basis of charisma and emotional power, how to detect lies, learn about “mindsight,” learn the sweet spot for achievement.

Intuition

• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking- how to use thin slicing to make sophisticated judgments, how to ask people what they want, how to listen with your eyes.
• The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work- how to use intuitive decision making, how to overcome the problems with metrics, how to coach others to develop strong intuitions, how to safeguard your intuition, how to communicate your intuitions, how to size up situations, how to spot problems before they get out of hand, how to use mental simulation to evaluate options, how to speed up your learning curve.
• Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions- learn how experienced decision makers make decisions, learn recognition-primed decision making, learn how team decision making develops, how to leverage metaphors and analogues, how to recognize patterns, how to identify leverage points.

Leadership / Management

• Flawless Execution: Use the Techniques and Systems of America’s Fighter Pilots to Perform at Your Peak and Win the Battles of the Business World – learn the Flawless Execution model, how to create a Future Picture, how to create a strategy, how to plan, how to brief, how to debrief.
• Influence Without Authority (2nd Edition) – how to lead people who don’t report to you, how to build effective relationships and create allies, how to influence your boss, peers, clients, and other partners.
• It’s Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks – learn who you are, learn your purpose, how to think independently, how to build trust, how to listen for truth, how to be accountable, how to take action.
• Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership- how to become a flexible and successful leader, how to diagnose a situation correctly so you know when to delegate, support, or direct, how to use the right leadership style, how to improve your management and motivation of others. 
• The Leadership Challenge, 4th Edition- learn the values that should guide your actions as a leader, how to set an example for others, how to articulate a vision of the future, how to improve your ability to inspire others towards a common purpose, how to create an environment that promotes innovation and risk, how to build a cohesive and spirited team, how to share power and information and still maintain accountability, how to put more joy and celebration into our efforts, how to improve your leadership abilities.
• Sun Tzu Was a Sissy: Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War- how to find your button, how to position yourself, how to defeat enemies, how to build your assets. 
• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You- how to become a better leader, how to improve your leadership skills.
• The 3 Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power Within People for Astonishing Results- how to implement empowerment in an organization, how to integrate team member’s needs with the organization’s needs, how to unleash the power and talents of your employees.
• The Truth About Managing People…And Nothing But the Truth- how to achieve higher productivity and morale, how to improve management effectiveness, how to motivate, how to improve leadership skills, how to handle conflict.
• What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness- how to kick arse and take names, how to maximize selfishness and brutality, while minimizing sentiment.

Learning

• Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader’s Guide to Knowledge Transfer Using Peer Mentoring – how to create a plan for the entire knowledge transfer process, how to clarify roles for each type of peer mentor, how to set expectations for communication, how to chunk information, how to develop a measurable training plan, how to create “lesson plans,” how to explain the “big picture,” how to make sure your apprentices have mastered what you’ve taught.

Life

• Lifetypes – how to figure out who you really are, learn why some tasks are tougher for you than others, learn what kinds of careers, relationships, and recreational activities to choose and avoid, learn how your leadership style influences others.
• Choices That Change Lives: 15 Ways to Find More Purpose, Meaning, and Joy- learn 15 character traits to develop your capacity for a rich and rewarding life, how to break the chains of self-defeating attitudes and habits, how to grow in qualities such as humility, patience, empathy, and courage, how to renew yourself daily.
• Lifescripts: What to Say to Get What You Want in Life’s Toughest Situations – learn the most effective approaches and actual words for life’s toughest scenarios, how to improve your attitude, timing, preparation, and behavior.
• Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons In Life (Quick Reads)- how to have faith in yourself, how to believe that anything can be done, how to live life to the full, how to never give up.
• Simple Zen: A Guide to Living Moment by Moment (Simple Series)- how to live in the moment, how to improve awareness, how to find inner power.

Marketing

• Married to the Brand: Why Consumers Bond with Some Brands for Life – how to measure emotional connections with your customers, how to build sustainable, profitable, category-dominating brand relationships.
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding- how to establish your branding, how to stand out in today’s marketplace.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

• Awaken the Giant Within- how to create lasting change, how to improve decision making, how to change a belief, how to break limiting patterns, how to get what you really want, how to reinvent yourself, how to create a compelling future.
• Brilliant NLP: What the Most Successful People Know, Do and Say- how to discard limiting beliefs and obstructive behaviors, learn how to use NLP to become more effective, more efficient, more powerful, and more successful.
• Manage Yourself, Manage Your Life: Vital Nlp Techniques for Personal Well-Being and Professinal Success- how to identify what you want, how to set clear, achievable goals, how to crate more love and happiness in your life, how to be confident and assertive, how to handle change effectively, how to improve your relationships, how to get back in control of your life. 
• Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement- how to do, have, achieve, and create anything you want out of life, how to reprogram your mind to eliminate fears and phobias, how to fuel your body with energy, how to improve your interpersonal relationships, how to become a persuasive communicator, how to build rapport, how to model success.

Presenting

• Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Winning Presentations- learn how the entire presentation process works, how to give presentations to one person or a crowd of thousands, how to capture the audience’s “Aha!” moment, how to use storytelling techniques, how to use graphics, text, and numbers to show and tell your story.
• Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story- how to capture your audience, how to make your story flow, how to use graphics to bring your story to life, how to use the right text, how to use the right numbers, 

Strengths

• Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance – how to identify your strengths, how to design your week for strengths, how to talk to your boss about focusing on strengths.
• Now, Discover Your Strengths-   how to find your innate strengths, how to focus on your strengths instead of weaknesses.
• StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths- how to uncover your strengths, how to apply your strengths, how to build on top of each of your Top 5 strength themes.

Wealth

• A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, Ninth Edition- how to maximize gains and minimize losses, how to analyze potential returns. 
• Irrational Exuberance- how to analyze the stock market from a historical perspective, how to analyze the real estate market from a historical perspective, how to identify a speculative bubble, learn the social psychological and sociology to understand why so many people change their opinions at the same time, learn how to lower your exposure to burst bubbles.
• Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook: Put the 9 Steps to Work- learn how your parent’s relationship with money affects yours, how to cope with the ever-changing landscape of educational costs, social security, and the stock market, learn the key questions that every financial adviser should ask you upon your initial meeting, how to get a realistic picture of how much money you have to work with.
• The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) – how to reach your financial goals, how to manage your portfolio, how to select securities, how to select stocks.
• The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities, 2nd Edition- how to figure out what the numbers really mean, how to stay ahead of the curve, how to spot turning points, how to figure out where the economy’s really heading, how to use foreign indicators, how to make sense when the numbers disagree, how to find the data. 
• What You Need to Do Now: An 8-Point Action Plan to Secure Your Financial Independence – how to prepare for money emergencies, how to provide for your family, how to preserve your assets, how to protect your income, how to defend your business, how to plan your next investment moves.

Work

• How to Be a Business Superhero: Prepare for Everything, Train with the Best, Make your Own Destiny at Work – how to create a winning business persona based on strategies from great comic book icons, learn effective business tactics from super hero examples.
• Making a Living Without a Job: Winning Ways For Creating Work That You Love- how to discover your secret talents, how to unleash your passion for success, how to identify your startup assets, how to overcome goal-busters, dream-bashers, and gloom-and-doomers, how to develop multiple streams of income, how to market yourself, your products, and your services, how to avoid the most common pitfalls of self-employment, how to find your lost passions and choose the entrepreneurial path that’s right for you.
• The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich – how to live more and work less, how to join the New Rich, how to train your boss to value performance over presence, how to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements,” how to outsource your life to virtual assistants, how to eliminate 50% of your work, how to cultivate selective ignorance.
• The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) – how to quit and stick more effectively, learn how to beat the right Dip for the right reasons, learn the 3 types of curves, learn the 8 types of Dip curves, learn the 7 reasons why people fail to become the best in the world.
• Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully- how to influence people at their request, how to expose and make effective trade-offs, how to be effective when you don’t know what you’re doing, how to see what’s not there, how to avoid traps, how to amplify your impact, how to make changes safely, how to deal with resistance, how to market your services, how to be trusted, how to set a price, how to get people to follow your advice.
• Trump: The Way to the Top: The Best Business Advice I Ever Received – learn how the most effective people get results in their personal and business lives, how to make good decisions, how to conduct yourself appropriately, how to develop your career, how to communicate with others, how to lead a team effectively.
• Work from the Inside Out: Seven Steps to Loving What You Do- how to understand and accept change, how to avoid blame, how to see things as they are, how to use envy to reach your goals, how to overcome anxiety and fear, how to check your motives, how to do the right thing.

Writing

• How to Write a Research Paper – how to write a great research paper, how to create a thesis, how to gather sources, how to build arguments, how to outline, how to write your first draft, how to cite sources.
• Write to the Top: Writing for Corporate Success – how to sell your ideas more effectively, how to write twice as fast, how to break writer’s block, how to target your reader’s needs, how to demonstrate leadership in writing, how to design documents for easier navigation, how to improve your ability to think strategically, propose solutions, and speed up decision-making.
• Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method – how to defeat writer’s block, how to use the Fieldstone method.
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles – how to beat resistance, how to live your destiny, how to channel your creative energy.