Our Favorite Financial Coaching Books And Books For Financial Coaches

It’s that time of year!  Summer is here, and it’s time to start getting your summer beach reads ready to go.  There is nothing better than sitting poolside in the warm sun and diving into a good book. While devouring a good Nora Roberts or James Patterson novel is a great way to spend the afternoon, we at Financial Coach Academy like to use the summer downtime to be students of our craft as well. We like to mix in some business and leadership motivation alongside the latest teen vampire series.

Consider this your official summer reading list for financial coaching books.

Financial Coaching is different than a lot of other  other service based businesses.  It doesn’t purely emphasize numbers and selling like financial advising, and it doesn’t emphasize mindset and emotions like life coaching or business coaching.  It is a precise balance of both logic and numbers and emotions and mindset. Because of this unique blend, your reading list should be pretty diverse.  There are tons of books out there about budgeting, investing, and personal finance but narrowing down some books that emphasize coaching can be hard.

In the 2018-2019 version edition of the Financial Coach’s summer reading list, we highlighted books specifically focusing on coaching.  Last year, we added books that will help grow your business, brand and message. And of course, our best addition in 2020 was the Financial Coaching Playbook by our very own Kelsa Dickey.

Books About Business Growth, Marketing, and Messaging

The Financial Coaching Playbook, by Kelsa Dickey

The Financial Coaching Playbook is a how-to guide for creating, running or refining your financial coaching business (with heaps of inspiration thrown in for good measure!). This book provides the guidance and support coaches need to confidently pursue a coaching career – be it full-time or as a side hustle. But it also provides the space to confidently design the business you want to run. Through more than 10 years of coaching clients and teaching other coaches, I know this is true: No two coaching businesses are alike. The goal of this book is not to give you an exact blueprint to follow. It’s to give you the lessons, prompts and space to design your unique coaching business.

By the end of the book, you’ll have not only a great reference for building a financial coaching business, but you’ll also have the play-by-play of how to build, run, and grow it.

Building a Storybrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, by Donald Miller

Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection, by Jia Jiang and Mike Chamberlin

Rejection Proof is Jia Jiang’s entertaining and inspiring account of conquering his fear of rejection, offering a completely new perspective on how to turn a no into a yes.

Jia Jiang came to the United States with the dream of being the next Bill Gates. Despite early success in the corporate world, his first attempt to pursue his entrepreneurial dream ended in rejection. Jia was crushed and spiraled into a period of deep self-doubt. But he realized that his fear of rejection was a bigger obstacle than any single rejection would ever be, and he needed to find a way to cope with being told no without letting it destroy him. Thus was born his “100 days of rejection” experiment, during which he willfully sought rejection on a daily basis – from requesting a lesson in sales from a car salesman (no) to asking a flight attendant if he could make an announcement on the loudspeaker (yes) to his famous request to get Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the shape of Olympic rings (yes, with a viral video to prove it).

Jia learned that even the most preposterous wish may be granted if you ask in the right way, and here he shares the secret of successful asking, how to pick targets, and how to tell when an initial no can be converted into something positive. But more important, he learned techniques for steeling himself against rejection and ways to develop his own confidence – a plan that can’t be derailed by a single setback.

Books About Coaching Skills

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Atomic Habits is a comprehensive and practical guide on how to create good habits, break bad ones, and get 1 percent better every day. Author James Clear says if you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.

Bad habits repeat themselves not because you don’t want to change but because you have the wrong system for change. This is one of the core philosophies of Atomic Habits: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. In this book, you get a proven plan that can take you to new heights.

James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.

Facilitating Financial Health: Tools for Financial Planners, Coaches, and Therapists, by Brad Klontz, Rick Kahler, and Ted Klontz

Facilitating Financial Health remains a one-of-a-kind publication that bridges the gap between financial planners and mental health practitioners. The authors, two mental health professionals and a CFP®-designated financial planner, pioneered the use of tools that help clients build healthy relationships with money.

This concise yet comprehensive Guide enables financial planning and mental health practitioners to effectively integrate tools from the fields of psychotherapy, life coaching, and financial planning as they help their clients change destructive financial behaviors. Facilitating Financial Health, 2nd Edition will enable you to:

• Address your clients’ money-driven problems, from both financial planning and mental health perspectives
• Learn the best techniques and recognize when to call in help from outside your field when dealing with clients’ financial issues
• Focus on both interior (emotional and intangible aspects of money) as well as exterior (the tangible “nuts and bolts” of financial planning) financial health topics
• Explore “Money Scripts” – beliefs about money commonly held by clients, financial planners, and therapists that can lead to destructive financial habits
• More effectively work with individuals and couples on difficult financial health topics In addition to everything that made the 1st Edition so popular, this new 2nd Edition delivers these enhancements:
• Modern counseling tools are presented with references to updated research and publications for both financial planning and mental health professionals
• A more comprehensive description of “Money Scripts” – beliefs that hamper clients’ abilities to make sound financial planning decisions
• Updated ethical information, including references to new CFP® ethical guidelines •A newly enhanced chapter on creating an integrated financial practice
• New tools for working with couples, including tips on working with nontraditional and unmarried couples
• Content that has been enhanced by readers about the kinds of money-driven relationship issues that are the most commonly seen by planners and clients alike

Co-Active Coaching, by Laura Whitworth, Henry Kinsey-House, Phil Sandahl, and John Whitmore 

When Co-Active Coaching was first released in 1998, this pioneering work set the stage for what has become a cultural and business phenomenon and helped launch the profession of coaching. Published in more than 10 languages, this book has been used as the definitive resource in dozens of corporate, professional development and university-based coaching programs as well as by thousands of individuals looking to elevate their communication, relationship, and coaching skills.

This fully revised third edition of Co-Active Coaching has been updated to reflect the expanded vision of the newly updated Co-Active Model and coaching course curriculum at The Coaches Training Institute, the training organization founded and run by the authors for 20 years. The third edition emphasizes evoking transformational change in the client and extends the use of the Co-Active Model into leadership management and its effectiveness throughout organizations. This edition also contains an on-line Coach’s Toolkit (replacing the CD of the second edition), several new coaching demonstrations and more than 35 updated exercises, questionnaires, checklists and reproducible forms.

Transformational Life Coaching, by Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott and Lynn U. Stewart

Cherie Carter-Scott, Ph.D., is the original life coach. In 1974, she founded the first Coach Training program and since then has written many books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules: Ten Rules for Being Human.

Continuing her tradition of teaching others how to become ‘brilliant’ coaches for themselves and their clients, Dr. Carter-Scott’s latest book reveals the strategies she uses with hundreds of thousands of clients worldwide with astonishing success.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Carter-Scott and her business partner, Lynn U. Stewart, have been training people to become life coaches through their organization, Motivation Management Service (the MMS Institute), a network of executive coaches, consultants, and trainers. Now, in this inspirational guidebook, you will learn the strategies that students of the MMS Institute receive, as well as the necessary tools of transformational life coaching, including:

• The Checklist for a ‘Brilliant’ Session
• The importance of acknowledging, integrating, and honoring feelings
• Listening to messages to guide the process
• Use of flow, energy, and chakras in the coaching process
• How to transform old negative patterns into positive imprints
• How to market and build your coaching practice
• The Twelve Steps to Living the Process of Transformational Life Coaching

Whether you are a professional coach, are interested in becoming a coach, or use coaching in your work, this is the ultimate coaching bible required for anyone who empowers people.

Making Habits, Breaking Habits, by Jeremy Dean

Say you want to start going to the gym or practicing a musical instrument. How long should it take before you stop having to force it and start doing it automatically?

The surprising answers are found in Making Habits, Breaking Habits, a psychologist’s popular examination of one of the most powerful and under-appreciated processes in the mind. Although people like to think that they are in control, much of human behavior occurs without any decision-making or conscious thought.

Drawing on hundreds of fascinating studies, psychologist Jeremy Dean busts the myths to finally explain why seemingly easy habits, like eating an apple a day, can be surprisingly difficult to form, and how to take charge of your brain’s natural “autopilot” to make any change stick.

Witty and intriguing, Making Habits, Breaking Habits shows how behavior is more than just a product of what you think. It is possible to bend your habits to your will—and be happier, more creative, and more productive.

The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Shwartz

This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery, and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time. “Combines the gritty toughmindedness of the best coaches with the gentle-but-insistent inspiration of the most effective spiritual advisers”.

We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We’re wired up, but we’re melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically-based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to:

• Mobilize four key sources of energy
• Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal
• Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do
• Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes

Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life by John G. Miller

The lack of personal accountability is a problem that has resulted in an epidemic of blame, victim thinking, complaining, and procrastination. No organization—or individual—can successfully compete in the marketplace, achieve goals and objectives, provide outstanding service, engage in exceptional teamwork, or develop people without personal accountability.

John G. Miller believes that the troubles that plague organizations cannot be solved by pointing fingers and blaming others. Rather, the real solutions are found when each of us recognizes the power of personal accountability. In QBQ! The Question Behind the Question®, Miller explains how negative, ill-focused questions like “Why do we have to go through all this change?” and “Who dropped the ball?” represent a lack of personal accountability. Conversely, when we ask better questions—QBQs—such as “What can I do to contribute?” or “How can I help solve the problem?” our lives and our organizations are transformed.

This remarkable and timely book provides a practical method for putting personal accountability into daily actions, with astonishing results: problems are solved, internal barriers come down, service improves, teams thrive, and people adapt to change more quickly. QBQ! is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to learn, grow, and change. Using this tool, each of us can add tremendous worth to our organizations and to our lives by eliminating blame, victim-thinking, and procrastination.

Daring Greatly: How the Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent And Lead, by Brené Brown

Every day we experience the uncertainty, risks, and emotional exposure that define what it means to be vulnerable or to dare greatly. Based on twelve years of pioneering research, Brené Brown PhD, MSW, dispels the cultural myth that vulnerability is weakness and argues that it is, in truth, our most accurate measure of courage.

Brown explains how vulnerability is both the core of difficult emotions like fear, grief, and disappointment, and the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, empathy, innovation, and creativity. She writes: “When we shut ourselves off from vulnerability, we distance ourselves from the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives.”

Daring Greatly is not about winning or losing. It’s about courage. In a world where “never enough” dominates and feeling afraid has become second nature, vulnerability is subversive. Uncomfortable. It’s even a little dangerous at times. And, without question, putting ourselves out there means there’s a far greater risk of getting criticized or feeling hurt. But when we step back and examine our lives, we will find that nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous, and hurtful as standing on the outside of our lives looking in and wondering what it would be like if we had the courage to step into the arena—whether it’s a new relationship, an important meeting, the creative process, or a difficult family conversation. Daring Greatly is a practice and a powerful new vision for letting ourselves be seen.

The powers of creative thinking can be yours if you’re willing to laugh and learn in this concise, cliche free, fun and memorable short book. With challenging chapters on topics like creative confidence, making bold decisions, and separating the need for feedback from the desire for encouragement, even if you’ve read other books on the subject or if this is your first, The Dance of The Possible will surprise you, make you think, laugh and perhaps even dance when you get back to work.

Scott Berkun was a manager at Microsoft from 1994-2003, on projects including v1-5 (not 6) of Internet Explorer. He is the author of three bestselling books, Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation and Confessions of a Public Speaker. He works full time as a writer and speaker, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes magazine, The Economist, The Washington Post, Wired magazine, National Public Radio and other media. He regularly contributes to Harvard Business and BusinessWeek, has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington, and has appeared as an innovation and management expert on MSNBC and on CNBC. His ambition in life is to fill the above bookshelf, which is by his writing desk, with books he has written. If he were smarter, he’d have picked a smaller shelf.

What would you add to this list of financial coaching books? Tell us in the comments.

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