The DTK Reading List for Becoming More

I. Self-Knowledge, Shadow, and Adult Development

1. Mindset Mondays with DTK: 52 Ways to REWIRE Your Thinking and Transform Your Life — David Taylor-Klaus
Examine the thinking shaping your life, challenge what no longer serves, and consciously REWIRE what comes next.

2. Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up — Jerry Colonna
The adaptations that built your success may now be limiting your leadership, relationships, and next stage of growth.

3. Immunity to Change — Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey
Wanting change is not enough; uncover the hidden commitments quietly keeping you stuck.

4. The Middle Passage — James Hollis
When achievement stops satisfying, this asks the harder question: What is all of this actually for?

5. No Bad Parts — Richard C. Schwartz
Stop fighting your inner critics; get curious about the parts of you that are trying, however clumsily, to protect you.

6. A Little Book on the Human Shadow — Robert Bly
What you refuse to see in yourself does not disappear; it simply gets better at running you from the shadows.

7. The Way of Integrity — Martha Beck
Separate what is truly yours from inherited rules, expectations, and identities that pull you out of alignment.

8. The Four Agreements — Don Miguel Ruiz
Many rules shaping your life were never consciously chosen; freedom begins when you realize you can renegotiate them.

9. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success — Carol S. Dweck
What you believe about your capacity to grow shapes what you attempt, how you handle failure, and who you become.

10. The Big Leap — Gay Hendricks
Success has an upper-limit problem: we often become the greatest obstacle to the expansion we say we want.

11. The Inner Game of Tennis — W. Timothy Gallwey
Getting better at what you do often begins by learning how to stop interfering with who you already are.

12. A Liberated Mind — Steven C. Hayes
Freedom is not eliminating difficult thoughts and feelings; it is refusing to let them choose your next move.

13. Positive Intelligence — Shirzad Chamine
Notice the internal voices consuming your Time, Effort, Energy, and Attention, then choose which ones deserve the mic.

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II. Meaning, Purpose, Fulfillment, and Transcendence

14. Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl
Even when you cannot choose your circumstances, you retain the profoundly human capacity to choose how you meet them.

15. The Choice — Edith Eva Eger
What happened to you matters; the life you create from what happened remains yours to choose.

16. The Second Mountain — David Brooks
After climbing the mountain of achievement, ask whether meaning, commitment, and service are calling you toward another.

17. Let Your Life Speak — Parker J. Palmer
Purpose may be less about inventing a future and more about becoming quiet enough to hear what your life is telling you.

18. Transcend — Scott Barry Kaufman
Move beyond achievement toward a fuller life built on growth, connection, purpose, creativity, and becoming.

19. The Art of Possibility — Rosamund Stone Zander & Benjamin Zander
The assumptions framing a situation can constrain you more powerfully than the situation itself.

20. The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin
Creativity begins with Attention, receptivity, and curiosity, capacities that matter far beyond traditionally creative work.

21. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Fulfillment often emerges when challenge, capability, Attention, and presence become fully aligned.

22. Finite and Infinite Games — James P. Carse
There is a profound difference between playing to win and playing in ways that keep life, relationship, and possibility alive.

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III. Time, Effort, Energy, Attention, and the Cost of Achievement

23. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — Oliver Burkeman
You will never get everything done; accepting that frees you to spend your finite life on what actually matters.

24. The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working — Tony Schwartz
Time is fixed; Energy can be renewed, directed, depleted, and invested with far greater intention.

25. Stolen Focus — Johann Hari
Attention may be your most valuable currency, and countless forces are competing to spend it for you.

26. The Practice of Groundedness — Brad Stulberg
Sustainable excellence requires something different from frantic striving, perpetual optimization, and an addiction to more.

27. The Good Enough Job — Simone Stolzoff
When work becomes identity, professional success can quietly consume everything else that makes life worth living.

28. The Soul of Money — Lynne Twist
Money exposes assumptions about scarcity, sufficiency, worth, and possibility that shape far more than your bank account.

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IV. The Neuro-Informed Mind: Thinking, Behavior, and Choice

29. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
Better choices begin with understanding how much judgment happens automatically, imperfectly, and outside your awareness.

30. The Scout Mindset — Julia Galef
Seeing reality clearly is far more useful than becoming exceptionally skilled at defending what you already believe.

31. The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk
Your history lives in more than your thoughts; understanding behavior requires understanding what the body carries, too.

32. Scattered Minds — Gabor Maté
Explore ADHD through a compassionate developmental lens, while holding its claims as perspective rather than settled science.

33. The Courage to Be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
Agency expands when you stop organizing your life around approval and distinguish what is yours from what belongs to others.

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V. Relationships, Conflict, Connection, and Conscious Leadership

34. The Good Life — Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
Decades of research point to one stubborn truth: the quality of our relationships matters enormously to the quality of life.

35. The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership — Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman & Kaley Klemp
Learn to notice whether you are leading from curiosity, responsibility, and openness or defensiveness, blame, and fear.

36. The Anatomy of Peace — The Arbinger Institute
Conflict changes when you stop treating people as obstacles or objects and begin seeing the human being on the other side.

37. Conversational Intelligence — Judith E. Glaser
Words create worlds; your conversations shape trust, safety, possibility, and performance before strategy gets a vote.

38. How to Know a Person — David Brooks
Attention is one of the greatest gifts we can give; truly seeing people is prerequisite to leading, loving, and connecting.

39. The Stake: The Making of Leaders — Henry Kimsey-House
Leadership gets real when you know what you are willing to stand for, risk, and put at stake.

40. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There — Marshall Goldsmith
The behaviors that created your success can become the very behaviors limiting your next level of impact.

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VI. Entrepreneurship, Organizations, and Building Something That Can Thrive Without Consuming You

41. The E-Myth Revisited — Michael E. Gerber
Building a business is different from creating yourself a demanding job; confusing the two eventually costs both.

42. E-Myth Mastery — Michael E. Gerber
A business becomes sustainable when success depends less on heroic effort and more on consciously designed systems.

43. Growing Pains : Transitioning from an Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm — Eric G. Flamholtz
The leadership that launches a company rarely scales it; refusing to evolve eventually makes the founder the constraint.

43​a. Growing Pains: Building Sustainably Successful Organizations — Eric G. Flamholtz
Growth creates new problems; learn to recognize when your company has outgrown its current leadership, systems, and structure.

44. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us — Seth Godin
Leadership needs neither title nor permission; it begins when someone cares enough about an idea and a group to move first.

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VII. Important Books by Friends and Loved Ones

45. The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids with ADHD, Anxiety, and More — Elaine Taylor-Klaus
A grounded guide to raising complex kids with more confidence, calm, curiosity, and less fear-driven parenting.

46. Parenting ADHD Now! — Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Practical ADHD parenting strategies that turn insight into action, helping parents respond with clarity, structure, and connection.

47. Parenting with Impact — Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Empowers parents to lead with intention, strengthen connection, and support complex kids without losing themselves in the process.

48. Zen and the Art of Productivity — Alan P. Brown
A practical reminder that productivity is not about doing more, but creating more time, freedom, money, and happiness.

49. Flourish: Coaching Wisdom in the Age of AI — Susan Caesar
A timely look at what human coaching must preserve, deepen, and become as AI reshapes the profession.

50. Modern Badass: Tales from the Leadership Front — Parissa Behnia
Own what makes you “too much,” then learn to channel it into leadership that creates impact, connection, and trust.

51. I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just Not You, 3rd Edition — Sarah Albritton & Roger Pearman
Personality differences stop feeling personal when you understand the patterns shaping how people think, communicate, and relate.

52. The Prosperous Coach — Steve Chandler & Rich Litvin
For coaches ready to create greater impact and income by deepening their courage, service, relationships, and conversations.