4 books to read this fall

With a new season comes a new list of my recommended reading! In this installment of titles that traverse my personal and professional interests, you’ll find everything from leadership and facilitation resources, to a rhyming little pig who jumps into a muddy little puddle.

1. Explore or Expire, by Nate Garvis and Tom Weise of Studio E

This title is excellent for anyone in a leadership role. Think of it as a reference manual and workbook for cultivating the skills needed to be a more inspiring, flexible and exploratory leader.

Readers are asked to ditch the idea that getting from point A to point B should be a straight line in favor of a curiosity mindset that celebrates a road filled with natural curves and bends.

It acknowledges leadership’s duty to understand where the team needs to go, just as it’s also leadership’s job to be open to change and stay the course when navigating the unknown. In doing this, we inspire our teams to stay committed to the goal, find inspiration in unexpected places, and design or define new things.

I might be biased because I love Studio E and have partnered with them in the past, but this book really did feel like an excellent resource for my facilitation work. When I lead teams, I always have a clear idea of the outcomes we’re trying to leave the workshop with, and I design the session with that in mind, but I never know exactly what’s going to play out. It’s a whole lot easier to navigate the unknown when I embrace an exploratory mindset rather than getting bent out of shape when things don’t go as anticipated, or trying to control every last detail.

“Is adopting an explorers mindset a matter of learning news skills? Yes and no. There are certainly basic skills to learn through practice and repetition, like storytelling, but much of this is not learning something new, it’s revisiting something old in all of us. We need to unlearn some of our conformity and our bias toward prediction and bring ourselves back to our toddler brains when we were curious and explore our way forward.”

It can feel uncomfortable, but the more you can encourage curiosity and exploration among your team (through leading by example), the greater the possibility for new ideas, AND the greater likelihood that when you run up against inevitable obstacles, your team will persevere.

2. The Piggy in the Puddle, by Charlotte Pomerantz

Not a title you were expecting to see? I know. Me neither. But I’ve absolutely fallen in love with this book.

My daughter knows how much I adore it and when she’s feeling especially kind and generous toward me, she reaches for it at bedtime (this is a big deal and warms my heart in and of itself). Plus, It’s a delight to read aloud because it’s filled with wonderful rhyming and alliteration.

The short tale tells the story of a little pig who hops into a muddy puddle. Despite each of her family members trying to coax her out to use some soap, they all eventually jump in with her and find themselves delighting in the mess; diving way down derry, they were very, very merry.

I think this story really does it for me because there’s a sweetness in the fact that the whole family ends up in the mud together despite their arguments and resistance. And, when they do find themselves there, they relax and enjoy it together.

Maybe it’s a metaphor for what I’d like to see happen more often with groups — where we share our grievances but ultimately, when we step into the muck with our family, friends, teammates, we make the best of it.

3. Bittersweet: How Sorrow And Longing Make Us Whole, by Susan Cain

Prepare to feel your feelings! A friend recommended this book to me and I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.

The author invites us to embrace hard feelings — like sorrow and longing — and see them as a way to deepen our connection and sense of belonging (something many of us could use more of).

Along the way, she tells wonderful stories that lend a relatable and narrative quality to the book. The whole thing reminded me that the human tendency to turn away from hard feelings often goes unchecked, and at a real cost to ourselves, our relationships, and our experience as living beings.

“And if you have a bittersweet temperament, or you’ve come to it via life experience, have you asked how to hold the melancholy within you? Have you realized that you’re part of a long and storied tradition that can help you transform your pain into beauty, and longing into belonging?” — Susan Cain

After years of sorrow, longing, and heartache for many, this book is a perfectly-timed balm for the time we are living in.

4. Draw to Win: A Crash Course on How to Lead, Sell, and Innovate With Your Visual Mind, by Dan Roam

This is a fun read filled with practical exercises for using drawing to communitea ideas, drive clarity, facilitate hard conversations, and beyond.

I love that it uses concrete examples for how to draw in different scenarios that can be directly applied to workshops and meetings. It’s very much in line with what I teach in my own workshops: that drawing is an effective communication tool, not a competition of artistic abilities.

Add this book to your shelf as a reference guide to use drawing more confidently in your work as a facilitator, meeting leader, or team builder.