Our Top Book Recommendations for Leadership Development and Personal Growth
As Christian business leaders, we must continue to grow. The most significant influence on our personal growth is found in spending time praying and reading God’s Word. Scripture provides the wisdom and guidance we all need to live our lives for Christ.
I have asked our Senior Director of Culture and Communications, Aunie Brooks, to help me with this post. She is responsible for leadership development at our family of companies and does an excellent job.
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I’m honored to be a part of this team as we get to participate in all God is doing. I’m thankful for the wisdom of other leaders who have gone before and documented what they’ve learned. Here is a round-up of some of the books our team utilized this year for our own growth and the development of those we lead.
1.The Blessed Life and Beyond Blessed by Robert Morris
Our culture is saturated with false teaching on what it means to be blessed.
But what does the Bible say about it? How can we truly live blessed
lives? In his book, The Blessed Life, pastor and bestselling author Robert
Morris presents the secrets of living a blessed financially and spiritually life
with humor, passion, and clarity. He shows that every part of your life
journey is affected when God changes your heart from selfishness to
generosity.
In Beyond Blessed, he shares the importance of being a good steward, not only with your finances but with every part of your life. Pastor Morris will motivate you to become a better manager of your money and provide practical lessons on taking your finances to the next level. Through Biblical principles, personal stories, and incredible testimonies, you will learn how to be a good steward. When you properly manage your finances, blessings will pour into all areas of your life. Here is a guide to increasing and going further with what God has given you and living beyond blessed.
2. Emotionally Healthy Relationships by Peter Scazzero
We spend a lot of money learning and becoming competent in our careers,
but few of us have learned the skills or gained the competency to love well.
As a result, it’s been rightly said that 85 percent of Christians are stuck and
stagnant in their spiritual lives. Most discipleship approaches do not include
the necessary tools to mature us as followers of Jesus Christ who love God,
ourselves, and others. Pete and Geri Scazzero developed The Emotionally
Healthy (EH) Relationships Course over 21 years to directly address core
biblical principles to guide you and others into an experience of discipleship
that will deeply change your life.
Traditional discipleship strategies fail because they do not:
Slow down people's lives so they can cultivate a deep, personal relationship with Jesus.
Challenge the values of Western culture that have compromised the radical call to follow the crucified Jesus.
Integrate sadness, loss, and vulnerability, leaving people defensive and easily triggered.
Measure our spiritual maturity by growing in our ability to love others.
In Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, bestselling author Pete Scazzero lays out how to create an emotionally healthy leadership and team culture.
3. ALPHA
In a world of isolation, anonymity, and keyboard warriors, Alpha offers content and guidance for churches, ministries, and individuals to create a space for honest and open conversations about life’s biggest questions. Everyone is welcome, and no questions are off-limits.
Alpha is by the Church, for the Church, and through the Church, but it is run worldwide in many settings—homes, cafés, restaurants, prisons, and more. Increasingly, Alpha is being embraced by organizations and people looking to create a safe space for conversations about faith.
Creating these spaces for honest, open, and judgment-free conversations for anyone to explore the Christian faith is so important to us that we give all of the digital assets to run Alpha away for free. How can we do this? We have hundreds of donors committed to the important mission.
4. Get Out of Your Head by Jennie Allen
In Get Out of Your Head, Jennie inspires and equips us to transform our emotions, our outlook, and even our circumstances by taking control of our thoughts. Our enemy is determined to get in our heads to make us feel helpless, overwhelmed, and incapable of making a difference for the kingdom of God. But when we submit our minds to Christ, the promises and goodness of God flood our lives in remarkable ways.
It starts in your head. And from there, the possibilities are endless.
5. Anonymous by Alicia Britt Chole
We all experience times of hiddenness when our potential is unseen, and our abilities remain unapplauded. This book encourages you to not rush through those times by reminding you that, though we often want to hasten through these anonymous seasons of the soul, these times hold enormous power to cultivate character traits that cannot be developed any other way.
6. Secrets of Dynamic Communication by Ken Davis
Whether you are one who speaks only on rare occasions or you find yourself
addressing an audience every day, this book will be an invaluable tool. Beneficial to the experienced pro as well as the new beginner,Secrets of Dynamic Communication is a practical and effective handbook for powerful presentations of all kinds. It takes the reader through the process of selecting and developing a theme, giving it focus, fleshing it out, and communicating well with the audience. The first half is devoted to preparation, the second to delivery.
Can a simple concept shift your entire world? Bob certainty thinks so. When it comes to loving your neighbors, instead of focusing on having the “right answers” or checking the “right boxes,” what if you decide to simply do love? To shamelessly show love and grace to those around you--what would that look like? Not the kind of love that stops at thoughts and feelings, Bob's love takes action. Bob believes Love Does.
8. Ordering Your Private World by Gordon Macdonald
One of the great battlegrounds is within the private world of the individual. The values of our Western culture would have us believe the busy, publicly active person in ministry is also the most spiritual. Tempted to give imbalanced attention to the public world at the expense of the private, we become involved in more programs, more meetings. Our massive responsibilities at home, work, and church have resulted in many good people on the verge of collapse.
9. Giving It All Away by David Green
Generosity. It's the foundation for building a lasting legacy not just of money but also of the enduring values of faith, family, and openhanded living. In this book--part memoir, part personal manifesto--David Green shares lessons that can help you reap benefits for multiple generations.
Have you read any of these? We’d love to hear your thoughts! What is on your reading list for this next year?