Leading and Reading: The Books That Shaped My Thinking

I’m convinced it’s no coincidence that leading and reading sound so similar.

To really hone your craft as a leader, and to deepen your understanding of yourself, others, and the world, reading allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants.

I also believe there’s massive value in reading the actual book rather than watching the TED Talk or YouTube summary. When I read, I want it to change my mind. To improve it for the better. And that only happens through true exposure: going beyond the theory and letting the stories, anecdotes, and examples come alive.

Below you’ll find the books that have changed my mind the most over the past years. Each one has profoundly influenced how I think, work, and live.

So, if you’re looking for inspiration, a new perspective, or a fresh spark in your leadership journey — take your pick, and happy reading.

Atomic Habits – James Clear

My daily yoga routine and weekly financial check-up wouldn’t exist without this book.

Focus aan/uit – Marc Tigchelaar & Stolen Focus – Johann Hari

No more switching between tasks, no more phones in the bedroom, no email before noon. So much more focus on what truly matters thanks to these books.

Give and Take – Adam Grant

Givers can come out on top, but only if they adjust their approach when dealing with takers.

Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert

Helped me understand how creativity really works. Also, a hugely entertaining read.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni

The first book you should read when you start managing a team. Or when you’re in a team. Or actually, when you’re human. You get my drift, just read it.

Start with Why – Simon Sinek

I think I’m in love with Simon Sinek’s brain. This book completely changed how I communicate in sessions: start with why, then people care about how and what.

Nonviolent Communication – Marshall Rosenberg

May completely alter how you view feedback. It gives you step-by-step tools to make feedback more intentional. Love it.

Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss

Hands down the best book I’ve read on interpersonal communication. I’ve recommended it so many times, you’d think I had shares in it. Written by a former FBI hostage negotiator.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey

The bible of personal leadership. If you haven’t read it, start here.

The Psychology of Money – Morgan Housel

Want to get more intentional about your money? This book explains how your psychology drives your financial choices. So many a-ha moments.

Diary of a CEO – Stephen Bartlett

Full of practical leadership insights, written in an engaging, easy-to-read way. Also, his podcast is my all-time favorite.

Unreasonable Hospitality – Will Guidara

Astounded me with how much a book by a world-renowned restaurateur could inspire my leadership trainings. A brilliant read.

Atlas of the Heart – Brené Brown

Brené Brown breaks down 80+ emotions. Words matter. Naming emotions accurately leads to better regulation and attunement to others. A must-read.

In closing…

Reading doesn’t just make you smarter — it expands your empathy, strengthens your language, and reminds you that growth rarely happens in isolation.

So if you’re a leader, a learner, or simply someone who loves to stretch their thinking: pick a book, slow down, and let someone else’s wisdom shape yours for a while.

Which of these books shaped your thinking the most? I’d love to hear.

If you’d like to take the next step and apply some of these lessons in practice, have a look at my leadership programmes — where reading meets doing.

The leadership trap of needing approval

Everybody wants to feel like they’re doing a good job. That they’re a good leader. A good person. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Validation is human fuel—we all need some of it.

But here’s the catch: that validation can come from two places.

• Internal: your own compass, your values, your goals, your sense of right and wrong.

• External: the feedback, praise, recognition—or the results you can point to as proof.

As with many leadership principles, the magic is in a healthy mix. A strong internal compass to guide your decision-making, combined with awareness of how your actions land in the outside world.

When the balance tips

In over a decade of coaching leaders, I’ve met many who lean too heavily on external validation. They only feel good about their decisions if others immediately approve—or if there are quick results to show for it.

The problem? Leadership often requires you to move forward in the absence of validation. Sometimes even in the face of disapproval.

Think of situations like:

• Letting someone go—hardly the moment for fan mail.

• Giving tough feedback—recognition usually comes much later, if at all.

• Delivering bad news—no one’s clapping their hands with joy.

• Making unpopular decisions—the frustration is often aimed directly at you.

• Driving long-term results—you won’t have instant numbers to prove you were right.

If you rely too much on external validation—whether from people or from results—these moments paralyze you. I’ve seen it result in procrastination, vague communication, lack of ownership, and unfinished business. In other words: ineffective leadership.

The anchor you need

In tough situations, you need something solid to stand on: a clear internal compass. One that keeps you steady when external approval or measurable results are absent.

It’s this compass that allows you to:

• Take action when it’s unpopular but necessary.

• Communicate clearly, even when your message won’t land softly.

• Follow through on hard decisions without constant reassurance.

So how do you develop an internal compass?

That’s the million-dollar question. It’s not about shutting out feedback or going solo. It’s about cultivating clarity on your values, principles, and purpose, so that you don’t collapse without applause or immediate proof.

Some starting points:

1. Reflect regularly. Journal or debrief after key moments. What guided your decision? Did it align with your values?

2. Define your non-negotiables. What principles will you not compromise on, no matter the reaction or results?

3. Practice discomfort. Deliberately make small choices without seeking approval, and notice how you hold up.

4. Seek trusted mirrors. A coach, mentor, or peer group that gives honest—not sugar-coated—feedback.

Leaders who build this internal compass don’t need constant applause or quick wins. They can withstand the silence, even the criticism, that tough leadership moments bring. And that’s when they become truly effective.

This is exactly the work I do with leaders: helping them strengthen their internal compass so they can lead with clarity and confidence—even when external validation is absent. If you’re curious what that could look like for you or your team, I’d be happy to explore it together.

Time Management: Using language of abundance

‘I liked the training, but it felt a bit rushed...’

‘I liked the training, but I found it a pity that we had to skip some parts due to time.’

You are probably familiar with this feedback. I know I am: I received both frequently when I started out. The skill you have to develop in this case is invisibly being in control of time. When you master this skill, you are able to orchestrate exactly how long each programme segment will take without participants noticing you're pulling the strings.

With this month’s blogposts, I’ll walk you through how you do it. Next up: Using language of abundance!

Using language of abundance

When it comes to time, you want your participants to experience a sense of abundance, rather than scarcity. The wordings you use when communicating timings will determine what they'll experience. Consider these sentences:

• You have 8 minutes for this exercise.

• You're halfway through the time!

• 2 minutes left!

• Time's up, please come back now.

How do these resonate with you? Do they make you feel at ease? Or rushed? Probably the second. Consider these same sentences, slightly altered:

• Allow yourself 8 minutes for this exercise.

• You’re at the halfway point, take your time to explore further.

• Give yourself  another 2 minutes to conclude the exercise.

• Let's explore the harvest of this exercise, I invite you to come back to the circle.

Let these sentences sink in... How do these resonate?
Chances are, these sentences create a natural flow of progression, rather than a feeling of being dominated by time. When you look at these sentences from a technical perspective, take note of the following:

• Where possible, talk about time while not using time-related words (use you’re at the halfway point rather than you have 4 minutes left)

• When you have to use time-related words (like minutes), pair them with a verb that feels abundant rather than scarce (take, allow yourself, use, give yourself)

• Place emphasis on the yield of the exercise, rather than the time element (explore further, explore the harvest)

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on how to deliver awesome trainings. It comes from the chapter Essential Trainer Skills - Time Management. This theory is also covered in my Train-the-Trainer programme: Inspire to Develop.

Time management: Framing invitations for interaction

‘I liked the training, but it felt a bit rushed...’

‘I liked the training, but I found it a pity that we had to skip some parts due to time.’

You are probably familiar with this feedback. I know I am: I received both frequently when I started out. The skill you have to develop in this case is invisibly being in control of time. When you master this skill, you are able to orchestrate exactly how long each programme segment will take without participants noticing you're pulling the strings.

With this month’s blogposts, I’ll walk you through how you do it. This time: Framing your invitations for interaction!

Framing your invitations for interaction

Any trainer worth their salt will want to invite participants to contribute to the training. At the same time, lengthy participant contributions are your biggest nemesis when it comes to time management. It is an art form to get your participants to open up and share, so you want to avoid having to interrupt or cut them short while sharing. So what do you do?

Let's start with what NOT to do. Do not give out any invitation for interaction without including your expectation for their contribution. That means the following sentences are off-limits:

• Please introduce yourself...

• How was this exercise?

• What is your experience with saying no?

• What did you think about today's session?

These sentences provide the participants with a sense of direction, yet force them to assume the length of their answer and what to include. The risk you run as a trainer is irrelevant information and too lengthy answers.

Instead, frame your invitations in such a way participants only have to ‘fill in the blanks’!

• Please introduce yourself by stating your name, role, and biggest pitfall in communication

• What is your single biggest take-away from this exercise?

• In 2 or 3 sentences, in which situation do you have the most need to be able to say no?
  In a couple of soundbites, I'd love to hear your thoughts about today's session.

When you start using these types of invitations you'll notice two things:

1. Most participant contributions will match up to what you are looking for.

2. It is easier to interrupt those that are too long or irrelevant because you can refer back to what you said in the invitation.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on how to deliver awesome trainings. It comes from the chapter Essential Trainer Skills - Time Management. This theory is also covered in my Train-the-Trainer programme: Inspire to Develop.

Time Management: Recovering time

‘I liked the training, but it felt a bit rushed...’

‘I liked the training, but I found it a pity that we had to skip some parts due to time.’

You are probably familiar with this feedback. I know I am: I received both frequently when I started out. The skill you have to develop in this case is invisibly being in control of time. When you master this skill, you are able to orchestrate exactly how long each programme segment will take without participants noticing you're pulling the strings.

With this month’s blogposts, I’ll walk you through how you do it. Next up: Recovering time!

Recovering time

So when you’ve been thrown a curveball and your timing is out of whack, you can either skip things altogether or recover time by cutting down the time it takes to run your programme. Usually, I try for option number 2 first, if at all possible. In my opinion, there is a right and a wrong way of recovering time. The right way keeps the integrity of the programme and respects participants’ energy. The wrong way creates a sense of rush, overburdens your participants, and hurts your evaluations. Let’s start with what not to do.

Do not — ever — recover time by skipping breaks. This used to be my first go-to solution whenever I was falling behind. I had yet to learn that effective breaks supercharge the value of the actual training time. By skipping breaks, I wore participants AND myself out, created a sense of rush, and struggled to keep the group engaged. Breaks exist for a reason — honor them. Breaks trump training segments, period.

Do not sacrifice your closing in order to buy training time. Remember the peak-end rule (we don’t judge an experience by every moment of it — we mostly remember the highlight, the peak, and how it ended). If you rush through the closing, evaluations will suffer because participants’ experience of the whole training will be tainted by the rush at the end.

Now that you’ve made your breaks and closing sacrosanct, let’s jump into what you can do to regain some lost time.

Make groups smaller. Look for parts of the training where people work in groups of 3 or more and where each person gets a turn. Logically, the fewer people per group, the less time you need. When pressed for time, I usually have them work in duos if the exercise allows. A reflection round of 20 minutes is brought down to 10 minutes when you slim the group from 4 to 2 people. And voila: you’ve earned yourself 10 full minutes.

Slimmed-down reflection. When I design a programme segment, I usually start with an exercise, followed by time for participants to reflect (individually or in groups), and then a plenary debrief guided by me. The reflection helps participants form their own insights, and the plenary ensures the key takeaways are highlighted. I aim to stick to this flow, but it also gives me flexibility to adjust when time is tight. Usually, the participants’ reflection takes longer than the plenary debrief. So, if I need to save a little time, I’ll skip the plenary debrief. If I need to save more, I’ll skip the individual reflection and only run the plenary.

Effective use of cases. Cases are a staple in training — whether you’re running role-plays or reflection exercises — but asking participants for their own cases can eat up more time than you think. The good news? It’s also one of the easiest places to win that time back.

One simple fix is to bring a few canned cases — examples you’ve prepared ahead of time. They’re not quite as relevant as real, participant-driven cases, but they can be a lifesaver when time is tight. I always have a couple ready, even if I don’t plan on using them. Most of the time, I aim for bespoke cases, but when I’m running behind, a prepared case keeps things moving without anyone feeling rushed.

Another approach is to have everyone work on the same case. This way, you only need to gather details once instead of multiple times. The trick here is to choose a case broad enough that everyone can relate to it. And if participants start worrying it’ll feel repetitive, reassure them: it never actually plays out the same way twice. Different personalities, experiences, and styles keep every round engaging. I’ve also noticed that the quality of practice improves this way because people pick up new ideas by watching each other.

A third option is to break the case into pieces and have participants work on different parts. In role-plays, for example, you can have people take turns stepping in (bonus: it keeps everyone sharp and paying attention). This works especially well with step-by-step models, like feedback frameworks, where each person can own one part of the process. For reflection exercises, you can do the same by assigning different questions to different participants instead of having everyone reflect on everything at once.

Eat a little into lunch. This is the only time I sometimes bend my own “don’t mess with breaks” rule. I always design sessions with a one-hour lunch break, and ideally, we stick to it. But when time is tight, I occasionally shorten it to 45 minutes — and only if the participants are okay with it and the lunch is on-site. If they need to travel for lunch, I never do this, because I want them to have at least 45 minutes of true downtime.

Cut entire segments. If none of the above are suitable for slimming down your programme segment, and you cannot think of another way to make it shorter, consider skipping the entire segment altogether. Don’t introduce a topic if you’re sure in advance you cannot do it justice due to time. Instead, beef up the programme segments that you are including, so that you truly make an impact there.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on how to deliver awesome trainings. It comes from the chapter Essential Trainer Skills - Time Management. This theory is also covered in my Train-the-Trainer programme: Inspire to Develop.

Time Management: Dealing with curveballs

‘I liked the training, but it felt a bit rushed...’

‘I liked the training, but I found it a pity that we had to skip some parts due to time.’

You are probably familiar with this feedback. I know I am: I received both frequently when I started out. The skill you have to develop in this case is invisibly being in control of time. When you master this skill, you are able to orchestrate exactly how long each programme segment will take without participants noticing you're pulling the strings.

With this month’s blogposts, I’ll walk you through how you do it. Next up: Dealing with curveballs!

Dealing with curveballs

When it comes to managing your time, curveballs are part of the game. Things will pop up that you can’t control — and they’ll happily throw your perfect timeline out the window.

A couple of examples from personal experience:

• A train strike that made everybody 2 hours late

• A double booking for a location that had to be fixed first before we could start, 1 hour late

• Participants in turmoil because the company announced a round of lay-offs just before the training

• Unwilling participants because they had had a very bad experience with their last session

• Participants having difficulty understanding the material

All of these instances require your immediate time and attention and force you to get creative with timings right from the get-go. The following tips will help you to do that gracefully:

1. Remember that you are not obligated to run the programme exactly as it's been designed. The design is just a guideline. It is your job to deliver on the goal of a session and, as they say,  there are many roads that lead to Rome…
   

2. Don't communicate timings in your agenda. When I share the agenda, I share the sequence of the topics that we'll cover, the time for lunch, and the end-time. This way the participants know what to expect but will not be aware if segments take longer or shorter than expected.
   

3. Don't mention it when you skip things. Remember, you are the only one in the room who knows what was supposed to happen. Mentioning you're skipping things will make them feel they're missing out, while they wouldn't even have noticed it had you left it unmentioned.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on how to deliver awesome trainings. It comes from the chapter Essential Trainer Skills - Time Management. This theory is also covered in my Train-the-Trainer programme: Inspire to Develop.

Time management: Training design

‘I liked the training, but it felt a bit rushed...’

‘I liked the training, but I found it a pity that we had to skip some parts due to time.’

You are probably familiar with this feedback. I know I am: I received both frequently when I started out. The skill you have to develop in this case is invisibly being in control of time. When you master this skill, you are able to orchestrate exactly how long each programme segment will take without participants noticing you're pulling the strings.

Over the next couple of blogposts, I’ll walk you through how you do it. First up: Training Design!

Training design

If the session has been designed poorly, you can pull strings all you want, and you will still end up with too little time or too much programme. So your first order of business is to critically scan the design of the session to check whether the timings are realistic.

This will prove very challenging if you're just starting out, because you lack the experience to know how long certain things take. If this is you, have the design checked by a more experienced trainer. A practiced eye can spot timing bottlenecks in minutes.

If you do this sanity check yourself, these are a couple of things to be on the lookout for:

• Does the design have some elements that can easily be cut during the day, without compromising the integrity of each segment?

• Have movements been taken into account? (for example, moving to and from break-out rooms, to and from smaller groups, to and from breaks and/or lunch)

• Is there enough time for reflection and interaction? The bigger the group, the longer you need.

• Usually reflection takes longer than the assignment itself — is this also the case in the design?

• Are the timeslots designed generously, leaving room for things to take longer than expected?

Obviously, you are looking for YES-es to all of these questions. 

If you notice the design is too cramped, do yourself a favor and cut segments. Yes, it will be hard, because you will feel everything is interesting and/or necessary. However, I would always urge you to choose quality and depth over quantity and breadth.

You might also fear that if you cut too much, your programme will be over while you still have time left. What if you don't know how to fill the time?! This is a fear I've had many times. The number of times it actually happened like this is... ZERO.

So cut away and trust that it is easier to lengthen a programme than to shorten it.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on how to deliver awesome trainings. It comes from the chapter Essential Trainer Skills - Time Management. This theory is also covered in my Train-the-Trainer programme: Inspire to Develop.

Personal stories as a training tool

Have you ever wondered: how much of myself do I share with my participants? Let me share with you some thoughts on sharing personal information that help you decide what, how en when to share.

I am not a very private person. I generally am very open about myself and not many topics are off-limits for me to share. You might be the same, or you might be someone who is more reserved. Both are fine. One is not better than the other. Use these guidelines to determine for yourself what, how and when to share.

• Please avoid ‘The-Trainer-Show’. One of the cringiest things I have experienced in training is that the trainer uses the training as a platform to share all of themselves - thoughts, experiences, personal history - and use the participants as their audience.. They give off the impression that they find themselves the most interesting person on the planet.  The focus of the training becomes the trainer rather than the topic. Don’t do this. As a trainer you are the means, not the end.

• Become intentional about what you share. When I choose to divulge something about myself it is always in service of the group. If it’s not in service of the group I will not share it. These are examples of things I share in service of the group:

• I might share similarities in background to help them connect to me better. To a group of trainees I might mention that I started out as a trainee as well. To a group of developers I might share that I worked at Google, so am familiar with a techy environment.

• I might share personal stories that are relevant to the training to peak their interest in the topic. In a training about stress I might share about my burn-out, in a training on communication I might share about a job interview that went south because of a clash in communication styles. 

• I might share something vulnerable if the training requires the group to open up and be vulnerable themselves. The level of vulnerability you show will be the bar for the training. It is a safe bet that no story that follows yours will be more vulnerable than yours, but that many stories will be more vulnerable than they would have been had you not set the bar. In a training about personal leadership I might share something about a difficult decision I have made in my life, like having a divorce.

• I might share something personal to normalize or validate an experience. When someone is really struggling to say ‘no’ in a training on boundary setting, I might share that that has been a struggle for me as well. That I was so bad at saying no that I accepted the role of master of ceremonies at a high profile wedding when I was at home with a burn-out! This usually helps to connect with the person. When I then share that I currently am pretty good at saying no, and that it’s a learned skill, that usually helps in their motivation to give the exercise another go.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book on how to deliver awesome trainings. It comes from the chapter Introduction. This theory is also covered in my Train-the-Trainer programme: Inspire to Develop.