14 Best Books for Life Coaches and What to Do With Each
The best books for life coaches help with the three things life coaching clients bring most: working out what they actually want, getting through a change they did not choose, and turning good intentions into a week that looks different. This list covers all three, plus the training texts behind life coaching and one honest book about building a practice. Each book comes with who should read it and a way to use it with a client.
If you would rather spend your evenings reading than building pages, Coachful's team will set up your website, worksheets or program in your account for free, and we cover how that works below.
How we chose: books a working life coach can use with clients, checked for title, author and first publication year on Open Library, Wikipedia or the publisher's description in October 2026. We do not rank by sales or link to bookshops, and we flag where a book's science has critics. For coaching craft in general, see our sibling list of the best books for coaches; this one is specific to life coaching.
The best books for life coaches at a glance
| Book | Author | First published | Read this if... |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Co-Active Coaching | Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House, Phil Sandahl | 1998 | You want the classic life coaching method |
| 2. Becoming a Professional Life Coach | Patrick Williams, Diane S. Menendez | 2007 | You are new and want the whole process |
| 3. Finding Your Own North Star | Martha Beck | 2001 | Clients don't know what they want |
| 4. Designing Your Life | Bill Burnett, Dave Evans | 2016 | Clients are stuck between options |
| 5. Transitions | William Bridges | 1980 | Clients are mid-change and lost |
| 6. Man's Search for Meaning | Viktor Frankl | 1946 | Clients ask "what's the point?" |
| 7. Mindset | Carol S. Dweck | 2006 | Clients treat setbacks as verdicts |
| 8. Atomic Habits | James Clear | 2018 | Clients set goals and never start |
| 9. Self-Compassion | Kristin Neff | 2011 | Clients are harsh with themselves |
| 10. Emotional Agility | Susan David | 2016 | Clients get hooked by their thoughts |
| 11. Positive Psychology Coaching | Robert Biswas-Diener, Ben Dean | 2007 | You want strengths-based tools |
| 12. Daring Greatly | Brené Brown | 2012 | Shame is shaping a client's choices |
| 13. Switch | Chip Heath, Dan Heath | 2010 | Change keeps stalling despite motivation |
| 14. The Prosperous Coach | Steve Chandler, Rich Litvin | 2013 | You love coaching and hate selling it |
1. Co-Active Coaching, by Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House and Phil Sandahl (1998)
First published by Davies-Black in 1998 with the subtitle New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life, Co-Active Coaching is now in a fourth edition (2018), with Karen Kimsey-House among the authors. Four editions over twenty years make it one of the longest-running coaching textbooks.
Why it matters for life coaches: the name says it: coach and client are both active in the work, and the book is about skills for coaching people toward success in work and life together. It gives you a shared vocabulary with the many coaches trained in the approach.
Read this if you trained somewhere else and want the method many life coaches were taught, or you were taught it and have drifted into advice.
Use it with a client: when a client describes the life they want, ask what the version of them who already lives it would do this week. Our guide to co-active coaching goes deeper into the approach.
2. Becoming a Professional Life Coach, by Patrick Williams and Diane S. Menendez (2007)
Subtitled Lessons from the Institute for Life Coach Training and published by W. W. Norton in 2007, with later editions, this book starts with a brief history of coaching and then takes the reader step by step through the coaching process.
Why it matters for life coaches: because it comes out of a coach-training institute, it reads like a course: where coaching came from, then the process step by step, which helps you see a full engagement from first call to last.
Read this if you are new, switching from a helping profession, or you want one book that covers the whole arc of a coaching relationship.
Use it with a client: write down the stages of your own coaching engagement after reading it, then put them on your website so clients know what they are buying. Our guide on how to become a life coach covers training routes.
3. Finding Your Own North Star, by Martha Beck (2001)
Martha Beck is an author, life coach and sociologist with a PhD from Harvard, and a columnist for Oprah Daily. Finding Your Own North Star, subtitled Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live, came out from Crown in 2001. Its premise is that the knowledge of your "right life" already sits inside you, like the North Star in its fixed place.
Why it matters for life coaches: many clients arrive with a good life on paper and a sense that it is not theirs. Beck's book helps you work with the gap between what a client thinks they should want and what their own experience suggests they do want.
Read this if your clients say "I don't know what I want" more than once a session.
Use it with a client: ask them to list three moments in the past year when they felt most like themselves, then look for the pattern together. Our values clarification exercise structures the follow-up. Beck also appears in our guide to famous life coaches.
4. Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (2016)
Published by Knopf in 2016, Designing Your Life applies design thinking and journaling to life decisions, with a series of exercises across its eleven chapters that help readers reflect, generate options and plan.
Why it matters for life coaches: it gives stuck clients something to do besides think harder. Design thinking's habit of testing small versions of an idea (a conversation with someone who does the job, a weekend trying the thing) is a practical way out of endless deliberation.
Read this if you coach career changers, recent graduates or anyone frozen between two or three futures.
Use it with a client: ask them to sketch three different five-year versions of their life, then pick one small, cheap experiment to test one of them before your next session.
5. Transitions, by William Bridges (1980)
Bridges, an author and organizational consultant, separated change (the event) from transition, the psychological process of adapting to it. Transition, in his account, has three phases: letting go of the past, a "neutral zone" where the old is gone and the new is not yet fully present, and a new beginning. Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes came out from Addison-Wesley in 1980.
Why it matters for life coaches: divorce, a move, a layoff, an empty nest, retirement: life coaching is full of transitions. Naming the neutral zone helps clients stop treating confusion as failure.
Read this if your clients are in the middle of something and keep asking why they do not feel better yet.
Use it with a client: ask which of the three phases they are in, and what they still need to let go of before the new thing can start.
6. Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl (1946)
Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote this 1946 book about his experience of the Nazi concentration camps and the therapeutic method he developed, logotherapy. Wikipedia summarizes its idea that people find meaning in three ways: completing tasks, caring for another person, or facing suffering with dignity.
Why it matters for life coaches: it is the book to have read when a client's question is not "how" but "why bother". It frames meaning as something people find through what they do and how they respond, which fits coaching well.
Read this if you coach purpose, midlife change or clients rebuilding after loss. If a client's despair looks like depression, that is a referral, not a reading assignment.
Use it with a client: ask which of the three sources of meaning is strongest in their life right now, and which is missing.
7. Mindset, by Carol S. Dweck (2006)
Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, describes a continuum between a "fixed" view, in which ability is innate, and a "growth" view, in which it develops through effort, learning and persistence. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success came out from Random House in 2006.
Why it matters for life coaches: the language helps clients who treat every setback as proof about who they are. Read it with its critics in mind: Wikipedia notes that some researchers have had trouble replicating Dweck's findings, and a large 2019 school trial of growth mindset training in England found no extra progress in reading or math.
Read this if a client says "I'm just not a disciplined person" or "I've never been good at this."
Use it with a client: when they make a fixed statement, ask what they would need to learn or practice for it to become untrue, then make that the experiment.
8. Atomic Habits, by James Clear (2018)
Atomic Habits is a 2018 self-help book on changing habits by replacing them with small, low-effort ones, summed up in the phrase "getting 1% better each day". It became a long-running bestseller. It also has critics: Wikipedia records a Guardian writer calling it pseudoscientific.
Why it matters for life coaches: many clients have read it, so you will hear its language in sessions. Its core advice (make the habit small, obvious and easy) matches what most coaches see work.
Read this if your clients set ambitious goals on Sunday and abandon them by Wednesday.
Use it with a client: shrink the goal until it takes two minutes, attach it to something they already do every day, and track it for 30 days. Our habit tracker template gives you a printable version.
9. Self-Compassion, by Kristin Neff (2011)
Neff, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is credited with the first academic studies of self-compassion. Her measure of it has three components: self-kindness versus self-judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself came out in 2011.
Why it matters for life coaches: many high-achieving clients believe self-criticism is what keeps them going. Neff's research distinguishes self-compassion from self-esteem and gives you a way to talk about kindness that does not sound soft.
Read this if your clients' inner voice is harsher than anything you would say to them.
Use it with a client: ask what they would say to a close friend in the same situation, then ask them to write it down and say it to themselves.
10. Emotional Agility, by Susan David (2016)
David, a South African psychologist, published Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life with Avery in 2016. The publisher describes an approach to understanding and accepting difficult emotions and thoughts without letting them derail you, starting from the point that the voice in your head offers opinions, not facts.
Why it matters for life coaches: it gives clients a middle path between pushing feelings down and being run by them, which is where most stuckness lives.
Read this if clients say "I know it's irrational, but..." and then do what the feeling says.
Use it with a client: ask them to restate a hooked thought as "I'm having the thought that...", then ask what they would do next if the thought were just a thought.
11. Positive Psychology Coaching, by Robert Biswas-Diener and Ben Dean (2007)
Subtitled Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients and published by Wiley in 2007, this book offers language and interventions for bringing positive psychology into coaching, moving from a medical model toward a strengths model. Biswas-Diener is a positive psychologist and author.
Why it matters for life coaches: it gives you research-informed tools for building on what is already working in a client's life, which balances the natural pull toward fixing problems.
Read this if you want strengths-based exercises with some science behind them.
Use it with a client: ask them to describe a recent day that went well and name the strengths they used, then plan one way to use the same strength on a hard task. Our guide to positive psychology coaching covers the evidence.
12. Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown (2012)
Brown, a University of Houston researcher known for a widely viewed 2010 TEDx talk, wrote Daring Greatly in 2012 about vulnerability and shame. It became a New York Times bestseller.
Why it matters for life coaches: shame often sits underneath the goals clients will not start: the business they will not launch, the relationship conversation they avoid. Brown gives you and the client a way to name it.
Read this if a client's fear of being seen trying is bigger than their fear of not trying.
Use it with a client: ask what they are afraid people would think if they tried and failed, and whose opinion that actually is. If shame is tied to trauma, refer to a therapist.
13. Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2010)
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, published by Broadway Books in 2010, argues that our minds are ruled by two competing systems, a rational mind and an emotional mind, and that successful changes follow a pattern that brings both on side. Chip Heath teaches organizational behavior at Stanford's business school.
Why it matters for life coaches: it explains why a client who clearly wants something still does not do it, in language clients recognize at once: the part of them that wants the change and the part that loves the old routine.
Read this if your clients have plenty of insight and very little change.
Use it with a client: when a plan stalls, ask which part is missing: a clear first step, a reason that moves them emotionally, or an environment that makes the step easy.
14. The Prosperous Coach, by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin (2013)
Subtitled Increase Income and Impact for You and Your Clients, The Prosperous Coach was first published in 2013, with a later edition in 2018. It is written for coaches building a practice, not for clients.
Why it matters for life coaches: life coaching is the easiest niche to enter and one of the hardest to earn a living in. A book that treats getting clients as part of the coaching relationship, not a separate chore, is worth an evening.
Read this if you are a good coach with a quiet calendar and an uneasy relationship with selling.
Use it in your practice: list ten people you could offer a real coaching conversation to this month, and have them. Our guides on getting life coaching clients and starting a life coaching business pick up from there.
Turning these books into client tools
Life coaches use these books in three ways: as background for themselves, as reading for clients, and as the source of exercises. For the third, write your own version and credit the author; do not copy a book's worksheets into your paid materials.
| Book | A client tool you could build |
|---|---|
| Finding Your Own North Star | A "moments I felt most like myself" reflection worksheet |
| Designing Your Life | Three five-year sketches, each with one small experiment |
| Transitions | A check-in asking which phase you are in this week |
| Atomic Habits | A two-minute version of each habit, tracked for 30 days |
| Self-Compassion | An evening prompt: what would you say to a friend? |
| Emotional Agility | A journal prompt to rewrite one hooked thought |
| Positive Psychology Coaching | A weekly "strength I used" log |
In Coachful, those become a worksheet in Forms & Worksheets, a habit the client ticks off in their app, an evening check-in in Coaching flows or a goal with weekly reflections, all included in your membership. The life coaching setup adds a weekly review, private journal prompts, a wins list, brave experiments and a life map clients re-score, which suits the Designing Your Life and North Star exercises well. Our lists of life coaching exercises and journal prompts for self-reflection give you more to adapt.
Have our team build it for free
Coachful's white-glove service is free on every plan. From Create > We'll build it for you · FREE, or the Want us to build it for you? card on your Website page, describe what you need: a website, a program, a worksheet built from your own version of a framework, a coaching flow or an email sequence. Add up to 8 reference links and 10 files. The team replies by email, usually within about 24 hours, and builds it in your account so you can edit everything afterwards. Recent requests include a five-page site for a midlife health coach starting from nothing and a dark forest-green site for a life-purpose coach moving from another tool. Nothing gets invented: credentials, testimonials and prices you have not supplied are left for you to fill in. See Coachful for life coaches.
The bottom line
The best books for life coaches cover the method (Co-Active Coaching, Becoming a Professional Life Coach), what clients want (North Star, Designing Your Life, Man's Search for Meaning), change and its feelings (Transitions, Mindset, Atomic Habits, Self-Compassion, Emotional Agility, Daring Greatly, Switch), strengths (Positive Psychology Coaching) and the practice (The Prosperous Coach). Read one at a time, keep the critics in mind where the science is contested, and turn each book into one tool you can use with a client next week.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best book for a new life coach?
Co-Active Coaching (1998) and Becoming a Professional Life Coach (2007) are the most useful starting points, because they teach the method and the full coaching process. Add The Coaching Habit for questions, from our general list of the best books for coaches.
What books should life coaches recommend to clients?
Accessible choices include Designing Your Life for decisions, Transitions for change, Atomic Habits for habits, Self-Compassion for harsh self-talk and Man's Search for Meaning for purpose. Recommend one at a time, tied to what the client is working on.
Is Atomic Habits good for life coaching?
Many clients have read it, and its advice to make habits small, obvious and easy matches what coaches see work. It has critics who call parts of it unscientific, so use it as practical advice rather than research.
Are growth mindset books backed by research?
Partly. Carol Dweck's work is widely cited, but Wikipedia notes replication problems and a large 2019 school trial in England found no extra progress from growth mindset training. Use the language to help clients reframe setbacks, without promising results.
Do life coaches need to read psychology books?
They help, as long as you stay a coach. Books by psychologists such as Neff, David and Dweck give you language for common patterns. They do not qualify you to treat anxiety, depression or trauma; refer those to a licensed therapist.
Can I turn a book's exercise into a worksheet for my clients?
Write your own version in your own words and credit the author. Copying a book's worksheets or text into paid materials can infringe copyright.
Will Coachful build my life coaching website or worksheets for free?
Yes. The white-glove build is free on every Coachful plan. Request it from the Create page or the Website page, describe what you need and attach your materials; the team usually replies within about 24 hours and builds it in your own account.
