Check it out, check it out. Welcome to the Art of Coaching Podcast. I'm Brett Bartholomew and at a young age, poor communication nearly calls me my life. Now I help others navigate the great area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication so they can can become more adaptable leaders regardless of their profession, age, or situation.

This podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems.

So if you're in the no nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advice you can put to use immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership, you're in the right place. I'm glad that you're joining us. Let's dive in. Hey, nice to have you again for another episode of the Arctic Coaching podcast. One, I hope you had a really happy holiday season. Whatever that meant to you this year, I hope you got through it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you made the most of it. Today's episode is really straightforward. Every year I'm asked, what books did you read and what books did you like most? So, we're going to do a little teaser here of some of my favorite books of the year, things that helped me learn or relearn, Even some kids books that I really liked that I got from my son, Bronson, because I know a lot of us are always trying to find great content, those of us with kids to give them, especially in today's day and age, it's never been more important to raise children who have critical thinking, good communication skills, and just emotional regulation in a world that gets crazier and crazier. And even if you don't have kids, hopefully you can think of these as helpful for your niece, nephew, anything like that. So we're gonna jump right into it. And you know, today don't worry, we're not gonna do some full boring lists. If you want a full list, really easy with some Amazon links, we'll put some on our newsletter. So make sure to go to artofcoaching.com slash begin to sign up for our newsletter. I always put out what I think and what many think is useful content. We have over 30,000 subscribers. I've been doing it since 2016. If you want an older reading list that I put together and older doesn't mean not useful, it just means I need to probably update it. I don't think it's been updated in about a year and a half, but if you've never seen it, it will be new to you. Go to artofcoaching.com slash reading list and you will be provided with a full PDF of different books that I've enjoyed. Okay, so if you follow me, you know that I always try to read a mix of nonfiction and fiction. I've been that guy that's gone through that period of my life where I just used to read only nonfiction books and only scientific articles and what have you. And then you get to a point where you realize that, wow, I can learn almost more through reading great fiction. And if you follow many authors, they'll tell you the same thing. The world of fiction allows you to explore a lot of new ideas,

a lot of new territory.

So I would like to implore you if you have been the type that's never really embraced nonfiction or fiction, rather, sorry. Make sure you do so, because it's really, really, really useful. All right, so I'm gonna give you just a brief rundown, tell you why I liked the book, the name of the book. And again, if you want a full list, let me know.

The one that I'm reading right now,

because I think it makes sense to start right now,

and I'll couch it, the name of the book. And again, if you want a full list, let me know. The one that I'm reading right now,

because I think it makes sense to start right now,

and I'll couch it, and I'm a huge history buff, is I am actually listening to the biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernau. If you don't know who Ron Chernau is, legendary author, these books are very dense. I mean, even if you're gonna listen to it, it's 41 hours.

But, you know, I think we spend way too much time today

jumping on things like TED Talks and even sometimes podcasts, not to go against my own podcasts. And we forget to learn from the past. We forget to learn from these people that had to innovate, had to get really creative and also just did some really incredible things. And so for me, especially having written a book and my new book comes out in September of 2026, being able to listen to the lives of different authors and hear what they've gone through and, you know, Twain is one of the most influential people in the Western world when it comes to writing. So if you like writing, you like history, I think you'll really love that. Although I will say my favorite book of the year and this is a historical book as well is Alexander and the end of the world. This is about Alexander the great and it's about his final conquest and they call it the forgotten years of Alexander the great. and I'll butcher her name, but it's written by Rachel Meredith Kuser. And the reason I loved this book is because it was fascinating to me, this individual that lived more than 2,500 years ago, and he had to lead such a diverse subset of people, right? This wasn't just a man leading Greeks as he conquered Persia and went further and further east. He had to find a way to really navigate what was starting to become a more globally connected and integrated world. And it gives you a really interesting perspective of the past. Also helps you to imagine the future because a lot of Alexander struggles in his finer years was how do I manage this army that's becoming more and more diverse and integrated? It no longer has Greeks, but now he has generals that were from parts of Persia that he had conquered. And so he had won unexpectedly and definitively so much. And it was like, well, what do I do next? Many of his soldiers, he had to find ways to keep them engaged. He kept wanting to get to ocean as Aristotle called it and told him about, that was his mentor. That was the end of the world to him. This mysterious place called ocean. And just fascinating how he managed the logistics of going over the Hindu Kush, manage the logistics of all the interpersonal issues, and also just leading. I mean, there's a lot of myths about Alexander the Great. And personally, I don't think that you can be as effective of a leader, whether it's for yourself or others without studying history. And there's perhaps, well, there's fewer, more intriguing historical leaders than Alexander the Great, especially, I mean, he had conquered most of the known world by the age of 22. I mean, it is just a phenomenal, phenomenal read. Some others that I really like. Let's see, I want to make sure that I don't just give you the history ones. I want to pull this up. It is. If you're watching the video, Steven Pressfield's government cheese. Now, technically, I think I finished this in 2024, but I didn't do one of these back then. I've always loved Stephen Pressfield. He's just a very great no nonsense writer.

One of the things that makes him stand out to me is, I think a lot of authors today, they try to showcase a lot of their wins and talk about the great things they've done and the companies they've helped. And that's all well and good. But to me, it's very hard to be relatable and even trustworthy if you don't share your flaws. Any of you that have followed me from the beginning know that, you know, I shared this story of about how I nearly lost my life. And some aspects of that story at certain periods of my life were relatively embarrassing to tell. They were deeply personal. And that was a big part of my first book, Conscious Coaching. And what I learned is that ended up being one of the core things that helped make that book relatively popular and relatively successful because people value hearing about the stories behind, you know, what most people just put up as a facade. And Stephen Pressfield doesn't really have that. He talks about how, you know, some of his actions unintentionally blew up his first marriage. He blew up his first novel. He didn't really know how to handle success.

As a matter of fact,

he did damn near everything he could to escape writing his first real book. And so a lot of people know him for the legend of Bagger Vance and the War of Art. But he dictates, you know, kind of pseudo-depressive periods he went through. I think at one point in time, he was even picking apples with a bunch of former convicts and burnouts,

he would just travel all over the country in this van.

And he talks about just breakthroughs and breakdowns and issues with his agent and things like that. And I just found it to be such a nice, honest, great detail book and his writing is very matter of fact straightforward. It doesn't try to be needlessly ornate. So if you had to start with one book out of any of that, I'd give you a, I would highly recommend that. I just, I love that book a lot. On the fiction front, now it's really fiction nonfiction is a series by an author named Don Winslow. And the first of these, now warning, this is not for those that can't handle some level of violence because it is about Mexican drug cartels and how some stuff with the cartels in the United States government and at one point even the mafia, excuse me if I take a drink, we're very interconnected. I don't wanna give a lot of it away from, a lot of it away to you, but I've always been interested and fascinated by the cartels. I mean, it's just so intriguing how, I'm trying to fit the complexity of that virus and how the only way to really get them to cease to exist is if North Americans and by and large the world quit doing illegal drugs. And unfortunately, we know that's not going to happen. And there's even stories in here that, again, if you do your research that talk about how drug money permeates so many different aspects of our economy during a financial disaster, a lot of the bailout money had sources back to drug cartels. His books are the power of the dog, the cartel, and the border. Again, they are not for people. If you're very squeamish around violence, do not read it. Don Winslow is a former private investigator, worked a lot with former members of the DEA, has a lot of unique knowledge of the cartels and these things, fascinating background in and of himself. But if you like shows like Narcos or you find those things intriguing, chilling but intriguing, you will enjoy these books. Again, the power of the dog, the cartel, I have not yet finished the border. I've heard that the border starts to get a little bit more political,

so I don't know that I'm going to get into that. That's not really how I want to spend my downtime. I mean, I don't, of course, I like to be educated in a lot of different things. I'm educated in politics. But for me, it was more about the interconnected nature. And sometimes the fruitless nature that a lot of these government agents felt when trying to stop this three headed monster

and trying to untie this gordian knot of corruption. But a lot of lessons in real-world leadership there and resilience. So highly would recommend that highly. A few more. These. I'm going to reach for them. I'll go through kind of rapid fire. You wouldn't expect the first one. It's called dialogue, the art of verbal action for the page, stage, and screen by Robert McKee. Now, if you followed me, you know that I love Robert McKee's book story very much ties into how a lot of aspects of psychology tie into our lives, real lives, and also the lives we see enacted on the screen. What goes into character psychology? How is it tied into psychological struggles we all deal with in our own life? Robert McKee is a screenwriter by trade, a legendary one. And if you read any story, you watch any show, right? We know that characters have to go on a journey. They deal with conflicts. They have psychological and emotional struggles just like us. And the more you can dive into the way people behave and why sometimes we mistake wants with needs and how we can try to get back on the right track if we followed kind of the wrong need or wanted his hire. Maybe we haven't answered a call of something that we really need to go for in life. And these books are fascinating. Now, I also just like dialogue because as I worked on my next book, you know, I could go down periods where I was getting too caught up this is the book that's coming out in September, 2026 with Penguin Random House. I always want to honor the research and there were times where the book had a little too jargony and I was using terminology to honor certain researchers and I always had to remember, come on, dude, remember how you talk, remember how real people talk. We want this book to be as relatable and useful as possible and of course, so does my publisher. So reading dialogue brought me back to that, which are my roots in general. We try to be very practical with everything we teach at art of coaching. So while it's all grounded in research, nobody should feel left behind if they can't understand the research. And dialogue is just, it's a great, great piece of writing. I highly recommend it to if you're writing a book or you're writing, even if you write a newsletter, just going back and remembering some of these things. Despite the fact that in this book, he analyzes scripts. The lessons are still very, very applicable, right? He just talks about like, listen, one of the passages, ideally every character is a walking dictionary of his or her own unique collection of words. So dialogue originality, he can't begin with vocabulary, right? It's great to have a wide-ranging vocabulary, but he also talks about just never, never forgetting that if you were to go sit in a diner and listen to people, always write how real people talk, right? Like that's a key. You have to understand how people talk. But I just, I love this book. Our lives happen through dialogue and connecting with one another. And so Robert McKee is a great author. Honorable mention, I did reread the Art of War by Sun Soo. I think that's timeless. As I got into Bronson and I are reading more and more books without pictures, so I started reading more from ASOPs Fables. I think that's timeless. I mean, business lessons, coaching lessons, unbelievable there. A new book that I got that I'm excited to read, so I guess I'm kind of cheating because I haven't read yet is Martwain's letters. I bought this from some Budget discount bookstore. It's torn to hell But again the reason I buy these things is I want to know how these great flawed damage intriguing Inspirational people thought what did they struggle with? Some of these? I don't understand a damn thing. I'm other ones. I'm like wow. It's just a reminder that these brilliant people are first and foremost human. So mark Twain's letters volume one you can get that on Amazon Re-reading the person and the situation. This is on our reading list at artofcoaching.com slash reading list. Why this is so important is we're often, it reminds you just how critical it is to always keep in mind the context of people's behavior and the impact it has on our psychology. Whether you're looking at things like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram experiments, Solomon Ash, right? And even just how people in your day-to-day life behave, you can never divorce these things from context. Contact shapes our behavior, our environment shapes our behavior. The people we spend the most amount of time around shape our behavior. And so you can never look at human behavior in a vacuum. And there's some phenomenal, phenomenal case studies. Many of them I remember just from college psychology, but other ones that are just so important to revisit because when you're trying to control your own emotions, when dealing with difficult people, you always have to start with, okay, what could they be experiencing? How might I be coming across to them? You have to, if you really want to think strategically, be able to zoom out and see the context for what it is. So, loved the person and the situation. We'll do a few more here. One that's another unconventional one is called the unpublished David Oglevy. Now, if you don't know who David Oglevy is for those of you that have watched Mad Men, Mad Men, he is really the original inspiration for Don Draper's character. It's interesting. If you read the back of the book, it says he is 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook. He has been a salesman, a diplomatist. That's a term I hadn't heard before and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing and has never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising at a career at the age of 38 and is ready to go work for $5,000 a year. I doubt if any American agency will hire him. However, a London agency did hire him and three years later he became the most famous copy writer in the world. Fascinating person. Now why am I recommending it? You've heard me say it again and again and I'll double down on it. It doesn't matter how much knowledge you have if you do not know how to communicate it in a way that makes sense to other individuals. And that is one of the hardest things to do, even if it's one of the simplest concepts to understand. In conscious coaching, I talk about it's, think of it as talking in color. Communication is not just about sending a message. It's a two-way street, so you have to be knowledgeable or more knowledgeable about how other people want to wish to or might receive a message. That is a cornerstone and it's a lifelong skill because it is incredibly difficult given how rushed we all are and how much we all have to balance. So David Ogovy talks about, Hey, how can hey, what did I do to connect with these people? This is not a scientific book. It's literally a lot of notes and little things that they found that Oglevie had made over the years that gave insight into how he thought about things, what was good copy versus bad copy, how to connect with people, how to lead. I mean, some of them are just really, really humorous. So I think once again, anytime you can see behind the curtain of a really impactful people, it is so, so, so important because success leaves clues. So the unpublished David Oglevie. All right, let's move on to kids' books for now. I have more I could share with you, but I want to be conscious of your time I know it's the holidays three books that I really like one of them now let me make sure I just oh you know what I'll give you one more for those of you that want something that's a little bit more science base and detailed it is human conflict disagreement misunderstanding and problematic is human conflict, disagreement, misunderstanding, and problematic talk. Human conflict, disagreement, misunderstanding, and problematic talk by David C. Mortensen. I'm actually three-fourths of the way through that. I need to finish it. But again, that's more of a nerdy book. If you really want to get into these things, but that was published back in 2005, I think it's really important because all of our lives are conflict resolution, right? So I shouldn't need to get into that too much. How do you become better at resolving conflict if you don't understand some of the roots of it? Okay, some of the favorite books I'm reading, Broncin, the 11th hour, a curious mystery by grand base. My God, I have never seen such a more, like a more beautifully illustrated book. It is absolutely amazing. It teaches critical thinking. You can read it just as it is, or you can read it. There's another way to read it that that makes it this very unique Kind of mystery But it is a full color beautifully illustrated book that he has really loved going back to Prior to bedtime. I mean it is it is a very good book a couple others This one was really important to me because Bronson is He's very. He's also at that age now where he's trying to figure out why other people, you know, crap on ideas and aren't, you know, aren't always supportive when somebody wants to do something unique. So, the book is called What Do You Do With An Idea? What Do You Do With An Idea by Kobe Yamada? And it just talks about the importance of nurturing an idea. What is an idea? And the illustrations are very cool here. It starts off kind of black and white. And then when the kid really realizes he should embrace his idea and quit worrying about what other people think of it and all that, the color starts to get rendered in full color. So anything that inspires kids to basically not give a shit, what everybody else is thinking about what they're doing and do it anyway is important. And I know I related to that. I mean, in 2026, we are unleashing our new writer's workshop course to help people that maybe wanna write a book, have been scared to kind of, you know, take that jump, but want to explore some ideas, people that are in the middle of writing a book, whatever, people that want to be better writers. And you know, I've had people say I was crazy for that. I've had people say I was crazy for the imperfect relationships course, speaker school, people tell me I'm crazy pretty much all the time. And maybe I am. And I'm going to chase these ideas because what I know is people also ask me questions about these things. They ask me questions about writing a book. They ask me questions about speaking. And so there are people out there that want to know these things. And I'm going to follow that curiosity, just as we all should encourage our kids and ourselves to follow that curiosity. Two more and then I'll let you go. Another one for Bronson is Voices in the Park by Anthony Brown. Now I'll admit the illustrations on this one are a little weird. Not weird in like a bad sense. I was just kind of like, why did we make this choice to make the character? Like the mother in it is like a gorilla. And it's almost like a, it's almost like bainsy paintings type illustration in terms of how the characters are formed. But the core of the book is that, as you guys know, we all experience things in life differently. Like we could all go to the same restaurant and all have a very different interpretation of that restaurant, not just the food, but the experience. This is again part of my of my goal to help Bronson develop more and more social intelligence and understand that people have different perspectives. So, it essentially follows four different stories and four different people within those stories who all talk about their experience of this walk in the park. One of them is mom. She goes to the park with her son. You know, that some mangy dog starts chasing her dog. She loses track of her son. She had a pretty fretful afternoon in the park. But then it tells the story from the perspective of the son. The son loved going outside, met a cool friend at the park. They played on this kind of like secret playground or secret swing set, right? That's hence why the mom was concerned. She didn't know about it.

But from his perspective, he had a great day at the park and so on and so forth. So it took me a bit when I was reading because I remember buying it and I knew what it was about. But then reading it, I had to kind of get an idea of where they go in with this. Okay, that's that person from page one. But it was very important to just talk to Bronson and say, hey buddy, this is a reminder

of even if you go ride your bike, you might have a great day riding your bike and love that part. But then let's say somebody walked by us when you were riding your bike and they were really anxious or maybe they were in a sad mood and they saw you riding your bike and instead of feeling happy, Maybe it reminded them of their little boy or girl and their little boy or girl is all grown up now. And so regardless of what we see or what we experience, so many of us see it in different ways. And I don't know that there's a more important lesson for children to learn and humans to learn in general. Like some of you like this podcast and enjoy hearing my voice. Some of you might not like this episode of the podcast and find me annoying. That's up to you. We can't control what people think all the time. We can just do our best to be authentic in the context of the moment. A fun lighthearted one now is the creepy pair of underwear. We bought this for Bronson on Halloween. It's just, you know, it's a funny book. This kid goes to the store, this mom. He always gets the same plain white underwear. And this time he got this glow in the dark pair. There's no way I can make this book sound as fun and as great as it is. And it's this glow in the dark pair of like Frankenstein looking underwear. It's written by Aaron Reynolds, but he gets creeped out by him, you know, because at night he's laying in bed and is underwear now glow in the dark and he's like, okay, I've been off more than I can chew here. So in the morning, right, he changes and he tries to get rid of the old underwear and it just keeps coming back. It's funny. I know it sounds weird, But it's funny. Bronson couldn't stop giggling when we read it. Another beautifully illustrated book. I have so many more I could share with you. I just wanted to see how you liked this episode in general. I wanted to make it a little bit more experimental. If you want more books on writing, if you want more books on other subjects, I could give them. I know I also reread Stephen King's book on writing what a phenomenal book that is. Stephen King is such an interesting person. None of it is about horror. It's all just about his experience as a writer. So that's interesting as well. And again, my mind is there because my book comes out next year. And also writer's workshop next year. If you want more information, email us about that. And also just because when we're talking about reading books and educating ourselves and improving, it's important to remember there's no better way to do that than applying. And so for me, writing, especially my next book, is what helped me learn more than anything else, writing and teaching, doing our workshops constantly, and doing our in-service is constantly, that's how you learn. putting skin in the game, not just harvesting information, not just reading more books or downloading more podcasts. Get out there and teach it. Ride it. Get your ideas down. Those things help you strip away the fluff and simplify your idea and get it to its core. Okay. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you had great holidays.

Please, again, check out our events for next year. Go to artofcoaching.com slash events. We're hosting a lot of them in Phoenix. Remember, we do in-services as well. So if you'd like to bring us in to do a workshop with your team, whether that's speaker school, whether that's conflict resolution and leadership, whether that's our business stuff, we'd be honored.

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