Here is Simon’s recommended reading list related to teaching, coaching, learning and performance. Simon references these works during instructor training and talks.
- Bounce: Matthew Syed
- Outstanding and accessible introduction to success in sport
- Ex-british number 1 table tennis player debunks the myth of talent
- Champions the power of purposeful practice
- Shows how 10,000 hours or 10 years of purposeful and dedicated practice are required to be world-class
- The Art of Resilience (strategies for an unbreakable mind and body): Ross Edgley
- Brilliantly written book about The Great British Swim where Ross swam 1780 miles around the UK coastline in 157 days
- Discusses resilience, stoicism, strength and stamina
- Advocates controlling the controllables and accepting the uncontrollables
- Mindset: Dr Carol S. Dweck
- The seminal guide to discovering the mindset for achieving success
- Encourages growth mindsets over fixed mindsets
- Explains why spending time learning is better than spending time ‘proving you are smart’
- Unlocks success, failure, change and growth
- Practice Perfect (42 rules for getting better at getting better): Doug Lemnov, Erica Woolway & Katie Yezzi
- 3 educational experts show how practice makes ‘permanent’, not ‘perfect’
- Describes how practice should be designed and how we should focus on solutions, not problems
- Shows how aiming at creative goals is better than remaining in a comfort zone
- Black Box Thinking (the surprising truth about success): Matthew Syed
- Inspiring book showing how significant learning and progress can be derived from failure
- Highlights differences in attitudes and responses to failure in medicine and the airline industry
- Illuminates how failure drives innovation and gains in performance
- #NOW (the surprising truth about the power of now): Dr Max McKeown
- How to nurture a nowist mindset
- Shows how there is little need to get every smallest part worked out: ‘computations may know the sums of everything and the meaning of nothing’
- Highlights how you can only directly think, do or change anything at the point of now
- References Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a theory of psychological motivation
- Suggests how feeling confident and powerful makes you more likely to take positive action
- The Chimp Paradox: Prof Steve Peters
- Explains how your limbic brain (‘Chimp’) interprets info with feelings and impressions, then uses emotional thinking to put things together and form a plan of action
- Compares this to your human (frontal brain) and how it interprets info searching for facts and establishing truths then uses logical thinking to put things together and form a plan of action
- The Chimp (like a voice in your head) can draw on your valuable energy resources by drawing you into negativity, anger, disappointment, anxiety and failure
- It can also give you a chance to succeed by positively interpreting failure
- The Natural Health Service (what the great outdoors can do for your mind): Isabel Hardman
- A warm and clear look at how being outdoors and participating in outdoor pursuits can be good for general and mental health and provide useful benefits against anxiety and depression
- Champions the restorative power of the great outdoors including being in and around water