About the book

The Coaching Shift: How A Coaching Mindset and Skills Can Change You, Your Interactions, and the World Around You offers practical guidance on how to adopt a coaching mindset and how to build a coaching skill set to unlock better communication, stronger relationships, and high performance in others.

Accessible and practical, the book draws on research from coaching, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and industrial-organizational psychology to provide the best science-based practices that can be applied in work and life. It presents core coaching skills that anyone can develop and use to improve their own emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and interactions with others. It uses levels of analysis to help readers think about key concepts first in relation to themselves, and then in 1:1 interactions, group and team dynamics, organizational-level impact, and beyond. The book offers specific and tangible advice for readers to develop their coaching and communication skills, while also developing a deeper understanding of themselves.

The Coaching Shift, with its clear tone, anecdotal references, and practical application, will be essential reading for coaches in practice and in training, and for academics and students of coaching and coaching psychology. These concepts and practices are also relevant for anyone who wants to have more effective interactions with others.

Meet the authors

Shonna D. Waters, PhD, is an organizational psychologist, technologist, leadership coach, and part-time professor at Georgetown University, USA. She spent her career conducting research and consulting on people and organizational systems. She is an executive at BetterUp, where she works to scale human transformation. Shonna also authored The Practical Guide to HR Analytics.

Brodie Gregory Riordan, PhD, is an industrial psychologist, executive coach, and part-time professor at Georgetown University, USA. Her career includes global leadership roles at Procter & Gamble, CEB, and McKinsey & Company. She manages Ocular, a coaching and consulting practice based in Washington, DC, and is an executive coach with The Boda Group. Brodie also authored Feedback Fundamentals and Evidence-Based Best Practices.

"I thought I knew what it meant to be a great coach – then I read Coaching Skills and it changed everything.”

— Andrew Biga, Chief People Officer at GoHealth Urgent Care

Other books by the authors

  • the coaching shift

    Feedback Fundamentals and Evidence-Based Best Practices

    Brodie Gregory Riordan, Ph.D.

  • Using Feedback in Organizational Consulting

    Brodie Gregory Riordan, Ph.D.

  • the coaching shift

    The Practical Guide to HR Analytics

    Shonna D. Waters, Ph.D.