Book Group

"Here at Network First, we all have a common frustration with the increasingly toxic social media environment that is consuming ever larger amounts of time and energy, and even fragmenting our attention and making it harder to concentrate. While failing to create a sense of connection and build trust.

When it comes to building connection, and trust there’s no better place to start than with yourself, and good book can help you get into a space that helps you to build your internal library of ideas, emotions, and perceptions and organise them around the ideas presented in the book. And deep reading helps us to rebuild our ability to focus.

Book clubs have been around for long time as a great way to build friendships in your local community with people who have a shared love of reading – but it’s hard to see how fiction can help us in our professional lives. Non-fiction books, on the other hand, tend to be written and organised around a single purpose – to educate the reader on a specific topic that can help them to grow.

But it’s not enough to just read a non-fiction book and hope that it will bring about the change you need. You have to work on the ideas – reflecting on how they apply in your own work, or in your own life, and what changes you’re going to make as a result of reading the book.

And so I’d like to suggest we schedule some meetings under the title of “Self-improving book club”, starting off with discussion on books that can help us to reflect on themes that are aligned with the Network First Manifesto, before branching out into more specialist areas as suggested by attendees.

As there's no telling when you will feel compelled to read a non-fiction book, it is not mandatory to read the book before each session. Rather: each session will be organised around a single book, either that you have read, or would like to read, or that’s similar in topic to books you have read. After a short introduction to the book (by someone who has read it), participants will then break off into groups of, ideally 4 or 5 people, to share reflections on what they’ve learned, and how they are applying the learning in the context of their lives and there’s an emphasis on ensuring that everyone has a chance to speak, and through speaking, to find their voice in relation to the topic discussed in the book, and through finding their voice - to feel more empowered to act on the learnings of the book. "