My official start date was April 1, but it wasn’t an April Fool’s prank: I have officially joined the Alliance coaching partnership! In a way, it still doesn’t feel quite real. It’s such a privilege to be asked to join this close-knit group of experienced business coaches in their (or rather, as I should say now, ‘our’!) extremely successful partnership/business that I can hardly believe it’s happened. Yet at the same time, because everyone has been so welcoming and inclusive, both individually and as a team, I feel I’ve been on board for ages. I must make sure I don’t get too comfortable too quickly, as one of the things I’ve promised to bring is a fresh perspective!
New Doors Open: Joining The Alliance
Category: business coaching |
Tags: Alliance, caring business, coaching, corporate clients, executive caoching, nancy kline, team
Financial Times Guide to Business Coaching
Business coaching: what it is, why it works, how to do it, when to do it (and when not to). Plus, critically, how to make money doing it. One of the Financial Times Guide to Business Coaching’s biggest assets is it covers all this and more in a single, elegantly written volume. It is genuinely a one-stop shop for relatively new players in the coaching game, and the more experienced coaches I’ve spoken to have also gained much from reading it. At this point, in the interests of full disclosure, I should reveal that I published this book and that the author, Anne Scoular, has since become a generous mentor and friend. Which brings me on to one of the book’s other outstanding hallmarks: Anne’s voice. Read more
How to make sure you achieve what you want
Following a great response to my previous blog post inspired by my Direct Line for Business calendar, I’ve looked to March’s page for inspiration. The suggestion for this month is to have no more than three priorities at any one time, on the grounds that ‘identifying three priorities will enable you to work with focus and pace and, over time, deliver far more than if you tried to do ten things at once’. This sounds like intrinsic common sense and the reason it particularly resonates with me is that it echoes a recent conversation I had with a super-successful businesswoman. Read more
Eat that Frog! by Brian Tracy
Eat that Frog! is my favourite book on productivity, and I often find myself rereading it in January, to remind myself of the disciplines and practices I’d like to follow in the coming year. While there are 21 tips in the book, these are really just variations on a few key themes. These themes are all based on one commonsense insight that pulls away the shrouds of illusion from our desire to ‘catch up’: there is never enough time to do everything you have to do. No matter how many personal productivity techniques you master, there will always be more to do than you can accomplish in the time available. Selecting what we actually do amidst the panapoly of things we could do is critical. As Brian Tracy puts it: ‘You can get control of your tasks and activities only to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few activities that can really make a difference.’ Read more