Celebrating 10 years, our 400th post ... and what next!
Dear tgc community,
I hope that everyone has had a good start to 2023 and that several readers and members have enjoyed the quick succession of welcoming in the western and lunar (Chinese) new year! It feels like 2023 starts now for many as they come off what might be considered a 'normal' break.
Firstly, we're delighted to share the following three blogs we're looking forward to publishing from next week and making the good coach's announcement for change in 2023,
The first piece leading 2023, is written by Charlotte Murray, one of the founding members of the good coach, an international Fortune 500 executive turned technology entrepreneur, and most recently Chief Coaching Officer at the virtual startup accelerator Propel, Canada. I've been fortunate to observe and witness the fantastic way she is transforming coaching, starting with not knowing that is what she does to making it the core business for succeeding in the start-up world. She is, in my opinion, one of the young leaders in today's coaching world who is doing coaching at scale: we need to learn more from her and support her in her engagements to understand better how we each can make coaching work for us, and in her latest blog she shares how she got to where she is today.
Pradip Shroff, a former CEO of Johnson & Johnson Ltd India and now CEO Coach and active member of CFI, writes the second piece and shares his methodology and approach to team coaching. His approach and integrity, and the presence of the way he makes his team coaching methodology work for the team projects he is contracted to work on, are developed from his insights from other's written work, several decades of business and people experience, and a bigger picture of how to make coaching work in groups and individually with transparency, consensus and positive competition. Pradip's coaching capacity and sophistication, in the way he wields it with humility, is something we can all learn from and with gratitude.
The third piece is written by Andrew Parrock, an internal coach and lead at the British civil service, who scrutinises the fundamental characteristics of coaching that impacts the quality of work a coach can deliver. In his first three-part series, he wants to get to grips with where confidence comes from, how it can betray us as coaches at various stages of our coaching journey, and connects it to neuroscience. This lays an evidence trail for some of our interventions and with meticulous detail and consideration, he works through what confidence is and how it impacts our work as a coach written from the perspective of an experienced coach. This should give us confidence (no pun intended) to apply those relevant insights in our work. Standing on the shoulders of giants, like Andrew's, is something I am thankful for.
Moving forward
What we're excited to share with everyone is… we are celebrating our 10th anniversary, and we want to thank everyone who has been part of the journey, from contributing to reading what we have earnestly published on the good coach platform.
It has also allowed me to reflect deeply on what we have been doing at the good coach and look back at some of the historical documents, references, and advisors who have helped shape and supervise the good coach into what you all see today. For all those who have recently joined the good coach, we have been going since April 2012, and we have gone through some evolutions as I clarified and amplified the purpose and intention of the good coach. And like any new start-up, there were teething challenges of identifying what it should be whilst competing with the need to earn money through coaching. But, in 2013, I was given the confidence by my peers to shift and sit in my strengths and the strengths of others to be where we are today.
For sure, it is different from where we started. However, we are now a more sophisticated platform with a better understanding of what the good coach can do and deliver: to share how we as coaches are using our experiences and available knowledge to make sense of what makes us professionally competent as a coach and thriving in our work. And in addition, being rigorous in what we do and bravely share our practice with peers and other individuals curious about what it is we write. This has also led to marketplace opportunities through another avenue that encourages professionalism, evidence-based, anecdotal experience, and personal development as another way to sincerely brand and market their work guided and sponsored by the good coach.
Furthermore, the good coach is dedicated to using the medium of writing to discuss our practice. I have had requests from others for alternative mediums. Still, I have made a conscious decision that writing needs to be the way forward for any practitioner who wants to belong to tgc community because of the immense benefits writing offers anyone who wants to understand their practice and be able to retain ownership, and IP, of their work in the Knowledge Economy we belong to. Otherwise, we can quickly become irrelevant if we give that away too freely or unconsciously for others to use and sell back to us as something we need. This decision may make the good coach obsolete because of the hurdles of writing. However, at the good coach, I have been working as well with fellow volunteering blogitors (i.e. editors) to work with coaching practitioners to support, encourage and enable anyone who has come through intending to share their strengths and insights of coaching to make the experience of writing as fun and as rewarding as it can be and also take a coaching approach till the blog is completed.
Importantly, all of the work, the publishing of blogs and editorial work on the good coach is a free service served from a private community initiative open to everyone who wishes to be part of it, with all of the infrastructure maintained on a shoestring. This is why at the good coach, we are continuously grateful to our regular and new coaching practitioners who choose to write about their practice and allow us to publish it on our platform. We rely on the goodwill, curiosity and similar aspirations of those coaches who write and work with the good coach for us to mutually benefit and scale the benefits of coaching organically with the markets we attract.
What next…
Moving forward and strategically thinking of where we can be in the next ten years (if I can be bold enough to see that far ahead), we look to continue working towards our mission and at the same time, the publishing schedule will be slightly different and perhaps disrupted for a year or two until we re-discover our next equilibrium of what we can offer and our community is looking for. As I had briefly mentioned in last year's post, one of the projects that I will be working on, and drawing from all the posts published on the good coach, is my first authored book called 'Becoming a coach'. My desire to write this book is to offer a way to continue developing our coaching practice, drawing upon my practitioner research, coaching experiences and blogs from the good coach, and suggest a way for us to each map our professional and personal development as a 'good' coach with professionalism and rigour. Writing this book will also provide a context and an underpinning of the philosophy that shapes the good coach. From time to time, I will share excerpts from the book on the good coach to be accountable. As this is meaningful to me (and my decision to declare this to the tgc community), my dedicated time to focus on the publishing side will be significantly reduced whilst maintaining the same energy and dedication as your in-house editor.
What that means, for now, is that I will optimise the automation available in the publishing process. I will only be publishing all the blogs on our social media platform and, for now, cease to send out a weekly newsletter. I'm not sure if this is the right decision. However, I hope the community will be patient with me until I can find the time to bring back all the forms of engagement when my time frees up again to keep up with the regular communication you have come to expect. When we come back with our newsletter, I'll email you to check if you would still like to be part of the subscriber community. In the meantime, please bookmark the good coach and use your various notifications, RSS feed, and media clippings to keep up to date with the daily blogs we post on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. And, if you would like to keep up-to-date on what the good coach is doing, please subscribe below and over the forthcoming year, and I'd be delighted to keep you updated.
And as I close out this post, I wish everyone an excellent 2023, and I hope that in whatever you set your mind and focus on, choose to work hard and diligently towards, luck and opportunities will come your way to make it a reality! Have a wonderful year and please continue reading what we publish on the good coach and challenge yourself to write something about your practice that you're most proud of achieving in coaching.
Warmly, Yvonne
