I often get asked about my own experience of having a coach by my coaching clients, especially as in the UK coaching is still a (largely unregulated and) relatively new profession. A lot of my coach training and credentialing process was designed to enhance the professionalism of coaching as a practice with lots of different applications, and I love hearing about what the contexts in which other coaches work: from health, fitness and nutrition coaching…
Tag: coaching
This week I passed my final exam and earned my ACC credential from the International Coaching Federation! It’s taken me two and a half years to achieve this milestone, so there’s much to celebrate. Coach Training complete, for now I’ve reflected previously on my coach training journey and I remain very impressed with the overall process (even though the final proctored exam made my edtech heart bleed). Initially I was focused on using coaching approaches…
Recently, I have done much work in leadership development. Both in the workplace and when I coach clients, I come across emerging and established leaders who have developed strengths and skills gradually over time, whether through informal learning or through practice or also outside of work. Especially where skills have come easily, grown over a period of time or when we have learnt something just for fun, these are often overlooked in favour of those…
When I first started coach training, I set myself the goal to offer walking sessions for my clients. My thinking is that pretty much all of my favourite coaching and mentoring conversations happened when walking, either outdoors or pacing up and down in my office. I like moving whilst thinking, and I like talking and walking… . I take walking meetings, and walking catch ups, so walking whilst coaching feels like a natural extension of…
This month I am celebrating a big milestone moment on my coaching journey. After two years of training and 100+ hours of coaching with over 20 clients I am set to formally complete the ACC credential of the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Thanks to Katie Linder’s Higher Ed Coach Training, I have now completed all mandatory training to become an ICF Associate Certified Coach. Completing the training and gaining the requisite experience in formal coaching hours means…
I made a fun discovery today: It’s now been over ten years since I started this list of things I have done. Wow! I had no idea it had been that long, and seeing those entries from 2013 made me pause and reflect on the habit of keeping the list, a decade in the making. Why did I start tracking progress in this way? My archive page is a lot like a personal vault. If…
It’s been great fun this week to head up to Edinburgh to facilitate an away day for a senior leadership team at the university, and I wanted to share a few snippets of what made the day really memorable for me. The focus for the day was all about hybrid working and leading people and projects in a continually changing context, managing the enduring impact of lockdown working alongside emerging policies and priorities. Here are…
Yep, this is another post about houseplants… or rather things we can learn from plants. I’ve previously published leadership lessons from office plants and in the same spirit this post is all about houseplant inspired tips for managing a period of change or transition. It’s inspired by my own experience of moving between jobs this month and my adventures in caring for a growing collecting of plants in my home and home office. It’s the…
As I write this, I am preparing to step down as CEO of ALT. The handover to ALT’s new CEO, Billy Smith, will formally conclude at the AGM during our Annual Conference on 6th September, and I hope to see many Members on the day in Warwick, and also online. Guests are most welcome, and if you’d like to watch the AGM, you can register now. I am very grateful to have had a month…
This academic year I am looking forward to working with many new clients, most of whom are new to coaching. The questions I get asked most often by new clients or those considering giving coaching a go, are… ‘What is a coaching session like?’, ‘What should I expect from the first session?’, ‘How should I prepare?’ and also ‘How can I make the most of it?’. In this post, I have brought together answers and…