Hello , I am just in time for January, but perhaps a little late to be saying Happy New Year, although of course I do wish that for you. 

I have a couple of tips today that I hope you'll find useful.  

You know how we all get bombarded with emails and offers purporting to change our lives, and how it can start to feel, same old, same old?  I get that a lot, but recently I came across what I think is going to be a real gem. I saw an advert, I think on Linked In, from Anne-Johan Willemsen (known as AJ) of TopMind, offering book summaries, business building advice and even a full length book, all for free. 

So I had a look and it's very sound, especially the book. I'm now on his list and everything he sends is valuable. I can't read it all at once, with what we've got going on here but I have read half the book and have saved everything else for when I have a minute. 

That's not all. He has developed a tracking app, which sends prompts to clients, every day if you like ( Marshall Goldsmith, the top executive coach in the world, swears by this method and gets question prompts sent to himself every day) and therefore keeps the clients' goals and agreed actions 'top of mind', producing much better outcomes. There's a free trial and today he's doing a demo of it for me, so that I can try it out and see if it is something I would like to offer to my clients. 

I'll report back next month! 

If you've ever gone through the accreditation process wth any of the professional coaching bodies, you'll know what an intensive and time consuming activity it can be! I'm aware that my accreditation runs out in July, and thought to myself, if it's going to take as long as before, I'd better get started! I don't want to let it go, and I want to keep my options open. 

So I was delighted to find that the renewal with the Association for Coaching is nothing like as extensive as getting the initial accreditation. I need to update my CPD log, for one thing, but that is a good thing to do anyway, in respect of ongoing reflection. 

This led me to wonder what is the experience of others around accreditation or certification. Do you have ICF, for example? This can be very time consuming, from what I have heard, and in fact this is what Reciprocoach was initially set up to help with. You'll recall that it's an international community of coaches offering peer coaching, supervision, mentoring, research reports and online tools at very affordable rates, and is particularly useful for those going through ICF certification levels.