Continuing your Professional Development as a Coach in 2023

A woodcutter strained to saw down a tree.  A young man who was watching asked “What are you doing?”

“Are you blind?” the woodcutter replied. “I’m cutting down this tree.”

The young man was unabashed. “You look exhausted! Take a break. Sharpen your saw.”

The woodcutter explained to the young man that he had been sawing for hours and did not have time to take a break.

The young man pushed back… “If you sharpen the saw, you would cut down the tree much faster.”

The woodcutter said “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw. Don’t you see I’m too busy?”

Recently, Liz and I were discussing the first time we both came across this short fable, and how it made us reflect upon the importance of continuing to pause and take the time to ‘sharpen our saw’ as coaches.

This year, more than ever, we have truly experienced the realities of being coaches in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) and this has brought into sharp contrast the need for us to keep fit for purpose. Without space to recover and grow, we will be coaching from a place of reactivity.

Self-care is one way we do this; the other is our ongoing personal development process.  

At the start of 2023, you may now naturally be pausing and considering how you will ‘sharpen your saw’ this year. To support you and our Alumni, we want to share some resources and options for your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) with us. Please see below for details of these opportunities.

Our annual gathering / CPD event in 2023

Please save the date for our next Annual Gathering (Alumni CPD event): 7 July 2023.

The theme for this year is Coaching Lenses and we will be offering a variety of CPD sessions on various psychological modalities, e.g., Neuropsychology, Existential psychology, Positive Psychology to name a few.

This will again be a virtual event as a result of the success and impact of our previous events — and hosting it online will also ensure that our alumni who are not based in London can join us. We hope you will join us.

You can learn more about the event and apply to join it here.

Reconnect, Deepen and Practise sessions

Working as a coach can be a lonely experience, and once you have completed your qualification, it can be difficult to get ongoing, high-quality feedback on your practice with which to hone and extend your skills as a coach and meet with a strong peer group.

Our ‘Reconnect, Deepen and Practise’ sessions aim to meet these needs. They have been developed based on our recent experiences of bringing several groups of our alumni back together to enable them to undertake some CPD, connect, develop and practise in a safe and non-judgemental environment.

The sessions will also provide you with opportunities to stretch and develop new skills and approaches and to work with other experienced coaches. 

For more information, please follow this link.

join a Free Online bite sized CPD session

Since our inception, we have been delivering free webinars on a variety of coaching and mindfulness topics and we will continue to do this during 2023. 

Our schedule for next year is now live on our website — please click here for more information.

All our previous webinars are available on our Youtube channel. Make sure you subscribe to it (click the subscribe button and then the bell icon) to get updated whenever we publish new video content on coaching and mindfulness.

Coaching supervision

If you are looking for 1-2-1 Supervision or hoping to join a group, do take a look at the Coaching Supervision services we offer.

Free Weekly Guided Mindfulness Sessions

To deepen your resourcefulness and presence as a Coach, and to help you pause and reset at the start of each week, from 16 January 2023, we will be continuing to offer a free guided online mindfulness practice most Mondays at 8am UK (GMT) time. Each mindfulness practice will last up to 30 minutes.

You can learn more about these here, or register for the sessions here.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the mindfulness sessions and a link for doing so — you can use the same link each week.

Deepen your professional development and accreditation as a Coach 

You may be considering your next development route as a professional coach.This may include:

• deepening your coaching practice to work transformationally as a coach 
• achieving the EMCC Global EIA Certification as a Practitioner or Senior Practitioner 
• journeying with a strong peer group 

We will be continuing to offer our advanced blended and fully online transformational coach training courses – just visit the coach training section of our website for more information.