Announcing that about 30 of Angus McLeod’s coaching papers are now downloadable from this site including one written with Olympian, James Cracknell. If you want to know more about Emotional Intelligence, the use of Reflective-Silence, Mindsets or developing coaching in organisations, here is your resource. And there is much more! Take a look now.

Remember too that we have a lot of free video-shorts available for both coaches and managers – see  ‘Coach Smarter‘ and ‘Manage Smarter‘ (links also at the top of the page).

A coach gets very attached to life and change but for over five years I have also enjoyed the regular and predictable visits to my tyre-fitter and other local retailers. My tyres have been fitted by ‘Nod’. First from his garage in Malvern, then near Upton. The routine of these visits was pretty standard, but Nod was fine about talking while at work and we exchanged small talk. Over time we learned more and more about each-other’s issues, aspirations and history because we were both expanding the box, rather than trapped in the safe stuff. An hour ago I called in and Nod was not there. When I asked his son how he is, Matt said that Nod is not well, in fact “he has cancer and does not have long to go”. The routine of tyre-fiting was the same but the experience was diminished, not only because of the fact of Nod dying, but because the level of human interchange I’d enjoyed with Nod was gone forever.

I have been talking and writing about my ‘Human at Work’ theme for over a year and Nod’s final illness has lessons for coaches and everyone. Its not enough just to perform at work – when we risk to bring our humanity into work, the value, trust and warmth that humanity engenders creates deeper, more productive co-work. And it does all that without the political agendas that suck the life and productivity out of organisations. Nod had this ability to bring his humanity into work in spades. Its for the rest of us to step-up and bring these qualities into our work too. It’s for coaches and managers everywhere not to be fixated just by targets, but to recognize that great coaching/management is also about engendering focus on people-well-being and the development of the soft-skills that make all of us more impactful, authentic and team-players at work.

Angus

AMA Coaching School starts the 2012 Coach Mastermind launch on TUESDAY the 17th of January at 18:30.

The Coach MasterMind Group is the second one we are running to support coaches who want to grow their business from coaching in 2012. Your mentors are marketing and experts in coaching-businesses including: Angus McLeod, Amechi Udo, Martin Cornes and Beth Sobiloff. Each Mastermind Group is limited to SEVEN coaches so the coach gets real focus marketing and business strategy. There will be FOUR sessions of an hour each.

FREE extras include: a Coaching Tool booklet with 15 coaching tools (written by authors Angus McLeod and Will Thomas)

PLUS a coach’s ‘Business and Marketing Development’ Programme (stipulate life or Executive when you enrol). You get all FOUR sessions and the all the extras as well for less than £25 a session! Go to this page and choose LIFE or EXECUTIVE to catch this fantastic chance quickly or BUY now below!

Buy Life- Development Programme and ALL Mastermind sessions, now £97.00

Buy Executive- Development Programme and ALL Mastermind sessions, now £97.00

N.B. The link page above also includes a video of the recent ‘Market or Die #2 Webinar with FREE information for coaches wanting to boost their coaching business in 2012! Link Page

You are a coach wanting business success…

Now is the time to make 2012 work for you as it already is working for me.

• Get 4 x mastermind group sessions (start 10th January at 18:30 GMT)
• Get support from top coaches: Amechi Udo, Martin Cornes, Beth Sobiloff and Angus McLeod
• Get over 50 page workbook with 15 coaching tools
• Get a seven-step programme to be successful at high rates of income – learn from my success and from my mistakes!

Look here to sign up

If you are an independent coach and want more business in 2012 – join us FREE on Tuesday January 3^rd at 18:30 GMT for a success webinar for coaching success. Find out about the SEVEN key steps to coaching-business success and get a free bonus coaching resource (over 50 pages of tools) for signing up! This is the second in the series and we will be focussing most of the webinar on two of the SEVEN key steps!

We will also let you know how you can get a month-long support group (focussing on a few coaches) to turn your plans into reality for a ridiculously ‘new year spirit’ price! Join us!

http://amacoachingschool.org/mod-webinar-two

Part of our ‘Human at Work’ series, the full slide-show has memorable and striking images by Daniel LeClair for Reuters. You can see the slide-show below. There are many lessons for coaches and coaching-executives but the concept of giving and taking is one I explore here.

A number of self-help and charitable groups work in Honduras and elsewhere to try and eleviate the enormous problems of poverty and child deprivation. In Honduras, the President’s wife puts on old jeans and joins helpers to help in the middle of the night. In every walk of life we have givers and takers. In Honduras the povety-stricken may have good excuses for receiving, when they do. But in our lives, what has made our culture so self-centred and selfish to the extent that ‘me first’ darkens almost all human behaviour from the super-market to the street. The coaching mindset is a force for change.

Professional coaches are net-givers not net-takers. If you see a greedy coach, you are unlucky. The Performance Coaching mindset is one of service, and many of us think of Greenleaf’s idea of the ‘Servant Leader’ on which to found our working practices. So, what if many more of us took these mindsets into more areas of our life-experience? What do you think you will see happening around you?

Let’s help make that cultural shift. Against all odds I still believe that you cannot shine darkness into the world, but you can shine light and make a difference that matters. Be a net-giver.

Angus

See the whole slideshow

As part of our ‘Human at Work’ series you may want to see a slide-show from after the Japanese Tsunami. With lessons to coaches and coaching-executives, the spirit of Japanese people in adversary is hard to match. See the slide-show below. With continuous fire-fighting all of us are susceptible to getting small stuff out of proportion. Reminding ourselves that our glass needs to be half-full and not half-empty is a healthy perspective to hold on to and we can thank Kahlil Gibran for that. “How bad is bad?” & “Calibrate ‘bad for me’?” are good responses to negative thinking about our working predicaments. From calibration comes fresh perspective. From that fresh perspective, the coach in us will look to the first achievable target towards the desired outcome or goal. Things are rarely as bad as we make them.

Angus

see the slideshow

This Blog is part of our ‘Human at Work’ series.

A slide-show of striking native pictures has lessons for coaches and executives alike. You can see the slide-show below. When Richard Moraes first tried to go in with Brazilian Health Expeditions to bring medical help to the tribes, they often stayed away as the people were frightened. Stories abounded about the white people taking your eyes and replacing them with horse eyes. Fear was rife.The slide-show has stunning pictures showing the results of their breakthrough. For coaches and coaching executives, the story is a metaphor for some of the people who more-or-less trust us, who are more-or-less anxious when with us. What mindset and behaviours should we bring to our work to put others in a good mental and emotional state to perform and have wellbeing at work? For performance coaches the answer is in personal growth. Often, as we know, therapists and pschologists are attracted to their professions as part of their own need to fix themselves. No doubt some coaches are the same.

Our clients and colleagues at work deserve better than that. We need people, coaches and executives who are grown up and do not feel a need to be ‘one-up’ or who feel threatened by others. The people around us grow faster when we have already gone some way along our own development journey.

Angus

see the slide-show yourself

A free new article on the trainingzone website ‘Online-learning-journeys’ has been viewed 488 times in under 7 hours! Now you can view it for free too. Learn this and more:

• The process, language and the interpretive demands on the learner must be appropriate to them.
• Remaining committed to web-based learning is more of a challenge to those who like to work near others.
• Make sure there are milestones and to congratulate learners when they move to a new module/unit after successfully completing their previous one

Learn more about established e-learning journeys for skills and knowldege development at the AMACS website.

One hour of your time – have you been inspired by someone?

Inspiration is a small and uneccessary aspect of leadership. If you have it, you are probably lucky or just highly developed as a human. But do our coachees develop inspiration in others? A key to this which I borrow from coaching senior executives for over a decade is the observation that inspiration, like charisma or ‘a brand’, mainly works easily in a new environment. If you do grow and develop inspirational charcteristics then these will invariably have more impact if you take them into another arena of work – by moving job into a wholly new environment. In other words, people often put us in boxes and once in, it is darned hard to get out! Yes, there are exceptions and these exceptions are themselves typically ‘exceptional’ e.g. where an individual comes to sudden prominence by doing something truly remarkable.

Now we have a chance to learn more about inspiration and the character of it in a more structured way by participating in the research work of Laura Murphy. If you have felt inspired by someone at work and both you and your ‘inspirer’ are potential interviewees (about an hour each) then do please contact Laura as below.

Laura Murphy is undertaking research on inspirational leadership with a view to publication and is focusing on the values aspect of leadership instead of looking at the usual leadership traits and styles.  She wishes to identify people who have been inspired by someone they have worked with and to interview both the inspired and “inspirer”, separately. In some instances the two would have been in the same company at the time and for others the “inspirer” was someone external to the company. If you are willing to be interviewed or just want to find out a bit more before you commit yourself, then Laura can be contacted on info@mtc2.co.uk.  She’s already interviewed a number of people but the more she can speak to the more robust the research.

Here’s a link so you can find out more about her:  http://www.mtc2.co.uk/about-us/associates/profiles/Laura-Murphy.xalter

I would encourage you to help Laura in expanding the research in this new and exciting area of work.

Angus

Visiting Professor of Coaching and,

External Supervisor of Research at Birmingham City University