What does it take to build a strong personal brand?
Why is this so crucial in today's crowded marketplaces?
What social media tools are recommended?
How long does it take?

Today, Anna Rydne, a Communications and Personal Branding Expert shares her first-hand experiences, successes and insights with you. 

Are we continue to crank up our Coach For Impact! Expert Coaches series, we've prepared a short written and audio guide to help ensure that each guest's appearance on our show is as smooth, relaxing and valuable as possible for the guest while also making sure that each guest's appearance is as entertaining and valuable as possible for our listeners.

We cover:

1. What to Expect
2. Pre-interview Scheduling & Arrangements
3. Interview Equipment & Procedures
4. Post-Editing Production And Release

We're always interested in interviewing expert coaches and related experts on a wide range of topics including skills acquisition, training methods, market trends, marketing, business development and related topics that will provide our readers and listeners unique insights or actionable advice in building or growing their coaching practices or coaching skill sets.

Our readers and listeners are primarily composed of six main segments:
1. Seasoned and successful coaches who want to stay out in front and on top of their game.
2. Seasoned coaches looking to step up and move their coaching skills & practices to the next level.
3. Part-time coaches looking to transition from part-time work to full-time coaching.
4. Newly minted coaches looking to establish or build out a practice.
5. Prospective coaches looking to gather information to see if coaching is right for them.
6. Corporate HR and Line Managers interested to discover the value that coaches can bring to
    their organization as well as interested to learn how to select a coach that best meets their
    or their organization's needs.
 
Our monthly unique visitors currently ranges between 3,000 to 4,000 uniques and in recent months, this has consistently been trending upwards and we expect it to continue to grow as we add deep and unique content.

The Coach For Impact!™ Expert Interview Series continues with Adam Markus a Graduate Admissions Guru and Coach.

The Coach For Impact!™ expert interview series kicks off with Denis Roberts, founder of The Networking Firm.

Denis Roberts Profile:
Today's guest is Denis Roberts (based in London), an Organizational Psychologist and founder of The Networking Firm.
The Networking Firm is a virtual organization primarily composed of consultants and coaches and which has an objective of developing a sustainable collaborative network of independent professional service practices and which also has a virtual action learning community.

Topics Discussed Include:
Where coaching has been
Where coaching is going
The trend and movements to self-employment
Disruptive technology and its impact on bricks and mortars
How to unleash the earning power of coaches and consultants (from 50% of their value to 85%)
Sustainable collaborative networks
Development and sustaining of an action learning community
Comparison of face-to-face learning and virtual learning
Tribal Leadership

We're happy to announce that the new High-Impact Coaching membership badges are now available for APCA members in good-standing. 

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A very thought-provoking article on the value of competition, winning, losing and "participation" trophies.

- APCA Editor


New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
Losing Is Good for You

By Ashely Merryman
Published: September 24, 2013

LOS ANGELES — AS children return to school this fall and sign up for a new year’s worth of extracurricular activities, parents should keep one question in mind. Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the program organizers this: “Which kids get awards?” If the answer is, “Everybody gets a trophy,” find another program.

Trophies were once rare things — sterling silver loving cups bought from jewelry stores for truly special occasions. But in the 1960s, they began to be mass-produced, marketed in catalogs to teachers and coaches, and sold in sporting-goods stores.

Today, participation trophies and prizes are almost a given, as children are constantly assured that they are winners. One Maryland summer program gives awards every day — and the “day” is one hour long. In Southern California, a regional branch of the American Youth Soccer Organization hands out roughly 3,500 awards each season — each player gets one, while around a third get two. Nationally, A.Y.S.O. local branches typically spend as much as 12 percent of their yearly budgets on trophies.

It adds up: trophy and award sales are now an estimated $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada.

Po Bronson and I have spent years reporting on the effects of praise and rewards on kids. The science is clear. Awards can be powerful motivators, but nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve.

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found that kids respond positively to praise; they enjoy hearing that they’re talented, smart and so on. But after such praise of their innate abilities, they collapse at the first experience of difficulty. Demoralized by their failure, they say they’d rather cheat than risk failing again.

In recent eye-tracking experiments by the researchers Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall, kids were asked to draw pictures. Those who heard praise suggesting they had an innate talent were then twice as fixated on mistakes they’d made in their pictures.

By age 4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.

It turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and uncertainty of real competition may become the activity’s very appeal.

If children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never obstacles to begin with?

If I were a baseball coach, I would announce at the first meeting that there would be only three awards: Best Overall, Most Improved and Best Sportsmanship. Then I’d hand the kids a list of things they’d have to do to earn one of those trophies. They would know from the get-go that excellence, improvement, character and persistence were valued.

It’s accepted that, before punishing children, we must consider their individual levels of cognitive and emotional development. Then we monitor them, changing our approach if there’s a negative outcome. However, when it comes to rewards, people argue that kids must be treated identically: everyone must always win. That is misguided. And there are negative outcomes. Not just for specific children, but for society as a whole.

In June, an Oklahoma Little League canceled participation trophies because of a budget shortfall. A furious parent complained to a local reporter, “My children look forward to their trophy as much as playing the game.” That’s exactly the problem, says Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me.”

Having studied recent increases in narcissism and entitlement among college students, she warns that when living rooms are filled with participation trophies, it’s part of a larger cultural message: to succeed, you just have to show up. In college, those who’ve grown up receiving endless awards do the requisite work, but don’t see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that attendance is all it takes to get a promotion.

In life, “you’re going to lose more often than you win, even if you’re good at something,” Ms. Twenge told me. “You’ve got to get used to that to keep going.”

When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin destined for landfills. We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children’s lives.

This school year, let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose.

Ashley Merryman is the author, with Po Bronson, of “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children” and “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing.”

We are pleased to announce that Career OverDrive! is now a proud sponsor of the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance. Career OverDrive! specializes in career acceleration and expert advice.

We are pleased to announce that Roukan.com is now an official sponsor of the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance. Roukan.com specializes in Work Environment (WE) consulting and advisory services.