Paul Duxbury

Giant Package of 200 Products with Master Resell Rights

Evening again!

I almost forgot to mention Cody has written to me and let me know that for a limited time you can download a large number of packages for free!

Check it out by clicking here.

Take care

Paul

Add comment January 28th, 2006

Free Genealogy Articles

Evening again!

As those who read my Blog on a regular basis will know one of my great passions is Genealogy and we have a number of websites which are aimed at the genealogist who is looking for both free genealogy resources and genealogy membership sites and these include:

www.amateur-genealogist.com

www.our-family-trees.co.uk

www.catholic-genealogy.com

www.family-legacy.co.uk

Well today we have added a new resource for those who are researching their own genealogy and those who have their own genealogy websites. Our new site www.genealogy-articles.com offers a range of articles which are free to use on websites as long as our resource box is retained. Genealogy Articles always make a great read and hopefully this added benefit for our readers will be helpful.

Take care

Paul

Add comment January 28th, 2006

Life Coaching

Evening All

Well it’s been another busy week for me! After the Masters Coaching Course in London it was back to London for a big meeting with lots of presentations. Not quite as exhausting as the previous week but still very demanding!

In the meantime work continues on getting ready for our launch of www.life-coach4u.com which is really exciting. Life Coaching encompasses so many areas and I am looking forward to coaching a variety of people (at affordable prices!) as we move forward.

One of my Internet Marketing friends who is interested in being coached asked me what the difference between having a Mentor and a Coach is. In simple terms the difference could be defined as a Mentor being limited to working with people in an area in which the Mentor is an expert or very familiar whereas the Coach is an expert in the techniques of Coaching. There are some people who Mentor in the area of Internet Marketing (which is an area I have a growing level of expertise in) and they tend to teach the mentoree the techniques and approaches they have used to build their own Internet Marketing business.

For me the power of Coaching in Internet Marketing is that whilst I have knowledge of the area my approach is to enable the coachee to explore all the possibilities and find those that are suited to them and their approach to online or home based business.

Hope that clarifies the differences for you?

Take care

Paul

Add comment January 28th, 2006

The Power of Coaching

Evening All

When you hear the word “coach”, what comes first into your mind? Do you picture the 46 Seater Coach packed with tourists or do you picture a basketball team with person shouting out instructions? Or maybe the image of a football team with someone in a tracksuit pacing back and to calling out the names of the players comes to mind?

Coaching does indeed have it’s origins in the world of transportation when servants conveyed a person of worth from place to place in a Coach! Coaching initially became more familiar as a profession with the images of the Coach working with a sports team. Before I move on to look at how Coaching works now I just want to share with you my favourite definition of Coaching which is that it is about enabling an individual to move from where they are now to where they want to be. I especially like that definition because of it’s succinct explanation of Coaching the links back to the original meaning of the word “Coach.”

Coaching is now one of the key concepts in leadership and management and increasing numbers of people who truly want to be successful are receiving Coaching.. Why has coaching become so popular?

Coaching creates a level playing field

As a leadership style, coaching is used when the members of a group or team are competent and motivated, but do not have an idea of the long-term goals of an organization. This involves two different levels of coaching: team and individual. Team coaching enables team members work together.

In a group of individuals, not everyone may have the same level of competence and commitment to a goal. A group may be a mix of highly competent and moderately competent individuals with varying degrees of commitment to the team goals. These differences can become a cause of friction among the members of the team with resentment about differing levels of contribution appearing.

The leader who coaches helps the team members level their expectations. In addition the coaching leader is able to manage differing perspectives so that the common goal succeeds over personal goals and interests. In a large organization, leaders need to work to align the personal values and goals of the individuals within the organization with those of the organization so that long-term or strategic directions can be pursued.

Coaching builds up confidence and competence.

Individual coaching is an example of situational leadership at work. The leader who coaches works one-on-one with individuals building up their confidence by affirming good performance during regular feedbacks. They also increase individual competence by helping people assess their strengths and weaknesses to facilitate career planning and professional development.

Depending on the individual’s level of competence and commitment, a leader may exercise more coaching behaviour for the less-experienced members. Usually, this happens in the case of new team members. The individual’s direct manager gives more defined tasks and holds regular feedback sessions with the new member of staff. Over time they will gradually lessen the amount of directive coaching and move along the coaching continuum towards consultative coaching as the individual’s competence and confidence increase.

Coaching promotes individual and team excellence.

Excellence is a product of habitual good practice. Holding regular coaching oriented meetings and providing constructive feedback is incredibly important in helping to establish good habits. In a coached team individuals will develop the habit of constantly assessing themselves for their strengths and areas for improvement that they themselves perceive what knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to acquire to attain team goals. In the process, not only do they find themselves empowered to examine their behaviours but they attain individual excellence as well. An excellent analogy or example is the Orchestra: in which each member plays a different instrument. In order to achieve harmony of music from the different instruments, individuals will ensure that they play their part in the piece to the very best of their ability, aside from practicing as an Orchestra. Consequently, as well as performing in a team they improve individually as an instrument player.

Coaching develops high commitment to common goals.

A leader who coaches works to balance the attainment of immediate targets with long-term goals towards the vision of the organization. As I mentioned earlier, with the alignment of personal goals with organizational or team goals, the personal interests are also kept in balance so that they do not distract from the team purpose and goals. By constantly communicating the vision through formal and informal conversations, the team members are inspired and motivated. Setting short-term team goals aligned with organizational goals and making an action plan to attain these goals can help sustain the increased motivation and commitment to common goals of the members.

Coaching produces valuable leaders.

Leadership by example is important in coaching. A leader who professes to follow a coaching approach will soon lose credibility if they do not practice what they preach. This means that they should be well organized, highly competent is their field, communicate openly and encourage feedback, and have a clear idea of the organization’s vision-mission-goals. By working with leaders who coach individuals can acquire the same good practices and attitudes they see modelled by their leader/manager. This in turn will enable them to become coaches themselves. If an individual experiences good coaching, they are most likely to do the same things when entrusted with formal leadership roles.

In conclusion as I commented at the outset coaching enables an individual to move from where they are now to where they want to be! Those who experience coaching really do see change in their lives and by applying the skills they observe and acquire through being coached they make a difference to those they work with.

If you are interested in Coaching then check out www.fulfilling-your-dreams.com

Take care

Paul

Add comment January 23rd, 2006

Raising your profile in the bloggers world!

Afternoon All!

I think if you are reading this Blog you would probably be inclined to agree with a view that Blogs are a very powerful force on the web today. It’s become almost guaranteed that if you search for something nowadays then you are likely to turn up a lot of blog entries as results.

One of the reasons is that blogs link to each other all the time and as a result they create a strong network of links that does very well in the search engines. Not only that, but they’re not shy about linking to other sites, as long as they like them! Again it’s becoming increasingly commonplace for one blogger to take links from the another blog and re-publish them. In other words, getting talked about on blogs gets you potentially thousands of links from sites from highly-ranked pages – that’s enough to get you quite high up in any search engine.

So How Do You Do It?

Well, to get your website talked about on the more popular general interest blogs, all you have to do is create some content that would be interesting to those bloggers. Once you’ve chosen your subject, all you’ve got to do is write something about it that is either new, amusing, or controversial.

For example, if you’ve heard that Apple is releasing a new iPod the size of a fingernail, that’s new. Note that you can do perfectly well guessing at new things, as long as it sounds plausible and you’re good at predicting: you can often write an article announcing the obvious next step for a company with popular products and get linked from all over the place.

When it comes to amusing, you might try some kind of spoof along the lines of ‘popular nerdy film/book in the style of nerdy thing’. For example, you might do a version Lord of the Rings as though it were being acted out in an IRC chat, or recreate the storyline of the Star Wars Trilogy with Lego (warning: both of these have already been done).

Controversy is the most fun thing to create, but it’s not easy and of course you need to ensure that you stick within the bounds of legality and decency. You have to attack one of the bloggers’ ’sacred cows’, the things that they almost all seem to agree on. The best example of this is a guy who wrote an article called ‘Why Your Movable Type Blog Must Die’, criticising the software that most bloggers ran their blogs on at the time. It was linked from literally thousands of blogs, and received an enormous amount of traffic – if you want to find it, it’s still ranked amazingly highly if you search for ‘movable type’.

Does that mean that I Have to Be a Wind-up Merchant?

Well, not necessarily – it’s better to put forward controversial views that you genuinely hold and stick to producing amusing things that you genuinely find amusing, otherwise your insincerity will no doubt show in what you produce, and no-one will like it enough to link to it. What I’m saying, rather, is that you have to be in tune with the blogosphere’s likes, dislikes, interests and obsessions, and write about things it cares about.

So I’ve Written It…

Once you’ve written something, the next step is to get it out there. There are several ways to do this: first, try outright submitting it to a blog or two, saying that you found this thing you thought they might like. If you published your content in a blog format, it’s also well worth linking to a few related entries on other blogs, as this will create a ‘trackback’, automatically creating a link from their entry to yours.

Other than that, you might try linking to what you’ve done from a few weblog-style community, where you know bloggers participate. You would be surprised how many people will take that link and put it on their blog if they like it.

Hope that helps?

Take care

Paul

Add comment January 22nd, 2006

Really mentally energised!

Evening All

Some may have noticed that I have not been around for the last week or so.

I have had the great good fortune to be taking part in an Intensive Coaching Programme down in London for the last week with some amazing people. I have been coaching people for a good few years and have had my own coach for years however I have come away with some new insights and it will have a direct impact on our developing business as it has made me look at things in a new light which has been really helpful. It’s also going to really help me with the coaching I do and the offer we are developing at www.ecoach4u.com

I have to admit though that I feel absolutely shattered physically but so energised in my head!

Anyway I just wanted to share a great experience.

Take care

Paul

Add comment January 20th, 2006