Ed Batista

Exciting news! I’ve signed a contract with Harvard Business Review Press to write a book on self-coaching. I worked with Editorial Director Tim Sullivan last year to transform my rough framework into a more comprehensive proposal, and ultimately he and his colleagues gave the idea a thumbs-up. (I’m grateful to Tim for his ongoing support and to Grant McCracken for introducing us in the first place.)

I wrote at length about what I mean by “self-coaching” last June, but in brief it’s a self-directed process that allows us to be more effective and feel more fulfilled in our professional lives by drawing upon tools and concepts from executive coaching, social psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines. Self-coaching is not intended to replicate the experience of working in-person with a coach, but self-coaching resources can be of use to people currently working with a coach, people who have worked with a coach in the past, and the much larger number of people who may never have the opportunity to work directly with a coach.

One further note: Self-coaching doesn’t mean solitary coaching. As I wrote in another post last June, “While self-coaching is an effort we initiate as individuals, it’s not a solitary experience that occurs in isolation from our social relationships. Self-coaching involves not only working with ourselves (as both coach and client), but also transforming key people in our lives into members of our self-coaching team, even if only for a single interaction. By compelling us to make aspects of our inner dialogue public and to engage others as we engage ourselves, self-coaching can be an intensely social experience.”

My manuscript for Harvard is due September 2014–which seems both a long ways off and just around the corner–but I’ll continue to explore these ideas here rather than take the process offline. After 8 years (!) of blogging I’ve found that writing in public is the best way to hold myself accountable and actually get the work done, with the added benefit of inviting others into a dialogue that results in better work than I would have accomplished on my own.

I took a longer-than-usual break from writing this fall because of a particularly busy calendar, and I expect to return to a more regular writing schedule this year. In the meantime, you can see the overall framework and links to key posts on my Self-Coaching page, but note that it’s very much a work-in-progress. (For example, my initial perspective on goal-setting has continued to evolve over the last few months.) Or just follow me on Twitter, where I announce new posts and occasionally share pictures of baked goods.