The Best of 2022: Most Popular Articles, 10 Most Loved Free Resources, Top Products & More!

Probably just like you, we had a very full and more challenging than usual year. Every year, in preparation for our 2023 goal-setting we review our successes, products, articles and blog posts for the year—which we share below.

I can thoroughly recommend doing something similar for your business, we even have some questions to help you do just that here.

It's not just interesting to review the past year, it's empowering and uplifting to realise that we achieved much more than we remember. Creating this article has become an essential part of our annual review. And while COVID continued to "throw a spanner in the works", we worked hard—and kept going. I hope you enjoy—and get inspired by—the summary below.

2022 was a busy year: here are a few highlights

Our Top Achievements

• We updated EVERY Single Career and Life Coaching Tool and Exercise on the site! This was truly a huge piece of work and took the entire year to complete 🙂
  • Each Toolkit now has its own colour theme.
  • All tools were reviewed and updated individually. Some were improved!
  • Please Note: Small Business Coaching Toolkit to be completed by the end of May 2023.
• NEW PRODUCTS in 2023! We launched:
  • 365 Days of Inspirational Quote Graphics
  • Why Hire a Coach? Social Media Graphics Set!
  • Career Development Wheel (Individual Tool)
  • Peak Moment Exercise & Script (Individual Tool)
  • (Goal-Setting) Make Your Goals SMART (Individual Tool)
• WEBINARS: We shared 4 highly attended webinars with our readers and fans (over 5000 of you registered!):
  
  1. Dr. Irena O'Brien (Neuroscience for Coaches). The Coach's Secret Weapon: How the Science of Neuroplasticity Helps You Create Lasting Change for Your Clients
  2. Dermot Butterly  (The Celtic Coach) 3 Big Challenges Coaches have Growing their Business - and What to do Differently.
  3. Cindy Schulson (Marketing for Coaches) Build Your Signature Program
     
  4. Dr. Irena O'Brien (Neuroscience for Coaches). Watch here: Building a Flexible Brain - How Coaches Can Help Their Clients Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World.

• FREE TOOLS: Our free tools were downloaded 118,029 times!
  
  

  Updated FB Group Manifesto

• READERS: If you read our newsletter, you are part of a community of 43,000+ newsletter readers from 175 different countries. It's exciting that coaching is now so international.
  • And our newsletter open rate is well above industry averages. 30-40% of the people we send our newsletter to, open it. With average newsletter open rates being 12-25%, we're still doing something right 🙂
• TOP COACHING BLOG: We were named again as a Top 70 Coaching Blogs and Websites (we're at number 4—beating out the ICF Blog!)
• NEW ARTICLES: We posted over 59 articles for coaches!
• UPDATED ABOUT PAGE: We completely revamped our About Page bringing it up-to-date with a complete re-write and graphics!

Supporting You

• The "Coaches Helping Coaches" Facebook Group grew to almost 20,000 coaches! It's a highly active group with lots of questions answered and support offered. We've continued to put a lot of effort into keeping the conversation going—and that promotions don't swamp the group news-feed.
• We ran 3 big Annual Sales again: the Fireworks Sale, Cyber Sale and continuing with the Spring Sale (which we launched in 2020 to help people during the pandemic). We know it's hard to build a coaching business!
• We also now offer great savings on at least four products per month!
• We offered a helpful Business Planner as our 2022 Holiday Gift to help Coaches "Make it Happen" in 2023! Get yours here >>

Plus over $27,500 of Free Training & Giveaways

• We gave away 5 Premium Top Level Memberships to WBECS 2022
• We gave away 5 WBECS ACE Coach Accelerator Enhanced Trainings
• We gave 10 people 3 hours each, of one-on-one mentoring at ReciproCoach
• We negotiated with Paperbell for a 6 month free membership for the Paperbell app  (value $342 per person)
• We gave away a copy of The Great Book of Journaling
• We gave away a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations by Jennifer Britton

The Coaching Tools Company Team

The Coaching Tools Team! From left to right: Marcus Diaz, Emma-Louise, Natasha Kong and Duncan Elsey.

The Coaching Tools Company team had some big changes in 2022!

• Michela Phillips who joined the team in March 2021 to help us with vital Customer Support and Admin was a brilliant addition to the team, learning fast and easily getting into our customer service groove. But working remotely was not for her, and she left us in June 2022 for an in-person customer service role.
• The marvellous Marcus Diaz (far left above) stepped in to fill the gap left by Michela. He is now our Communications & Social Media Manager. Which means he not only continues as our Social Media Coordinator, but Marcus now manages all our customer service email, helps me plan our content and with many other small projects! Thank-you Marcus 🙂
• Emma-Louise grew Fierce Kindness to 2,500 newsletter readers. She added Fierce Kindness philosophy pages and wrote almost 50 new Fierce Kindness blog posts. There is much more to come here, so watch this space! She also continued to write and manage the weekly Coaching Tools Launchpad Newsletter jam-packed with goodies, created 5 new products (listed above), updated every tool in the Megapack and Renew You, and generally kept the Coaching Tools Company ship going throughout the year.
• Natasha Kong is our resident graphic designer and has now been with us for 7 years! She is fabulous! As well as helping create all our sale graphics and 4 new infographics in 2022, she also created these 5 Inspiring Quotes for International Women's Day (Graphics), many beautiful graphics for Fierce Kindness—and much, much more! And of course she worked hard recreating all the images for the Coaching Tools design update.
  

  Wendy Buckingham

• Duncan Elsey continues to be our essential technical expert and advisor. Not only does he answer our "Help, my _______ has stopped working", but he also works hard to maintain and continuously improve the website. This year he had many boring but necessary projects—like moving us onto a new version of code for the entire website. He continues to work on SEO, website optimisation to ensure the best experience for our website visitors. He has also been researching Coaching Apps for our readers which we hope to share in 2023!
• We continue to appreciate the contributions of the wonderful Wendy Buckingham as volunteer moderator in the Facebook Group (as well as supplying occasional blog articles). She strives to expand the reach—and maintain the integrity of—the coaching profession for all.
• We are also grateful to Laura Cappello-Bromling of Elusive Beast Editing, who continued as our Editor in 2022.
• And last but not least, Emma-Louise and Duncan got a puppy (Odin) in January of 2022. As a rescue pup from Texas, he has been quite the challenge! He is now a boisterous teenager and we hope to share more of Odin soon!
  

  Ruchi Parekh

Leading from the Heart and Living our Values

• We turned down countless offers to advertise in our newsletter.
• We donated over $10,000 to charities we believe are important in the world! These charities included supporting the homeless, mental health, black youth and more! Watch for our article in February for more info.
• You met 9 more coaches in our Coach Features, where we helped you get to know your fellow coaches! Ruchi Parekh and  Rhonda Cornwall (pictured right) were the most popular!

Rhonda Cornwall

Here are the Top 10 Articles/Graphics from 2022!

And here are the 10 most popular articles/blogposts:

Choosing our top articles is not an exact science! We look at the number of social shares from the blog, but also the number of article comments, shares and comments when an article is posted on Facebook—and also the positive emails we receive about an article!

1. Slow Down & Calm with this Easy "Windshield Wiper" Mindfulness Exercise by Marcy Nelson-Garrison
2. Your 2022-2023 Holiday Gift from The Coaching Tools Company!
3. Infographic: Help Inspire Potential Clients to Hire You!
4. Inspiring Quotes for International Women's Day
5. 4 Practical Journaling Exercises to Activate Your Confidence by Lynda Monk
6. How to Use Breakout Rooms: 10 Tips to Supercharge Webinars & Groups! by Jennifer Britton
7. What You Really Need to Do to Grow Your Coaching Business by Ruby McGuire

The 7 Most Loved Free Resource Downloads of 2022

This is more of an exact science! Our Free Resources were downloaded was 118,029 times.

Here are the Top 7 Free Resources downloaded in 2022:

1. Wheel of Life Template with Instructions (downloaded 11,503 times)
2. 21 Questions to Extraordinary Goal-Setting (7,390 times)
3. BLANK Coaching Wheel (6,226 times)
4. Action Brainstorming Worksheet (5,762 times)
5. 25 Powerful Questions to Identify Strengths (5,720 times)
6. Understand The Why of Your Goals (5,334 times)
7. 37 Coaching Questions to Liberate Your Clients! (5,276 times)

And our Most Popular Products in 2022

Finally, here are our most popular sellers from last year:

1. Coaching Tools & Exercises MEGAPack!
2. Coaching Welcome Packet
3. Renew YOU, Love Your Life! Coach Program
4. Small Business Coaching Toolkit
5. Career Coaching Toolkit

The Top 10 is rounded out by our Vision & Goal Setting Toolkit, then jumping up to number 7—the Self-Discovery Toolkit—followed by the (SEASONAL) Set Your Compass: Celebrate 2022 & Prepare for 2023!, the Productivity & Time Management Toolkit and Balance & Self Care Toolkit!

I hope you enjoyed these highlights and summary! For our latest articles visit the Coaching Blog or go here to Sign-up for our newsletter!

We'd love to hear your 2022 highlights—share yours in the comments below!

Contributing Author:

Emma-Louise Elsey has been coaching since 2003 and is the Founder of The Coaching Tools Company and Fierce Kindness.com. She's passionate about coaching and personal development. Originally a project and relationship manager for Fortune 500 companies she combined her love of coaching, creativity and systems to create over 100 brandable coaching tools, forms and exercises including 30+ completely free coaching tools. She now serves coaches and the coaching world through her exclusive newsletter for coaches, Coaches Helping Coaches Facebook Group and many other great tools for coaches, plus resources and ideas for your coaching toolbox. The Coaching Tools Company is an official ICF Business Solutions Partner.

Learn more about Emma-Louise & see all their articles here >>