The Best of 2023: 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 2024 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. I do hope you enjoy—and get inspired by—the summary below.

2023 was a busy year: here are a few highlights

Our Top Achievements

*NEW* CANVA Social Media Set! (January)

• We finished updating ALL our Coaching Tool and Exercises on the site, specifically the 30 tools in our Small Business Coaching Toolkit!
  • This was the end of a truly huge piece of work that took 18 months to complete 🙂
  • Every single toolkit now has its own colour theme. All tools were reviewed and updated individually. Some were improved!
• NEW PRODUCTS in 2023! We:
  • Updated all 12 months of our Diverse and Inclusive Social Media QUOTE Graphics so that they're available in CANVA!
  • Created Monthly CANVA Social Media Graphics Set for December and January. NOTE: The rest of the months, plus the complete year of Canva Social Media Graphics Suite for Coaches due to be completed by the end of January / Early February 2024!
• WEBINARS: We shared 4 highly attended webinars with our readers and fans :
  
  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. Dr. Irena O'Brien (Neuroscience for Coaches). 10 Research-Backed Strategies to Help Your Clients Change their Habits, Behaviours & Lives!
  3. Dr. Irena O'Brien (Neuroscience for Coaches). Building a Flexible Brain: What Coaching Clients Need to Create Better Habits, Navigate Change & Attain their Goals in 2024
  4. Cindy Schulson (Marketing for Coaches) How to Build Your Signature Program
• FREE TOOLS: Our free tools were downloaded 116,231 times!
  
• 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 still 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 number 4 out of 70 Best Coaching Blogs and Websites To Follow in 2024 (beating out the ICF Blog!)
• NEW ARTICLES: We shared over 53 articles for coaches!
• Now find us on TRUSTPILOT!

Supporting You

• The "Coaches Helping Coaches" Facebook Group grew to over 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 2023 Holiday Gift to help Coaches "Make it Happen" in 2024! Get yours here >>

Plus over $10,000 of Free Training & Giveaways

• We gave away 5 Premium Top Level Memberships to WBECS 2023
• We gave away a copy of From One to Many, Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching 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 in 2023

• The marvellous Marcus Diaz (far left above) continued in his role which has expanded. 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 helpful projects! Thank-you Marcus 🙂
• Emma-Louise grew Fierce Kindness to 3,500 newsletter readers. She created a brand new How to be Kind to Yourself Toolkit (free with newsletter sign-up) and wrote 38 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, worked on the new products (listed above), updated the 30 tools in the Small Business Coaching Toolkit, 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 8 years! She is wonderful! As well as helping create all our sale graphics she has worked on many beautiful graphics for Fierce Kindness, has been instrumental in getting 1) our quote graphics and 2) our social media graphics into Canva. And of course she worked hard recreating all the images for the Small Business Coaching Toolkit 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. As usual, he had many boring but necessary projects. And he continues to work on SEO and website optimisation to ensure the best experience for our website visitors.
• 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 2023.

Leading from the Heart and Living our Values

2023 Featured Coaches

• You also met 9 more coaches in our Coach Features, where we helped you get to know your fellow coaches (see image at right)!
• Recognizing there was a shortage of helpful and practical advice on DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging) for Coaches and meeting just the right person to help, we co-wrote a series of original articles with Abena Baiden (top of the Coach Features image at right):
  • Introduction: 7 Ways You Can Increase (Your) Cultural Awareness in Your Coaching Practice
  • The story of how these articles came to be
  • 1) Identity Mapping Exercises: The Identity Iceberg (with Free .PDF Tool)
  • 2) Review Your Marketing Materials (With Checklist)
  • 3) Make Identity & Culture Part of Your Onboarding Process

Here are the Top 7 Articles from 2023!

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. The Top 15 Coaching Books to Make You a Better Coach!
2. Your 2023-2024 Holiday Gift from The Coaching Tools Company!
3. 54+ Wheel of Life Coaching Questions to Rock Your Coaching Sessions!
4. What's Your Superpower as a Group and Team Coach? by Jennifer Britton
5. How to use a Life Wheel to Measure Your Client's Coaching Progress | 5 Simple Steps
6. GROW Model Questions: 79+ Helpful Coaching Questions to use with the GROW Model
7. Journaling as a Transformational Coaching Tool (How to with 5 Keys to Success) Lynda Monk

The 7 Most Loved Free Resource Downloads of 2023

This is more of an exact science! Our Free Resources were downloaded 116,231 times.

Here are the Top 7 Free Resources downloaded in 2023:

1. Wheel of Life Template with Instructions (downloaded 12,196 times)
2. BLANK Coaching Wheel (8,374 times)
3. 21 Questions to Extraordinary Goal-Setting (7,451 times)
4. Coaching Intake Session Checklist (6,340 times)
5. Action Brainstorming Worksheet (5,800 times)
6. Wrap-up Session Questions (5380 times)
7. 25 Powerful Questions to Identify Strengths (5,307 times)

And our Most Popular Products in 2023

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. Career Coaching Toolkit
5. Small Business Coaching Toolkit

The Top 10 is rounded out by our Vision & Goal Setting Toolkit, the Self-Discovery Toolkit—followed by the Productivity & Time Management Toolkit, Balance & Self Care Toolkit and Why Hire a Coach? Social Media GRAPHICS Set!

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 2023 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 >>