Chair’s update

Stephen Palmer

Interest in coaching psychology continues

Welcome back to the second issue of The Coaching Psychologist. Since I last wrote my Chair’s update, our membership has been steadily increasing. We now have over 1900 members. If you consider that we didn’t even exist as a BPS Special Group until last December 2004, we are doing very well. Of course, some of our members may believe that our proposed membership fee of £3.50 for 2006 is too steep and this could impact upon our membership. I hope not.

So what will you get for your £3.50 next year? The Coaching Psychologist will be published three times in 2006, subject to submissions. It will continue to be a hardcopy version for members with it being freely available online.

You may recall that in the last issue, I was hoping that our proposed joint publishing venture with the Australian Psychological Society, Interest Group Coaching Psychology will come to fruition. The good news is that the papers have been signed, the Inter-national Coaching Psychology Review is being developed and a team of editors will be officially appointed. If we receive sufficient academic papers, we hope to publish two issues in 2006 (March/April and September/October). Although there will be an online version to help promote coaching psychology research, SGCP members will receive a hardcopy version too.

Writing for either of our publications will mean that your articles or book reviews will have a wide audience. It really is worth having a go and writing a paper or case study.

Our various sub-committees have been very active representing coaching psychologists and coaching psychology in different forums. They have also been involved in arranging our successful series of workshop events and planning for our second Annual Conference on 19-20 December 2005. It is the events and conferences that allow us to keep the membership fee at only £3.50 next year even though members will receive between four to five issues of our publications. SGCP members will continue to obtain discount for all of our events and we will continue to keep the prices down too. There will be no excuse not to have sufficient hours of CPD for your BPS CPD online logbooks especially as coaching psychology cuts across different fields of psychology.

You may have noticed that we are running a research symposium at the Annual Conference. As we have had such a good response from our members submitting papers for this event, we have decided to hold a seperate one-day Annual Spring Conference focusing on coaching psychology research. This would be in addition to our December event which coincides with our AGM.

By the time you read this column, I wll be about to step down at the AGM and will become ‘Past Chair’ (or past it!). On day two of the conference, as Past Chair I will have more time to relax and chat. The Wine and Cheese event will be great opportunity to network too. Bring your business cards. I look forward to meeting many of you again in December. Many thanks for all your e-mails and letters of support.