Last week I distinguished the notion “existence systems” and their importance to people who are Up To Something.  Then I speculated on what are the underlying, defining characteristics that make them great.  Now I want to explore their role in coaching relationships, and I’ll do so looking from where we [at CoachAccountable] aim to contribute to the coaching profession.

Everyone has his or her own relationship to existence systems. For example, one can overall be empowered by them, resistant to them, or indifferent/oblivious to needing such things (I’m proud to say I’ve graduated from that third category).   Most coaches will find, among their clients, that there are relationships to existence systems that are all across the board.  A coach working with a client who is already a master of utilizing an existence system has a big leg up in the process.  During my year as a coach, it felt sometimes like one of my responsibilities was to BE the existence system for my coachees (“How did you do with those four actions you created last week?”  Pause.  “Umm… can you tell me what were they again?”).

Causing your clients to be master of their own existence systems is a huge win.  It enhances their ability to use your coaching to produce results.  When you don’t need to deal regularly with the grunt work called “managing what fell through the cracks” there is more time to do the real work.

It is precisely this insight from which CoachAccountable was conceived.  It’s designed to be an easy-to-use, enjoyable existence system for your clients, one that perfectly fits into your coaching relationship, and you get to give it to them.  Moreover, it is uniquely designed to allow your interaction and oversight as coach: it allows you to closely support them in being masterful with existence systems.  What would it be like if your clients never had any actions or appointments fall through the cracks?

Yesterday I distinguished the oddly phrased concept “existence system”, which unravels to mean “a system for keeping things in existence”.   Or put another way: a system for managing details in life and staying on top your commitments.  Today I want to speculate on the defining features that make such systems really great.  In the years since I first became acquainted with the notion “existence system” (including an initial bout of resistance to having my life chained to anything of the sort), I’ve experienced plenty of what does and does not work for me, and here are the unifying gems I’ve found:

Easy or Automatic Data Entry

By “data” here I mean the details of whatever you need to keep in existence: appointments, meetings, outings, all of it.  If it’s all gotta go in (and it does all gotta go in, if you want to be able to say with confidence whether or not you’re free next Wednesday at 11:00am for one hour) it better be super easy and fast to do so.  Otherwise laziness will understandably kick in, soon rendering the system incomplete and out of date, and thus pretty much useless.

Automatic Reminders

One can be expected to check in with a schedule only so often, and every half hour on the half hour isn’t likely.  The ability to set reminders for key things and have the system alert you automatically at the right time is a fantastic tool to make sure you make every engagement, and on time to boot.

A pleasure to use

This goes beyond just ease of data entry.  It makes such a difference to have the entire experience be pleasant.  I say that, by default, you and I are not wired to enjoy using existence systems (it’s much easier to just wing it day to day, right?).   Intuitive, pretty, and even fun to use… these sorts of things collectively constitute a spoonful of sugar to help the [responsibility] medicine go down.

How does your existence system rate in these three areas?  Furthermore, do you know how the systems you clients use rate?  When keeping others on task as coaches so often do for their clients, one easy way to make gains may simply be to get them interested in using an existence system that serves them better.

Next: Using existence systems to cause client success.

We’ve released a few new features in CoachAccountable. First, our Premium account holders can now enjoy the convenience of online scheduling. To set up appointment types, your general availability and email reminders, go to MyCA, then MySystem and click on Appointment Scheduling. Once you have enabled this feature, your clients will be able to schedule or reschedule appointments with you directly from their Client Pages. These appointments will show up on your Calendar, which brings us to…

Calendar Imports! Regardless of your account type, you can now import your current Outlook, iCal, Google and other calendars into CoachAccountable. Go to your Calendar and click on the “Import Calendar” button an the bottom of the mini-calendar view. There is inline help there to quickly walk you through the process. You can also export iCal using a private data feed URL. We are exploring other sync options and will keep you posted. Also coming up shortly: day, week and agenda views.

It must be said: the CoachAccountable team loves the frank self-assessment. Because we started this from nothing and fuel ourselves almost exclusively on excitement and possibility, we find it helpful every 6 months or so to take a good hard look at the central reasons why we are doing this. Now that we’ve launched and we have some big new feature releases only a few days away, we wanted to make sure that all of our next actions are aligned and focused on the right path. We soul searched. We revisited dusty old versions of business plans, USPs (unique selling propositions), tag lines and group emails harking back to the lonely era of B.B. (Before Beta.) Against the dramatic backdrop of Midwest summer thunderstorms, we reflected deeply on lessons learned.

Then we threw all that out the window and took a good look at where we are now, what is important to us, what feels right in our guts and what drives us to show up and work hard every day. Here’s the mini-manifesto that we came up with, illustrating the mindset we want to come from as we work to make CoachAccountable a truly great resource for coaches and their clients:

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Why We Exist:

At CoachAccountable, we are an ally to the coaching community.

We strive for the constant improvement of the coaching experience for both coaches and their clients.

We are committed to making coaching and coaches more accepted, accessible and enticing to the general public.

What We Do:

We are creating versatile web-based resources for both coaches and clients that empower their relationships.

We add value by providing an interactive and tangible framework that facilitates growth and tracks progress.

How We Do It:

First and foremost, we are building this system for people.

By prioritizing the coachee experience [meaning that we can stand in the shoes of a coaching client and authentically see things from their perspective], we build tools that most effectively help people realize their goals.

By collaborating with our coach customers, we support and grow their businesses.

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So, what do you think? Does it strike any chords? Raise any concerns? Are we missing the mark or right on target? You are the person that we are trying to serve. Please let us know your thoughts.

P.S. There is some really good stuff launching very soon in CoachAccountable. Sneak peek: importing Outlook, iCal and Google calendars, online scheduling, and our Affiliate program. I, personally, am so excited that I can’t stop doing classic 1980’s dance moves such as the Roger Rabbit, the Lawn Mower and the Cabbage Patch.

P.P.S. Since we are laying ourselves bare in this post, full team disclosure: Rob has mastered the Moonwalk and is passable at the Running Man. John has always been something of a savant at Dance Dance Revolution.

Yesterday I wrote a piece about transparency of coaching, or how accessible the coaching industry is (or is not) to the more general public.  Now I want to take a look at transparency in coaching, or said another way, how easy it is for a client to perceive the progress and process over time.

Clearly we can agree that any coach worth their salt will be providing perceptible value for their client whenever they are interfacing.  It’s industry standard, you could say, that during a coaching session a client is realizing valuable insights, solid direction, and a more or less immediate experience that “yes, I am more clear/focused/ready for what’s next”.   But what about such clarity over the duration of the coaching engagement, whether weeks, months or years?

In my experiences with being coached I’ve seldom had, at the end of the coaching, a crystal clear view of where I had been and how far I’d come (let alone at any point during!).  I knew I’d gotten value, I just couldn’t easily tell you how much.  Our team’s collective experience with being coached suggests that a coach who can (and does!) provide a client with a comprehensive view of what was accomplished during the relationship is an exception, not the rule.  Failing that, we as clients are left with a collection of emails, printed worksheets, and hastily scribbled notes, and it’s up to us to keep it all straight and organized.

Much of CoachAccountable was designed with just that in mind.  From experience, I assert that clients are much more present to value they have gotten/are getting when the course of the whole relationship is easy to see, because keeping the coaching process and progress transparent at all times keeps clients having clear sense of ongoing accomplishment.  Would you agree?

One of the things I’ve run into time and time again during the course of CoachAccountable’s development is having to explain coaching (in the personal development sense) to friends who have never heard the word used outside the sports context.  Even despite many opportunities to practice giving my explanation, I seldom have it resonate with my listener.  The best response I can usually hope for goes something along the lines of “Ah, that sounds kinda cool for those people that need that.”

Those people that need that.

People generally understand that athletes do well to have someone who is not them looking at how they’re playing and offering guidance from an external perspective.  To score more points and win the big game, this makes perfect sense to most people.  But somehow when you apply that same concept to living one’s dreams, career advancement, and quality of life the concept goes sour in people’s minds.  Somehow a concept that enjoys “of-course-you-do-that-to-be-the-best” status in sports becomes far less obvious when applied to the grander scope of life.

What if we consider how transparency of coaching impacts this?

Coach/client privacy is a very important consideration of any coaching relationship, and it should be.  Being coached on the quality of your romantic relationships is much more personal than how many steps to take towards the basket for a layup.  A candid look at how you’ve been being with your team at work hits much closer to home than how many laps you ran during warm up yesterday.

So generally speaking, what happens in a coaching relationship stays in a coaching relationship.  An unintended consequence of this is that coaching (as we know it) remains relatively shrouded in mystery to the general public.   Consider this logical loop:

• The only way to know how coaching works is to experience coaching.
• The only way to experience coaching is by knowing well enough to choose to get coaching.
• The only way to know well enough to choose coaching is by knowing how coaching works.

Is this strictly true?  Of course not.  But it’s true enough to be interesting and worth finding ways to circumvent.  To that end, we’re throwing our hat into the ring.  As part of our effort to champion the benefits of coaching we’re going to get coached, and we’re doing it publicly.  We’ll use the CoachAccountable platform as a showcase of our progress (AND process).

Addressing transparency is obviously not a silver bullet for bringing coaching to a more mainstream understanding and interest.  But it is an interesting avenue to pursue with many possibilities.

I am a hacker.  (“Hacker” in the sense of programmers who really love to create things in code, NOT people trying to break into the CIA)   It is said in hacker circles (specifically in several essays by Paul Graham) that the best software is that which hackers write to scratch their own itch.   Why is that?  Because they are their own users.  It is the rare and magical combination in software development of (1) knowing exactly what is needed and (2) being able to create it.  If anything is cumbersome or annoying, they can fix it.  If a little shortcut is an obvious time saver, they can put it in.

One of the reasons we are looking for a coach is to position CoachAccountable more like that kind of software: built by and for the people who use it.  We want the regular experience of being clients in our system, using it like your clients will use it, and being in constant contact with the coach’s user perspective.  We’re going to expand on what we like and tweak/fix/scrap what we don’t.  We designed the sessions and file sharing features of CoachAccountable as an answer to what I would have used when I had between 4 and 8 coachees during my year in the Team Management and Leadership Program.  I’ve since graduated from that program, so there’s a lot more we can do to get into the shoes of our users.

When we nail it for ourselves, we nail it for a lot of people.

The CoachAccountable team is looking for a business coach. We have three reasons for this: a deeper understanding of the coach-client relationship, a chance to use the CA system firsthand for ourselves, and – obviously – to grow our business!

We also want to do it publicly.  When we describe CoachAccountable to our friends, family members and acquaintances, most of them have no real idea what coaching is all about. “Is it like therapy? Having a personal assistant? Would a coach help me?” are all common questions. We think it would be very cool and instructive to offer ourselves up as public examples of the experience and benefits of coaching.

Here’s the deal: There are 4 of us on the team. We can be coached individually or as a group. We all have varying degrees of experience with coaching and we are positive and motivated. We want to work with the CA system. We haven’t decided how to publicize our coaching experience yet; it’s probably better to discuss that with our coach first.

We have spent much of the last year building CoachAccountable from scratch, so we don’t have a lot of money. We do, however, have a lot of experience in the realm of graphic and web design, development and advertising. In exchange for coaching, we will barter for services and/or create a kick-ass marketing campaign with you that will rock your business. If you are interested in discussing this opportunity in more detail, give me a shout at lee@coachaccountable.com. If you know someone who may be interested, please forward this to them. Thanks!

UPDATE: We have found our coach(es)! Stay tuned for more details…

Can we get a “woot woot”? Today we successfully completed Beta and launched to the public!

Building this fabulous application has been a long, fascinating and (usually) fun journey. And this is just the beginning. As my mama woould say, “There’s no rest for the wicked.” We are working out the technical details for our Affiliate program and should be launching that soon. We are working on some new solutions to some of our Beta coaches’ feedback. We are also working on a major revamp of the Calendar so that it will sync with your other calendars and will feature online scheduling for Premium accounts. Whew!

We’d like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all of our Beta coaches who tested the system and got their clients on board and gave us such great feedback and positive support.  You guys totally rock! We couldn’t have done it without you.

We have officially been in Beta for a few weeks now and are super excited about how things are progressing. We have a great group of Beta users and we’ve just sent out our first questionnaire so we should have a solid range of feedback to begin our next development phase next week. Some things that will be updated include time zones and currencies so the system will be useful worldwide. Also, we will be building out new features on the calendar and working to make CoachAccountable sync with a few other popular systems. We will keep you posted as new features arise.

On a different note, we have been brainstorming ways to add more value for the coaching community at large. We aren’t professional coaches, so we won’t presume to tell you anything about being a coach or how to coach. However, one thing that we know pretty well is web technology, including applications, social networking, and future trends. We thought we could provide some tips and tutorials for coaches on improving their business with technology. Keep checking back here to see what we find. Also, if you have any questions about technology at all (from super basic to advanced or even theoretical) please just ask! If you want to know, I’m sure there are others out there with the same issue. We would love to find the answer. Cheers!