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:

______________________________________________________________________________

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.

______________________________________________________________________________

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.

This past weekend I participated in a course focused on personal development, and it was the first time doing so since four and a half years ago.  It was in that course way back when that I first heard of the word “coaching” applied to anything outside of the sports world and I had never seen anything like it. Back then, it didn’t compute for me how person A (who knew next to nothing about person B) could offer person B tremendously powerful insights into person B’s life.  I don’t think it computed for many people at the start, but at the end we participants constituted 100 or so more people who had experienced coaching in this new sense of the word and seen it work wonders.

It’s easy for me to get lost in a sea of code and to-dos while building CoachAccountable, so it’s easy to lose track of what I’m building it for.  The good dose of coaching in action that I experienced this past weekend really has my thoughts and actions realigned towards supporting you guys, the coaches, in making more of that magic happen.

I might wonder if I’m the only one who can lose sight of the value of coaching while working on coaching, but I’m pretty sure I’m not.  When you’re making your coaching business work, how do you stay in touch with whatever it is about actual coaching that lights you up?  Are you in touch with it right now?