The CoachAccountable Blog

Have you ever thought about what coaching looks like?  Or, more to the point, what YOUR coaching looks like?

It’s more worth pondering than you might imagine.

Coaching by its very nature is a rather abstract process: you would be hard pressed to fill a box with “coaching”, point to it and say “Here, this is what coaching looks like.”  It’s more elusive than that.  Most coaching relationships (even the really good ones), appear on the surface to be a jumble of documents, a few email exchanges, and memories of some good sessions (plus notes about them, maybe).

They appear that way because that’s what they are.

This poses a problem of presentation for any given coach, and for coaching in general.  To the people who hire you, external appearances often form a huge basis for choosing a coach, and even choosing whether to be coached at all.  It’s hard to show off something that is inherently so abstract, and smooth glossy brochures (and their digital analogs) are generally met with at least some skepticism.   You might not trust them to mean anything more than a good design budget, and the same applies for your would-be clients.

» Continue reading “Does Your Coaching Look Professional?”

Sometimes in a coaching session you might determine that you want your coachee to take on a regular practice for the coming week.  It might be some new habit that will be most beneficial by becoming engrained, or just something that simply deserves to be more than a one-time good idea.

I had this with one of my coachees, Tim, last week.  He’s exploring a new way of offering and selling his services as he moves beyond offering commodity technical services and into more sophisticated consulting.

“Try this”, I said.  “Over the next week, I want you to find 5 occasions to take just 10 minutes and ponder who you might pitch to and what you might present.  Then journal about those 10 minutes, either the ideas you got, the insights you had, or the actions you took.  Just 10 minutes, do it 5 times.”

It should be noted that this sort of thing is generally a lot to ask of someone you coach.  They have to remember to follow through not just once but on five separate occasions, and do so with a behavior that, by its very nature, is not yet natural.

But this is also very powerful: it’s building a practice that sets your coachee up to shift things on an ongoing basis.

» Continue reading “Develop Good Habits with Pseudo-Recurring Actions”

The benefit of experience and use has revealed a handful of worthy upgrades to CoachAccountable Courses.

Following Items

Sometimes it is useful to share a file or send a note or assign something else only after a given assignment has been completed.  Courses now allow you setup items that follow a given Action or Worksheet.  For any assignment you can have one or more items that follow it, and if those items are either an Action or Worksheet, then THEY can have following items.

Such chaining can go as deep as you like.  If one were so inclined you could create an entire course as just a sequence of assignments, each triggered by the completion of the last (not that you necessarily would).

When the first action is completed, the next one is immediately assigned.

» Continue reading “Courses: Remixed a few steps closer to perfection”

I am absolutely biased when I say this, so you should be on-guard and skeptical when you hear it:

CoachAccountable is an absolute joy to use for the sessions I have with the people I coach.

I love knowing what’s going on, I love coming prepared based on what’s going on, I love watching my coachees make their coaching plans, I love how clearly everything is laid out for us both when we get off the phone.

Before, it was hard to convey this to people.  You kinda have to use CoachAccountable for a full week to appreciate how the work from one week sets things up for the next, and a bit longer to see how the rhythm of it all builds so beautifully.

Basically, it takes a little time before you wonder how you ever did it any other way.

But I’ve cooked up a video that walks you through how your process can look with the benefit of CoachAccountable.  So today, if you’ve got 3 minutes, I can illustrate the beauty of it for you.  Check it out; I recommend watching in full-screen mode.

We’ve built even more functionality since this post in 2013 – check out our latest features by setting up your free 30-day trial now.