Last week my wife and I were in Vancouver enjoying a little getaway, during which I had my second international face-to-face with a CoachAccountable customer.  This time it was David Frank Gomes of Life Compass Coaching.

Relative to the timeline of CoachAccountable, David and I go way back.  He was one of the very first people checking it out with whom I chatted on the phone, one of my early attempts to convey in words the how and why of the system.  This was in November of 2012, just over 2 months into CA’s public existence.

I think the job I did of convincing him was good but not great in that green period of my sales call ability: it wasn’t until 5 months later that David came back as a full-fledged user of the system, but to my delight he’s been a vocal fan ever since.

During our visit we talked of Team Edition’s imminent release, our mutual paths as entrepreneurs in the coaching space, and David’s experience of using CA for his year+.  For David’s practice though he loves the system he finds a lot of its mechanics (for example of Metrics and Actions) to be cold, uninspiring, a little too right-brained.  For his sake, he told me, he’d love to give his clients a more visual experience: something to viscerally inspire the dynamic process that dealing with life’s issues and ambitions generally is, and communicate more than just numbers and graphs.

“Like sharing images,” he said, “yes I can upload it as a file to share with the client and put it in their Files tab, but then they have to click through and download it to their machine and open it.  It’s clunky.  It would be nice to see them just appear in the Stream tab.”

He went on to explain how “Yeah you can do a Metric of ‘how do you feel about your dad’s death today?’, but what does that mean, when they report a 2?  I want them to go out in the world, take a picture that expresses how they’re feeling.  When they share that we can have a conversation, create and build a story based on that rather than some sterile graph.”

It was fantastic to see and hear things so clearly from his perspective.  The way he described the situation gave me several ideas of low hanging fruit to put more imagery into the coaching experience.

So today I’m happy to announce the release of two tweaks to the system which allow the coaching process to be just a little more visual.

The first is that clients are now able to upload and embed images into their journal entries.  Like coaches have enjoyed for a while now, a little image button on the WYSIWYG editor allows them to access and add to their image gallery:

Fun fact: that sketch of me was done by some nice gal during a drunken draw-off competition at a house party in college.  Pretty sure she won.

You may need to let your clients know that they can insert images into their journal entries, as that little picture icon is easy to miss.  And remember: as coach you can add images to your templates, worksheet assignments, session notes, and even client messages.

The second tweak is that shared files that are in fact images are now rendered inline in the stream.

Taken together the Client Stream can now be a much more pictorial account of the coaching process:

The client has included an image in his journal entry. The shared image file shows right up with no need to download.  Also: that’s what I looked like in grad school.

David, it was a pleasure hanging with you on the Granville Island harbor.  Thanks for sharing your inspired perspective!