The CoachAccountable Blog

Offering Restrictions have been a thing for quite a while now, they are the ability to restrict folks from signing up or purchasing one of your Offerings.  They’ve come in three flavors:

1. Limit the number of total sign ups (“sold out!”)
2. Beginning available date (“coming soon!”)
3. Ending available date (“now expired!”)

There’s now a fourth: limit the number of sign ups per client (“one per customer!”).

Like the others, this can now be set in the Restrictions area when editing a given Offering:

For the long time I didn’t see much need for that sort of restriction: generally speaking, someone who wants to buy another package of sessions, or redo your course, or similar would be a good and welcome thing!

But oh right, the classic, complimentary Discovery Call^TM definitely fits the mold of “one per customer”.

I had earlier thought any sort of abuse to this would be few and far between, and on whatever such rare occasions, it would be easy to spot and politely say, “No, nice try.” to the offending party (with the likely positive side effect of coach being let know that yes, this person is back and keen to engage!).

But as I write this, I imagine myself saying as much during a live press release, and promptly getting heckled with a well-meaning “Yeah, you’d be wrong there, Larson!”  To which I would say “Fair enough!”  And this new ability to restrict Offerings in this way addresses whatever hassle anyone has had amid any sort of abuse to the self-service nature of Offering sign ups.

This restrictions is ultimately based on email address.  If a known client who should be so restricted is already logged in, CA will catch as much and notify them prior to their proceeding, like so:

If not, CA will catch any should-be-restricted situation upon their completion of the sign up, and notify accordingly.

Enjoy!

The other week I had the delightful experience of riffing with Patrick Healy of The Learning and Performance Podcast.  Patrick comes from a background in a field that was new to me, Learning Design.

Though I’m apt to botch the nuance in my layperson’s description of it, Learning Design means creatively and intentionally crafting a learning experience (including the materials, pacing, presentation and overall delivery method), and do so in a way that best gets the target audience to effectively engage and ultimately learn what there is to learn.

In other words, it’s the stuff of going well beyond throwing a textbook at someone and telling ’em to get cracking.

This perspective that Patrick comes from made for an exploration of coaching from a nuanced lens which is novel to me, namely how coaching maps on to learning and ultimately performance.  We open with a hearty survey of what coaches do and how coaching compares to ostensibly similar activities, like training and mentorship.

Some of my favorite parts:

• How accountability is often the missing magic in coaching and why execution matters (17:30)
• A big success of my own self being coached, and why it worked so well (37:02)
• Advice for coaches starting out: get specific about your pitch (42:38)
• My leeriness around AI’s growing presence in coaching (featuring reasoning beyond the mere fist shaking of a Luddite!) (47:47)
• The 3 skills that make one stand out as an exceptional coach (in this definition, competence from training is mere table stakes) (53:15)
• CoachAccountable as a long form love letter to the practice which has given me so much (1:12:18)
• Why, if I had to pick, “Baller” would be the one word I’d get tattooed on me (1:16:54)

Enjoy!