CoachAccountable 5.1 has now just launched!

This release is a collection of features designed to let you provide more delightful, difference-making experiences for your clients.

They are:

• Key Insights – Capture the essence of what they’re getting as a growing collection of memorable one-liners, ready to carry forward and easy to review.
• Reflections – Automatically insert your client’s earlier responses into later worksheets, Whiteboards, notes, and other content.
• Metric Templates – Make setup of Metrics super easy, and do so in a way that showcases and gets clients excited about what you can support them with.
• Default Client Landing Pages – Have clients upon login jump to a given Group or Course page when that’s the area of focus for their in-app experience.
• Pinning Stream Items – Pin key items to the top of any Client or Group Stream.
• New Worksheet Rules – Automatic deletion of old, incomplete assignments and new abilities for clients to modify already completed ones.

CoachAccountable Version 5.1 is all about the client experience, specifically giving you more power to deliver more delightful, on-point, and profound experiences for your clients.

Let me show you how!

Key Insights

It’s a serious treat to get session notes.

Speaking from experience, I love getting from my coach their version of “Hey, this is what I’d want you to take from this conversation”.

Without fail, it brings back the warm fuzzies of what was great from that session, reminds me to take that coaching goodness out into my life, and is a souvenir that I can revisit later, when I’m stuck or could use a little inspiration.

It is a gift that keeps on giving.

Key Insights put this gift squarely on a silver platter.

What are Key Insights?

Key Insights are short and sweet one-liners that are the most distilled essence of what you want your client to remember.

Key Insights represent the highlight reel of your sessions; the nuggets of wisdom and touchstones that allow recall of the important parts. If your client reviews nothing but those, they’ll be left present to the lion’s share of what mattered in their work with you.

As a new feature, Key Insights are an alternative (or addition!) to the usual ways of composing Session Notes.

They can be positioned below the usual WYSIWYG as well, or even be an outright replacement for it.

When you compose your Session Notes consisting of Key Insights, they’ll be prominently displayed up top, ready for an at-a-glance review:

Clicking on any given card, of course, brings it up in full size.

Better yet, any Key Insights you add as part of your Session Notes are automatically collected in their own section, ripe for review and searching by you and your clients:

Click on any one to bring up the full Session Notes that the Insight originally came from.

Capture the essence of what your clients are getting as a growing collection of memorable one-liners, ready to carry forward and easy to review.  They’ll love you for it.

You and your clients can also “star” any given Key Insight, making it easy to sort or filter down to only those that are starred, which is great for keeping present those that are most relevant week to week.

One click on, one click off. What’s the focus this week?

You’ll find the place to enable and configure Key Insights in your account under Settings >> My Style >> Coaching Work >> Key Insights.

Get the full story, including some great practices around using these, in the Knowledge Base article on Key Insights.

Reflections

This is the one I’m most excited about.  Reflections are a little abstract, but have the greatest potential to profoundly contribute to the power of your work.

As your coaching relationships progress, insights, declarations, and results will naturally accrue.

Will these things be forgotten, merely flash-in-the-pan with no lasting impact? Or will they stick around, to be remembered, truly integrated, used for a reference of then-and-now progress and built upon?

Few.  Coaches.  Wrestle.  With.  This.

And yet…

Here’s a street-level report on things, from us coachees.

The default state in coaching is that whatever was created last session is pushed out of awareness by whatever is created in the current one.  Absent structure to record and re-presence past creations, this is a natural consequence of human awareness.

Enter Reflections.

Reflections are your way to have CoachAccountable automatically insert insights, answers to questions, and results that were recorded earlier into subsequent work and content, allowing both you and your clients to stay aware of (and build upon) whatever was created earlier. This steers coaching relationships towards continuity and progress that builds (as contrasted with always starting from a blank slate, dealing only with the moment thus losing sight of the bigger picture).

With Reflections, scenarios like these are possible with CoachAccountable automatically doing the heavy lifting of finding and filling in the blanks for you:

“Over the past 4 weeks, your weekly sales have been $____, $____, $____ and $____.  How are you feeling about your progress during that time?”

“Coming into this Session, [clientFirstName] said they most wanted help this week with _____________.”

“Coming into this session you said you were most excited to get guidance around ______________.  What is your outlook around that now, going forward?”

“Yesterday, you meditated for ___ minutes.
What’s your number for today?”

or, if they entered a zero or didn’t report:

“It looks like you didn’t meditate yesterday.  No worries, you can get right back into the habit today!”

“On Day 1 you said the breakthrough you were most interested in getting was this:
_____________________________________
Three weeks in, how is that going now?”

Forth button in from the right.

I don’t like to traffic in hype cliches.  Nevertheless I believe it fair to say that the ability to automatically re-presence the words and results of your clients in subsequent interactions is a game changer.  You get to create a profound sense of continuity in your relationship, really be in your client’s world by recreating what they’ve said and accomplished, and keep meaningful creations alive and present.

And the client experience?

When presented with our own words and ideas, we pay attention.  Yes, it’s not hard to fill out the usual blank pre-session form as preparation for our upcoming coaching call (“How’s it been going since last time?”, but it’s a vastly different experience to interact with an inquiry that contains our own words (“After last session, you said you were taking on ___________.  How’s that gone since then?”)

For client engagement.
For continuity.
For awareness.
For the experience of being known and heard.
For progress that builds upon itself.
This.  Is.  Cool.

And I can’t wait to see what you create with Reflections of your own.

To get you started, I’ve created a Resource Package that showcases off several ways to use Reflections.

The pair pre- and post-Appointment Worksheet Templates, for example show off a powerful back-and-forth rhythm of re-presencing what client said over a sequence of sessions.

Try it, and others, out in the Course Builder Page Preview mode to see the effect in action.  If you take 5 minutes to install that Reflections Resource Package, its apt to get your creative juices flowing in a Very.  Good.  Way.  To learn more of the nuts and bolts, see the Knowledge Base article on Reflections.

Metric Templates

Build a habit, measure a KPI, track a rating, reach for a goal.  I’ve already said plenty on why Metrics, so let me now focus on why Metric Templates.

Metric Templates allow you to template out common Metrics that you’ll be guiding your clients through, meaning you save a few seconds and clicks for each setup.

This is a nice upgrade for coaches.

But the really exciting new possibility here?  Making one or more Metric Templates available to your clients, something they can use to set up a game of something worth tracking.

This, too, saves ’em a few seconds, which is cool.  But the real magic is how you can now effectively showcase a set of things they might want to track and play at.

When you create a collection that is client facing, you are saying in so many words “Here are things you might find worth moving the needle with.  Set in motion whichever you’d like, and I’ll be here to support you in making meaningful progress in those areas.”

That’s a great dimension to the service you offer, and a very distinguishing one at that.

Make some Metric Templates and share ’em with your client, then let ’em know what’s on offer and they’re free to help themselves.  Slick.

To get you started, I’ve put together a Resource Package full of Metric Templates that you can peruse and install.  Hat tip to Michael Hyatt of Full Focus: two years ago he created a Resource Package of Metrics as Courses and generously shared it with the CA user’s group, from which I drew heavy inspiration.

When you add thumbnails to your Metric Templates, it all comes together as a very compelling collection for your clients:

Choose as many as you like to set in motion whichever ones desired.

For the full story, see the Knowledge Base article on Metric Templates.

Default Client Landing Pages

Generally speaking, when a client first logs into their CoachAccountable account with you they are taken to their in-app home page.  And that’s usually just the place to be.

However, in SOME scenarios the home page isn’t actually the focal point of the action.  Here are two that are common:

• When the main focus of their experience with you is in a Group, and
• When the main focus of their experience with you is in a Course.

For these situations, you now can tell CA that a client who is a member of a particular Group, or actively participating in a given Course, that they ought to automatically bounce to that respective Group or Course page upon login.

A Group can be designated as a “default landing page” for its client members, and so can a Course for its participants.  Set those however fitting, and CA will do the rest to figure out who should bounce where.  You can even specifically customize this on a per-client basis.  See the article from the CA Knowledge Base for full details.

Pinning Stream Items

Items within a given Stream (either that of a client or a group) are always sorted chronologically (by item date or most recent comment), with newest items at the top.

In some cases, however, some item (or items!) might be so important that they’re worth always keeping present, i.e. at the very top.

When you have such an item, you can pin it, which will cause it to show at the top of the Stream for both you and your clients (and any other team members).

To pin an item, hover your mouse over it to reveal the little pin icon at the upper right.

One click does the trick. On and off.

New Worksheet Rules

Ever want clients to be able to go back to already-completed Worksheets and make further edits?  Now you can let them.

Revisiting a Worksheet can be a matter of making quick edits, or fully un-marking it complete for a new due date, reminders, and opportunity to mark the complete again.  Your call which.

Speaking of Worksheets, if you have ones that go out at a routine cadence (say a regular tracking form, or pre-Appointment check-ins), you now can set CA to auto-purge NY overdue ones, automatically clearing whatever is no longer relevant in the event that your client hasn’t been fully diligent in completing them.

You’ll find the place to configure these new Worksheet rules in Settings >> Coaching Work >> Worksheets.

Just tell CA how you’d like it to handle these things.

And There You Have It!

I’m excited for the new ways in which the features of Version 5.1 will enable you to create more magic and value for your clients.

Let me end this announcement with a funny story.  The other day I got a very kind note from someone recently inducted into the CA Millennium Club (when you’ve logged in 1000 times):

John! I LOVE CA!!! Its the best best best coaching platform ever! SO simple. So helpful. You thought of everything! Thank you!

To which I replied:

Aw, thanks Leith!

Hey, can I quote you on that?  I’m so shy about asking for reviews, I haven’t had a new one all year [Editor’s note: this is a real fact.].  If you open the top right in-app user menu and go to About… >> Reviews, you can write a review.  A verbatim paste of exactly that would be a real gift. :)

To this, Leith most generously gave me the following:

Done! And very happy to do it. I’m glad you asked for the reviews! Keep asking people!

“Keep asking people!” I consider to be sage coaching, and one that I’ll now get over myself to do.

It remains a delight to keep showing up and do what I can in service of your work as coaches.  If you would be willing to take a few minutes to share a review, I would be honored.

You could leave one here.  Or here.  Or only 5 folks have ever left one here, so that’d be great.  Or all three.  And like Leith did you can leave one in-app from the About >> Reviews area, which will land it on CA’s own reviews page.

I’m not even trying to cherry pick just 5-stars, so if you’re in some other camp in your fondness level for CA I would honored to see a review from you, too.  Frankly the overwhelming presence of 5’s and almost nothing else probably looks suspicious anyway, so that’ll help to keep things looking real. :)

Right then, that’s all I’ve got for 5.1’s announcement.  Thanks for reading, and I hope these additions add real magic to how you show up for and serve your clients!