The CoachAccountable Blog

In the two previous posts we’ve covered the basics of using Worksheets within CoachAccountable, and how to wield their Form-Based variant.

Now let’s look to the next level of power in using Worksheets: setting them up to have your clients’ answers feed into their Metrics.

This is a bit abstract, so let’s consider a concrete example to see how this is useful.

A quick warning before we dive in: the ideas to follow are the stuff of putting a lot of features of CoachAccountable together to make elaborate, sophisticated setups to serve your coaching clients.  It is cool stuff, but requires a certain familiarity with some of the basic building blocks of the system, like Actions, Courses and Metrics.  If you’re familiar with these things already then you’re set, and might be delighted to learn of the fancy, integrated and automated setups that are possible.  If you’re NOT familiar, you might want to learn those basics first (though reading on here may serve as good motivation for that learning!).

Right then, let’s dive in.

» Continue reading “Piping Worksheet Answers Into Metrics”

Courses within CoachAccountable allow a coach to design a timeline progression of materials and assignments, to be delivered automatically according to the schedule to course participants.

Among items that can be delivered are Actions: assignments of what to do and by when, plus helpful reminders, e.g. “Read Chapter 3 of the Workbook, due 2 days from now at 5:00pm with a text reminder to be sent 24 hours prior to the deadline”.

Action Projects are a way to group separate Actions as contributing steps to the overarching goal or milestone.  With their progress meter and summary display they do a great job of visually organizing the bigger picture of tasks which your clients are undertaking.

You can now bake project structure right into your Course Actions, and CA will do the work of creating those Action Projects for your course participants.

» Continue reading “Course Action Projects”

Courses allow a coach to define a timeline of assignments, materials, and communications to be given to a given course participant over a span of days, weeks, or months.

Groups allow a coach to put 2 or more coaching clients together and allow them to jointly participate in Group Actions, Group Metrics, and Group Worksheets, wherein each group member does their thing which counts towards the overall progress of the group (for example Group Metrics, wherein each person reports their number which contributes to the overall Group Metric, computed as either the sum or average of individual performance).

These two tools for structuring sophisticated coaching programs used to be completely separate: Courses could be taken only by individual clients and their progress and results were kept completely separate, and there was no such thing as a Group going through a Course all together with shared results.

With Group Courses these structures for program delivery can be combined: Groups of coaching clients can embark together on the same course, and all items of the course will be delivered as group items.  Say Day 1 of a course entails an Action assignment to call on five prospects.  Members of a group taking that course would each have that assignment, and could all see the overall progress of everyone in the group, i.e. who is done and who is not.

» Continue reading “Group Courses”

Consider the following scenarios:

• Nutrition and wellness coaches routinely have their clients track things like weight, exercise, and dietary intake.
• Real estate office managers training their agents on performance will often be concerned with typical metrics like appointments, touch points, and showings.
• Business development coaches commonly start their clients with a standard action plan which has owners taking stock of their operations and getting generally prepared for the process.

In these cases and so many more it is common for a coach to have a standard set of Metrics and/or assignments that applies to every new client they onboard.

Especially now that they’ve been freed up for everyone, CoachAccountable Courses provides a way to quickly set up new clients according to these standard templates using what I call “Starter Kit Courses”.

» Continue reading “Quick Client Setup with Starter Kit Courses”

One of the things technology is generally useful for is to automate a lot of grunt work and thus free up time for people, and CoachAccountable is no different in this regard.

Since the launch of the site redesign back in April, I’ve had a signature website “Coming Soon” notice on an illustrative video about how CoachAccountable helps to scale up one’s coaching practice.  “Soon” for things like this is a standard lie in the web world, and alas amid all the travel I took nearly 3 months to finally get that video together (in my defense, I was traveling through all of Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal, UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Italy during that time).

But I knew I’d get to it eventually.  I cooked up the script for it in haste back in mid-April, during the 36 hour window I had prior to my appointment at a proper sound studio to do the recordings.  With proper narration all done it was but a matter of time before I could animate it, and whilst living in Crete I found that time.

Anecdotes surrounding its creation aside, the video gives a nice illustration of the difficulty of scaling up one-to-one coaching, and how CoachAccountable can help.

Coach more people in the same amount of hours, or the same amount of people in fewer hours.  I think it’s a juicy win.

Enjoy!

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”

A new major piece of CoachAccountable has just been released: Courses.

Courses allow coaches to define their own courses & coaching programs as a series of Actions, Metric trackings, Worksheet assignments and more.  These items are placed over a timeline which consists of as many days as the course or program is long.  Compose a timeline consisting of these items and the course is ready for people to go through.

Participants can be put into courses at any time, as many as you like and whenever you like, and either all in sync or in an ad hoc fashion.  CoachAccountable handles the release of course assignments and materials for each participant according to the timeline you set.  For greater flexibility, an individual’s participation in a course can be paused at any time.  Course participation can also be fast-forwarded or  rewound however a coach deems appropriate.

As the course progresses for your participants, you can see at a glance how they are doing with respect to their assignments:

At a glance view of how a participant is doing with the collection of course assignments.

If you’ve ever wanted to design and implement repeatable programs for the people you coach, or even if you have a standard sequence of assignments and events that mark the beginning weeks of your typical client relationships, CoachAccountable courses might be just the thing for you.  Courses are also great for routine & repeatable training procedures.