The CoachAccountable Blog

I once presumed that, within coaching, client engagement could be taken for granted.  After all folks are paying good money for the experience, and it’s a way for them to grow and prosper in ways that are important to them.  So of course they’re going to keep up with the materials, heed coach’s advice, complete all assignments and follow through on action plans, right?

If you’ve been coaching a while you’ve probably had a handful of such A-students of the process: those who put in their work as though the quality of their life depended on it, and were accordingly rewarded for their diligence with the results they sought.

But not everyone who is coached has all of the will, the wherewithal, and the confidence in the process to follow your guidance with such high fidelity.  This is just as true for individuals who undertake being coached of their own volition as it is for individuals participating in some form of company-mandated training program.

We could say that the success of coaching is the product of how good the direction is (expertise, content, fit with the client) and how engaged the client is with that direction.  This probably makes intuitive sense: you can have the greatest coaching methodology in the world, and if the engagement is nil or negligible it won’t make a difference.

One way to look at client engagement is that it simply lies within clients themselves: some are sufficiently motivated and in a good place to take advantage of the process, and others just aren’t.

But building CoachAccountable and helping hundreds of coaches over the last two years has given me evidence that there’s more to the story.  The degree to which a client engages with a given coaching program is actually quite malleable, and is intimately tied to how the program is structured and the ways by which a client can participate.

» Continue reading “On Client Engagement”

Happenings Reports.

Or: “CoachAccountable’s system of emailing a summary of what’s new with your clients on a regular basis”.  It is perhaps an odd twist of a phrase, but this tool is one that I suspect will be quite powerful and useful for coaches.

So much customization!

Setup is as simple as indicating who to send to, which clients to report on, and when to send.  There are three types of recipients to serve three very distinct purposes.

» Continue reading “Introducing Happenings Reports”

When setting up a new client in CoachAccountable, the system makes it super easy to send an invitation email which welcomes them into the system right away.  But you might want to hold off of that for just a short while.  Here’s why.

As coaches we want our clients’ experience of our coaching to be a delight at every step, and their first run experience with CoachAccountable is no different.  By taking 5-10 minutes on a new client BEFORE inviting them in you can set things up so that they’ll immediately feel right at home.

First things first: your smiling face.  This actually isn’t something you have to do for every client, rather just once and you’ll be set for everyone.  The very first thing your clients will see when they click the magic registration link is the registration page.  If you’ve got your own headshot uploaded to your coach account, they’ll see that photo of you and instantly know they’re in the right place. Oh, and if you’ve set up your branding, this page will show with your colors and logo, too.

A picture of you lets your client know they’re in the right place. This is most reassuring for a technophobe.

» Continue reading “Setting the Stage: Perfect Client Onboarding”

10 months ago I released the “CoachAccountable’s Poignant Guide to Coaching with CoachAccountable”, a manual for coaches about how to incorporate CoachAccountable into their coaching style.

It is boisterous, just look at the color scheme of that sticker.

Today I’m excited to release a companion manual, written for the people being coached: “CoachAccountable’s Boisterous Guide to Being Coached with CoachAccountable“.

It covers both the motivation and mechanics of using the system.  My favorite part of this guide is that I’m inviting coaches to PLAGIARIZE THE HELL OUT OF IT.

Why?  These are strategies tuned to get clients more engaged in–and get the most from–the coaching process.  And even though they’re battle-tested over months of coaching, I readily grant that my voice and ideas might not be completely applicable to everyone’s coaching and clients.  So I’m inviting coaches to re-purpose and remix the ideas and essays in whatever way that fits to serve their clients.

Pass on the manual directly onto clients and tell them to skip the first half?  Cool.

Copy and paste whichever bits are useful into on-boarding materials?  Go for it.

Carefully read through and then co-opt the language and ideas to get clients oriented directly via conversation?  Love it.

However the ideas in this guide serve to get your clients more engaged and you to better coach them, I’m for it.

I’m really excited for this manual.  It finally represents a concise resource for coaching clients to get clear on–and excited about–the tools they’ll have while working with a coach.  I think it will help them generally get even more value out of the coaching work they undertake, and for me that’s the best part of all.

Download it here.

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!

A few weeks ago I got a request from one of the coaches on CoachAccountable:

I set myself up as a client and am essentially coaching myself.  I setup metrics to daily enter things from productivity level to weight lost.  I wondered if there was a way to have ourselves in the system but have it not count against our total clients?  It has helped me better understand how to use the tool with clients but as I get closer to ten clients I hate to have to pay for the higher tier.  Is there already a way to use the tool for ourselves or is this a possibility in the future?

At first I didn’t give this request much heed: doing extra coding and adding complexity to the system to have it track which client is technically the coach him or herself didn’t seem appealing, just to accommodate the (overall) rare event that a coach coaching themselves would push them over the threshold of the next subscription level.

But then I meditated on it, quite literally.

» Continue reading “Delightful Collaboration III – Coach Yourself”

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?”

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. 

The yellow sticker ain’t lying, folks.

Just released, hot-off-the-press and ripe for consumption: “CoachAccountable’s Poignant Guide to coaching with CoachAccountable”.

CoachAccountable does wonders for structuring coaching relationships, but it takes a bit of experimentation to get into a style that has the tools really work for you.

Until now.

This guide takes the guesswork out of how to set things up for you and the people you coach.  It is designed to be a light but super-useful read, a bit cheeky at times but serious about the subject.  It is not comprehensive documentation of the software and its features, as that would be boring.  Rather it a series of discussions focused on the various benefits that CoachAccountable provides, centered around structural topics that arise over the course of coaching relationships.  Readers are invited to jump around to only those topics that are of interest.

Even if you don’t ever end up using CoachAccountable, the guide holds a lot of ideas and practices that you can apply immediately to your own coaching practice.

Download your copy.

On Friday morning I had a call with an organization considering CoachAccoutable to be the platform for one of its new programs.  During the interview about the system and its capabilities, I was hit with a question I knew would come sooner than later from a more enterprise outfit: “Is there a way to export our data?”

My interviewer went on to elaborate concerns that I found completely understandable and might’ve anticipated: the data of their coaching over the span of a year amounts to so much of their client relationships, and to lose it would be catastrophic to the trust and integrity of those relationships.  “It wouldn’t even have to be readable: something that our admins could run as a weekly backup and have in case anything happened to CoachAccountable’s copy, something we could re-import if ever necessary and be back in business.”

It’s usually my job to say no to feature requests, and only give an eventual yes to the ones that come up for a lot of users (otherwise the system quickly becomes a bloated mess that no one likes).  But in this instance, the peace of mind factor alone really makes the case.

» Continue reading “New in CoachAccountable: Export Your Data”