The CoachAccountable Blog

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’ve several times been asked what I was thinking to inspire the functional design of CoachAccountable.  I find it easiest to answer in terms of certain tendencies I’ve noticed over the course of coaching relationships, drawn from both coaching and being coached.  I’ll share those tendencies and how they pertain to CoachAccountable’s design, and I invite you to read along and see for yourself which ones you recognize from your own experiences, both of coaching and being coached.

» Continue reading “Tendencies I’ve Noticed in Coaching Relationships”

And I have an update on what is happening with CoachAccountable.

But first it seems fitting to take a little time to introduce myself and share with you a little about who I am, in particular concerning my role and relationship to this fine and waylaid  endeavor.   A lot has changed in the two and a half years since anyone last posted here on the CoachAccountable blog, and I believe the most personal tidbit about me that one can find in our archives thus far is a passing mention of my fondness for Dance Dance Revolution (still true, by the way).

I’ll begin with some back story: when our team was last on the trail in any publicly visible way back in the fall of ’09, it was myself, Lee Robinson, and Rob Fieldhouse giving it our all, bootstrapped but proud.  A few months of trying to approach the market unsuccessfully revealed that we three didn’t have what it would apparently take to make it work, and we put things all on an indefinite pause.  We were over being poor chasing the dream.

» Continue reading “Hello, I’m John”

Yesterday I wrote a piece about transparency of coaching, or how accessible the coaching industry is (or is not) to the more general public.  Now I want to take a look at transparency in coaching, or said another way, how easy it is for a client to perceive the progress and process over time.

Clearly we can agree that any coach worth their salt will be providing perceptible value for their client whenever they are interfacing.  It’s industry standard, you could say, that during a coaching session a client is realizing valuable insights, solid direction, and a more or less immediate experience that “yes, I am more clear/focused/ready for what’s next”.   But what about such clarity over the duration of the coaching engagement, whether weeks, months or years?

» Continue reading “Transparency IN Coaching”

One of the things I’ve run into time and time again during the course of CoachAccountable’s development is having to explain coaching (in the personal development sense) to friends who have never heard the word used outside the sports context.  Even despite many opportunities to practice giving my explanation, I seldom have it resonate with my listener.  The best response I can usually hope for goes something along the lines of “Ah, that sounds kinda cool for those people that need that.”

Those people that need that.

People generally understand that athletes do well to have someone who is not them looking at how they’re playing and offering guidance from an external perspective.  To score more points and win the big game, this makes perfect sense to most people.  But somehow when you apply that same concept to living one’s dreams, career advancement, and quality of life the concept goes sour in people’s minds.  Somehow a concept that enjoys “of-course-you-do-that-to-be-the-best” status in sports becomes far less obvious when applied to the grander scope of life.

What if we consider how transparency of coaching impacts this?

» Continue reading “Transparency of Coaching”

The four of us had a most excellent experience this weekend, and that was attending the Big Omaha conference: a gathering of entrepreneurial-minded tech folk.  Attendance covered the gamut from established thought leaders in the field to freelancers who just quit their job eager to create something themselves.

As a group of creatives on the verge of launching our first web app, we felt right at home.

Jeffrey Kalmikoff’s presentation on transparency was a real hit with all of us.   He posited the big question: “what does it take to be so genuine and authentically connected with your customers that you could screw up big time and have them still love you?”  There are a couple of things that  jumped out at me when looking at that:

• Never trying to appear as though you are something you are not. We’ve been a team of only 3 or 4 for a while now, but Lord knows the earliest drafts of our design agency website tried to pass us off as big and corporate.  Turns out we never needed to be: appearing big and deeply established never got us a job, being talented, commited and reliable did.
• Being accessible. Allowing a two-way rapport with customers, with emphasis on the two-way: if our customers take the time to give us feedback or comments, we owe it to them to give a thoughtful reply.
• Publicly owning up to mistakes. Nothing makes failure on someone’s part more painful than having it come with some song and dance trying to hide or justify the problem.  Being open and responsible about mistakes can turn an “us-vs-them” situation into a collaborative community effort to work out a resolution.

It may go without saying given all the above, but for the record I’ll say it plain:

We want to have that kind of relationship with the Coaching community.

While sitting out at the wine tasting rap party at the Big Omaha we came up with a few ideas on how to cultivate just that.  Stay tuned.  In the mean time I invite you to do the same: take a little time sitting outdoors (possibly with a glass of wine) and think about how you could foster such relationship with your clients and the communities you serve.  I’d love to hear what you come up with.