The CoachAccountable Blog

It’s a serious treat to get session notes.

Speaking as a coachee, getting from my coach their version of “Hey, this is what I’d want you to take from this conversation” is a real gift.

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 just that: 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 touch stones 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.

What are Key Insights as a new CoachAccountable 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 can even revisit any past Session Notes and add those retroactively, they’ll accordingly be added to their stash of Key Insights.

When your client clicks on a Key Insight, the full Session Notes from whence they came will pop right up, allowing them to jump right back into context.

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?

Clients will only see the Key Insights tab in their Session Notes area once there’s something there to see, so if you’re not into using those today, no worries!  They’ll be available for you to easily start with as a value-add whenever you’re ready.

In the lead up to launching Version 5.1 I got to experience having Key Insights as part of the mix:

Distilled bits of wisdom that helped focus my efforts of getting version 5.1 launched.

It was a treat, and it was effective. :)

If already you share Session Notes with your clients, add Key Insights to the mix to make them even better.

If you don’t, start.  Key Insights make writing good Session Notes dead simple, AND more valuable.

Your clients will love you for ‘em.

In a coaching relationship, some things are appropriate for sharing with clients and some things are meant to be for internal reference only.  As such it’s vital for any online coaching portal to smartly manage who can see what, so as to both respect confidentiality AND accommodate collaboration.

CoachAccountable has long supported privacy settings on a per-item basis, allowing, for example, some Session Notes to be shared with/freely accessible by the client and others to be private, for the coach’s eyes only.  “Private” and “Shared with client” are handy options to have when making an entry in a client record.

Coaches in Team Edition accounts actually have 3 options for the privacy setting:

1. Private, for my eyes only.  Items that are just for the author’s reference, and not meant to be seen even by other coaches on the team.
2. Visible only to team coaches.  Items that are just meant to be internal to the coaching team.
3. Shared with client.  Items that are meant to be seen by the client in addition to members of the coaching team.

For quite some time these settings have been quite sufficient for the CoachAccountable community.  But a few weeks ago, CoachAccountable client Martin Hoyle shared some insightful perspective that I’d never considered before:

…if I share a session note with a client it can be seen by another team coach. Can I suggest you make that more explicit?

As a coach I’m not comfortable with this, as I believe that all conversations between me and my client (especially session notes) are confidential – even with regard to other coaches working with the same client. It doesn’t seem that there is an easy way to preserve this privacy within the system as it stands.

I’d always assumed that coaching teams within a given organization were more or less a fully united front, in that anything suitable for sharing with the client would as well be suitable to be seen by other coaches assigned to work with that client (not necessarily ALL coaches within the organization, of course, just those specifically paired with him or her).

Yet this bit of feedback made clear that that wasn’t always the case.  Thus I agreed that the system needed a 4th privacy setting: Just me and the client, for items that are suitable to share with the client but still to be kept confidential from any other team coaches, EVEN those coaches who are also working with the client and have access to their records.

So thus here we have sprinkled out through the system, wherever item privacy settings are relevant, a 4th option:

My thanks to Morgan for the grammar check: the first draft of this option was the less catchy and grammarically-inferior “Just client and I”.

It is my hope that this little addition will make easier and more clear the task of balancing confidentiality with collaboration.  My thanks to Martin, and as always to the whole community of CA users whose input continues to make the platform better than I ever could with my limited perspective alone!

Form-Based Worksheets are a lovely thing: they let you create worksheets for your clients to fill out that have text areas to type in, checkboxes to check off, drop down menus to make selections in and so on.  This is all a variation on the theme of regular Worksheets, which work like free-form documents that can be edited freely as if working on a Word doc (the kind of setup wherein you type a question and hit Enter a few times to make space for your clients to type in their answer).

Session Notes, by contrast, have always been just the free-form variety, allowing coach to define a template as a convenient starting point but then type freely in and around that template when filling out notes for a session with a specific client.

» Continue reading “Form-Based Session Notes”