The CoachAccountable Blog

Sometimes a simple misunderstanding reveals a good idea I never thought of.

In this instance of Delightful Collaboration that good idea came from David Green of LeadershipMARC, who forwarded me a URL for a page on CoachAccountable and wondered how to have that page be without the name of one of his clients:

The name is a fake but the branding is real.

I explained the misunderstanding, that this link was meant only to be the special page for his client to register her account (and that since that registration was already done, that’s why a login shows instead).  He countered with a most sensible expressed desire:

But I am looking for a landing page like that off of my website.

It’s a very good look.

Please tell me it’s possible.

Prior to this moment that screen, in all its customized, white-labeled glory, was only meant to be a one-off experience for clients.  But indeed it is a snappy login page, and a useful alternative to embedding a small login widget on one’s own site.  Immediately I agreed that it should be available to serve as coach’s own login page for their system, and took about 15 minutes to cook up a client-neutral variation:

Fit for any client of a given coach to login, branded to match his or her white-label settings.

Then I sent this reply:

David, I gotta hand it to you:

That’s a REALLY good idea.  So I’ve cooked up just that for you.  If you go to My CA >> My System >> White-Label Branding you’ll find a new piece there, “Customized Login Page”.  There you’ll find a magic link that is suitable for linking to as a branded, general purpose login for your clients.

Thanks for making the request, I imagine many other coaches will enjoy it as well!

I hope that they will!

One of the things I adore about being at the size that I’m at with CoachAccountable (and which I suspect I will eventually really miss) is that I’ve got time to personally reach out to the coaches who use the system.  Yesterday a cancellation notice crossed my email:

Coach Cancellation
Reason: involved in another wellness project
Comments: I love the service.  I will be back.  My private client case load is down while I take on a wellness consulting project. I hope to reengage in 2014.

Thanks for all your support!

This was coming from a woman who’d been using CoachAccountable since January, and with whom I’d already enjoyed a few nice exchanges.  When I saw this a few hours after it originally sent, I replied with the following:

Hi ____,

I just saw this notice come through, sorry to see you go but I completely understand! Thank you for being a most positively encouraging early adopter of CoachAccountable. If you’d like I’d be happy to make an exception and keep your data in tact, such that if and when you’re ready to pick up again next year you can do so from right where you left off.  I figure it’s the least I can do for you. :)

Thanks again for the kind words!
John

This morning she replied:

You are so kind! I would LOVE it if you kept my account. If all goes well, this consulting gig could lead to many more clients.

Regarding another topic…I do a lot of group coaching. It would be nice to have a feature that let’s me communicate with a group if people.

Thanks so much! I’ll stay in touch!

Nice!  Not only to be able to do for someone what turns out to be a useful favor (and indeed one that benefits me by making it easy for her to return as a paying customer), but that bonus insight into what would be useful to an interested user: support for group coaching.  The timing on hearing that is quite nice, for I was able to reply:

Super cool,

I will do just that.  Just drop me a line whenever you’re ready for me to reactivate your account.

Funny you should mention group coaching.  This week I’m putting on the finishing touches to CoachAccountable Groups and I will be releasing it next week.  Should be some new, useful goodies for you whenever you return!

Cheers,
John

This reply came swiftly back:

Please send me info when available…I may be back sooner than I thought. I will be conducting some groups and may find that service helpful :)

Thanks!

What a fine and unexpected outcome, just for sending a quick love note thanking a customer on her way out the door.  This is doubly nice for me because, when heads down coding a major new feature, nothing does quite so nicely to motivate and focus those efforts quite like hearing from REAL PEOPLE who are genuinely interested in what I’m working on.

So I get to commence my day of programming with renewed vigor and focus.  Reaching out to people is awesome.

I got a note recently which utterly made my day.  It was sent as a response from one of the lessons in the Coaching With Software course:

Hi John!

First, I want to let you know that reading and pondering the articles you’ve sent has forced me to think differently about what my business really needs to provide potential clients. Years ago, I hired an executive coach to help me be accountable. Looking back, what their service ultimately became was an endless stream of worthless platitudes. They sounded and felt good but had absolutely no value or substance to help me move my business forward and hold me accountable. There was absolutely no meat just a bunch of feel good fluff that I was paying for on a weekly basis!!!

My coaching business has been on hold, for several years, because I could not see any inherent value that could be provided to potential clients.  You have inspired me to think differently and therefore, have decided to move forward again.  I am currently working on the details necessary to put my former coaching practice back in place. I have decided to use CoachAccountable as the vehicle to help me accomplish this.

You will hear back from in a couple of weeks once I have things back in place to support my coaching practice.

Thank you for inspiring me to take action!!!

Jack

I think Jack really gets to the heart of the hangup many have with coaching: all too commonly, it just boils down to so many feelgood platitudes.

As coaches we’re all pretty well adept at being a top-shelf cheerleader for the people we coach.  That sort of ability, to lift up and motivate others with our words, is neigh on a requisite of the practice.  But to truly have our coaching be worth taking seriously (not to mention worth coming back for), making our coachees feel good has to be balanced with actual lasting results beyond our interactions.  It has to contain structure, concrete actions to be taken, sincere follow through with those actions, and the courage to actually measure the results and respond accordingly.  Ultimately, it has to be results-based.

The degree to which the coaching industry is taken seriously depends on it.

To have CoachAccountable be recognized as a tool for giving those sorts of lasting results through structure and accountability is among the most important praise it could receive.  Thanks for the kudos, Jack.

This one’s a guest post by the venerated, bonified CoachAccountable customer #1, Dr. John Kenworthy.

During our visit a few months ago in Singapore, Dr. John mentioned that I gave him a lot of his free time back.  As I continue along my path of telling the story of CoachAccountable as being a win waiting to happen for your typical results-focused coach, I decided to ask Dr. John if he’d care to share with the class more precisely about that time he has saved.

His willingness to do so was generously enthusiastic, and his account was nothing short of remarkable.  I told him his title of saving 100 days of time this year might be regarded as a bit sensationalist.  He has assured me he’s ready to duke it out in any form of comment debate that ensues, so feel free to weigh in below with any skepticism and/or curiosity you have.

Take it away, Dr. John.

» Continue reading “How CoachAccountable is giving me 100 extra days this year”

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”

Last week during the database downtime incident happening at the (now past) hosting environment, Scott Hudspeth of Marketing in the Clouds dropped me an email:

Tried to sign up through 2 different browsers, are you guys having issues?

Scotty

Sure enough, this was during the 90-minute downtime window we had.  Luckily I was online (this was at around 9am in Laos), and was able to reply 7 minutes later:

» Continue reading “A Shaky, Then Fantastic, First Impression”

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you’ve no doubt come across the words of Dr. John Kenworthy of Celsim Business leadership coaching.  Dr. John signed himself up for a CoachAccountable account on launch day back at the end of August, and since then has been the most publicly vocal fan of the system since.  Some days, in fact, I wonder if people think I contrived him as a character with which to have conversations in the comment threads on this blog.

He is very consistently pro CoachAccountable, after all.

But no, it turns out he is quite real indeed.  Despite the fact that we share the same first name, further supporting speculation that he is but a CA-promoting figment of my imagination, Dr. John lives in Singapore.

» Continue reading “Meeting CoachAccountable’s Customer #1”

A few weeks ago I reached out to a coach who was new to the system to see how it was going for him.

Though “so far so good” was the overall message, part the feedback was this:

There are a few issues. Can I send Audio (.mp3) or videos thru the system? It would be terrific to integrate links to sugar sync or dropbox folders so as to not get heavy on the files I send.

At first glance my answer was clear, of course!  I proudly began to type out my reply:

You’ve got a few options for sending audio and video though the system.  You can upload those files into your library once (My CA >> My Library) and then share them with clients with a few clicks on the Files tab of their respective client pages.  Or in your case (and this might be better as you’ve already got your files already online) you can share links to those files with your clients via CA in, say, a journal entry or as part of a worksheet assignment, or in a Stream comment.

As I wrote this I got to thinking this was actually a lackluster answer, and I was surprised to realize it.

» Continue reading “Delightful Collaboration II – Externally Hosted File Sharing”

As a single coach, my experiences can run a reasonable size of the gamut of all possible coaching scenarios, techniques, and structural setups.  Still, there’s no question that my familiarity falls well short of the 100% mark: there are a ton of ways of doing things that I’ve just never considered.  Thus it is delightful with other coaches share with me what they’re doing in their practice, insomuch as CoachAccountable might be able to help.

The Delightful Collaboration Series is accounts of when users of CoachAccountable reach out to me and say things to the tune of “Hey, this is nice but can you make it do…”.  On these occasions I get a glimpse into the coaching practices of others, and get familiar with [potential] uses for the software that I hadn’t considered myself but would be a big win for someone else.  I take these as suggestions of how I might tweak or build upon the current CoachAccountable.

» Continue reading “Delightful Collaboration I – Long Term Goals & Progress”

…And while I was away, CA sent all the reminders to them ;-) Just simplifies my life…

– From Dr. John Kenworthy of Celsim, remarked about CoachAccountable and his coachees after returning from vacation.