The CoachAccountable Blog

Worksheets are CoachAccountable’s way of letting you create, manage, and organize written assignments for your clients.  Similar to Microsoft Word or Google Docs, they allow you to create a series of questions in free-style fashion with blank spaces for your clients to fill in (OR in form-based fashion with text boxes, radio buttons, etc. – more on that HERE, but here we’ll just cover the basics, as the title of the post implies).

Everyone seems to chuckle at the WTF check-in.

Here’s a look into how they work, and how to use them to their fullest in your coaching programs.

Worksheet Templates

Our overview of using CoachAccountable Worksheets starts with a look at templates.  Templates are your collection of stock worksheets common to your style/methodology/programs.  We’ve pre-loaded your account with eight templates that serve as examples of how you might do your own.  You’re welcome to use these in your coaching, modify them to better suit your style, or delete them outright and create new ones from scratch.

Set up as many templates as you like.

Assigning a Worksheet

Once you’ve got templates ready, you can add an assignment for your client with just a few clicks.  Visit your client’s page.  The big +Worksheet button on the sidebar is one way to assign a worksheet to that client. You can also use the +Worksheet button on the Worksheets page.

Upon clicking the worksheet adder button you’re presented with a number of options.  First the system invites you to pick (from among your templates) which worksheet you’d like to assign.  You don’t strictly NEED to have any templates because you can always start with a blank worksheet, but having them is a leg up: a serious shortcut when the assignment you’re about to give is one of your regulars.

Pick one from your collection of templates, and it fills right in.

You’re not stuck assigning one of your template worksheets as-is: when you pick a template, its contents load right in for you to see and, if needed, edit to better fit the situation at hand with your client.  This is the best of both worlds: you’re able to give an assignment quickly from your established collection AND you can add or remove questions as warranted.

Tailoring a worksheet assignment like this (especially when it’s one that your client sees on a regular basis, like a weekly check-in) is a way to let your client experience that your coaching truly suits their specific needs.  When it feels like that (as opposed to going through some cookie-cutter process), your clients are apt to put in more thought and effort.

Worksheets have due dates/times associated with them which you can set, add, or remove.  If your client is in another timezone the system gives you a hint to ensure you set the right time.  You can also set one or more reminders to be sent to either you or your client, via email (or even SMS if you are in North America).

Negative one weeks before, what’s that about?

A reminder for your client one day before the worksheet is due works well to have him or her reliably complete on time.  If it’s a longer-range assignment, due more than a week out, you might set a second reminder around the halfway mark to get your client thinking about it.  Reminders sent via email are especially nice because it puts your client one click away from hopping into their account with the worksheet loaded front-and-center, ready to be worked on.

Note the third reminder in the example collection above, where it says to remind the client -1 weeks before via email.  Using negative numbers is a little trick to tell CoachAccountable to send a reminder AFTER a worksheet’s due date has passed.  This is handy if you think it likely that a worksheet will go undone for so long, a way to have the system gently remind your client that “hey, this is overdue but it’s still due so please go complete it”.  But what if they’ve already completed it on time?  Not to worry: like all reminders, a negative reminder will NOT be sent for a worksheet if it has already been marked complete.

Finally you’re given the option to have CoachAccountable send your client a notification about the new assignment immediately.  The notification message is pre-loaded from your email message templates (customizable under My CA >> My System >> System Communications) for convenience, and can be personalized to suit the situation.

Click “Assign” and you’re done.  The worksheet will appear in the “Assigned” section under the Worksheets tab (as well as the “What’s Next” tab of the Overview), there for you to see and your clients to work on.  As coach you can modify an outstanding assignment, including its due date and reminders.

Notifications

To help along the process of your clients actually getting their Worksheet assignments complete, CA offers a few notifications.  Under Settings >> System >> Notifications you’ve got options:

Notifications can be sent automatically when interesting things happen.

Notifications of completed worksheets are especially nice because they put the content of the worksheet right in your inbox: no need to log in to see what your client filled out¹.

Notifications of late worksheets keep assignments from falling through the cracks.  As coach it is nice to be alerted when a due date has slipped; it gives you the opportunity to check in with your client and see if you can offer any help to get them back on track.  In fact, text and email notifications about late worksheets can be replied to directly, which both passes the message back to your client AND captures it within the CoachAccountable client record.

Here as in other emails sent by the system, the “Reply ABOVE THIS LINE” message tells us what we can do from the comfort of our inbox.  So we hit reply and type:

You, of course, will probably be much more tactful.

This message is emailed on to the client as well as captured within CoachAccountable:

After Completion

Once completed a Worksheet becomes part of the client record, living in both the Worksheets tab and the Stream tab (which is the running log of all things in the coaching relationship to date).  You and your client can easily print out a completed worksheet, or email it off to whomever.  If you as coach deem for whatever reason that it’s not complete, you can un-mark it so, and effectively send back to your client to work on further.

With that you have the whole flow of worksheet assignments for a typical, single client.  Worksheets can also be sent out automatically as standard prep work for appointments or as a follow-up, can be included in Courses as part of the timeline of materials and assignments, and can be assigned to members of coaching Groups for the purpose of collecting and sharing individual responses.

Give them a try.  Worksheets are a wonderful way of getting your clients to really think through and put down thoughtful responses to the questions or exercises you lay out for them.  That work is the stuff of transitioning them from passive recipients of your coaching insights and wisdom to a place of actively thinking about and applying that wisdom.

In short, they make your coaching more real.

Get your WTF on with a free CoachAccountable trial now.

Note:

A common concern with using a web-based system like CoachAccountable is one of privacy: the information that is captured and stored over the course of a coaching relationship is of course of a highly personal and often sensitive nature.  To use a system like CoachAccountable, wherein that information is stored and managed with a third party, requires confidence that such private matters will stay private.

This is a worthy and well-founded concern, and the expectation of confidentially is most reasonable and in fact should be present.

To address that concern I’d like to first contrast CoachAccountable against web-based companies like Google and Facebook, whose business model is to give away the platform for free and monetize customer relationships by owning and selling the customer data.  CoachAccountable on the other hand is a platform which charges for use of the product itself, and does not traffic in the sale or sharing of data in any way whatsoever.

Here’s a question which nicely expresses another aspect of concern:

Are the client records confidential or can you or any other admins go in and read intended confidential client accounts?

As it says in Item 11 of the Terms of Awesome, it is technically IMPOSSIBLE for our team, as custodian of all data stored within CoachAccountable, to NOT technically be able to access client records.

(This is the case for EVERY web-based collaboration platform which allows two or more parties to access shared data.  If you as coach were the only person who needed to access your data, it could technically be stored encrypted by your password, which, in a well-designed system is made unknowable to system administrators¹.  But if your account data were encrypted with a key that only you possessed, sharing that data with your clients–and vice-versa–would be impossible because their password would not be able to unlock it.  Any comparable web-based service which claims otherwise is lying².)

So yes: I AM technically able to go in and read confidential client information.  The ability comes from the same power that allows me to help folks access their account when they can’t log in.  The good news is that authorized members of the CoachAccountable team are the only ones with that level of access, and we tread very respectfully with the well founded expectation of confidentiality that you and your clients have³.  The only reason we ever access account data is if needed to troubleshoot a support issue upon request.  When we do, it is as a plumber on a house call: go directly to the kitchen sink and get it fixed, paying no heed to unrelated surroundings and certainly not poking around in bedrooms or rifling through drawers.

There is even slightly cynical line of reasoning that might instill confidence around safekeeping privacy: as a small-team operation with literally thousands of clients being coached on the platform, we have neither the time nor curious inclination to rifle through anyone’s data.  To spend time at an activity which wantonly disrespects the privacy of our customers is an exceptionally poor use of time at cost of good will–I’m not having it.

Ultimately if you and your clients are comfortable using email as a medium of exchanging coaching information, you have every reason to be similarly comfortable using CoachAccountable.  In fact a system like CoachAccountable has a leg up, as email is rarely encrypted in transit and generally leaves more of a digital paper trail.

For more of the technical side of how CoachAccountable is secure, see the CoachAccountable security page.

It happens: even with the login helper that CoachAccountable provides, sometimes your clients can’t get themselves logged into their account. As coach you always of course want to ensure your clients are having a great experience in all facets of working with you, so helping them get logged in is a natural thing to want to do.

First things first: make sure their client account is active.  By design, a client you deactivate CAN’T log in, so be certain that’s not the reason for their issue OR advise them appropriately if it is.  (Assuming you deactivated them because your coaching relationship finished, this might be a good opportunity to invite them to start up work with you again.)

For security purposes the username and password of your clients are strictly their own, so you can’t tell the client their username or reset their password for them.  There are a few things you can do, though.

The Login Helper

The login helper is always accessible by clicking the “Forgot your username or password?” link from wherever your clients are logging in from:

The login helper gives your clients (and you, it works the same for everyone) a choice of what to recover based on what part of the login is forgotten, username or password.

When you provide an email address the system can look up the associated username and send it to the address provided.  If there is no username account tied to the email address you provide, the system will let you know in the message it sends.

When you provide a username, the system sends an email with a magic link by which to log in automatically, which of course makes it possible to reset your password.

Maybe.

Here’s the catch: the system can send an email out with that magic link ONLY IF the username provided is actually on file:

It’s SUPER common for folks to not read this whole message. Sigh.

To prevent nosy or malicious parties from fishing around to see if certain individuals have an account (by guessing at plausible usernames), the system DOESN’T tell you whether or not the username you entered actually exists: the above is the same message whether CA recognizes the username or doesn’t.

This brings us to the common gotcha: if the login helper fails to send you a helper email when you request one, the most likely reason is that you’re not entering your correct username.  So the thing to do is enter your email on file to get your correct username, and THEN use that correct username to request a login link by which you’ll be able to reset your password.  (And in all cases you should check your spam folder just in case the login helper emails are landing there.)

The above is a general lesson on how to use the login helper, and it applies to coaches as well as clients.  If your client is having trouble, you can always remind them of the email address on their account, and from there they should be able to use the login helper to get the rest of the way using the two steps: first get the username, then use the username to get the login link.

A login link that YOU can send

All that said, you as coach can send your client a Message through the system that contains a magic login link to get that client right into his or her account.

To do this, compose an email to the client by clicking on the email icon in the upper left on the client’s page.

Include the [loginLink] magic tag anywhere with the body of the message and send it their way.  Add that tag by clicking on the magic tag at the bottom of the message composition screen, or by typing it in, exactly like this: [loginLink], brackets and capitalization included.

Once in, they’ll be able to visit their My Account page to confirm their username and, if needed, reset their password.

One thing to note: if you CC yourself on this message, the [loginLink] will still simply say [loginLink] in the email you receive.  Rest assured your client got an actual login link.  The reason you didn’t is because that would be quite a security hole if you could send yourself a login link for your clients’ accounts!

Thus you have two things you can do when your client can’t access their account.  Granted the second approach is much more direct, BUT that requires you to be involved each time.

If your client has trouble logging in I recommend you get them right in with a Message containing a login link, AND you let them know how to help themselves in the future by using the login helper, making them aware of the common gotcha so that they’ll be successful with it (because presumably they weren’t if they’re telling you of their problem).

It’s a nice one-two combo, like giving them a fish for now and then teaching them how to fish for next time. :)

Most of the legalese-filled documents like “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy” are lengthy, uninteresting, and full of jargon that is generally inaccessible to humans.  CoachAccountable has such documents and they indeed fit that model: they are fully vetted as legit and covering all bases by qualified lawyers, but that still doesn’t mean they’re not boring, boilerplate, and overall uninteresting.

Perhaps that is as it is meant to be to satisfy the needs and eventualities that can arise in our current system of law.  Fine, so be it.

But when it comes to outlining the parameters of the relationship between CoachAccountable and its customers, there really is (and deserves to be) more to the story.  Enter the CoachAccountable Terms of Awesome.

Written like a manifesto of the rights and privileges one can expect as a user of CoachAccountable, the Terms of Awesome is essentially an account of how I’ve been doing business with folks since launching back in 2012.  It’s been working well, so I’m happy to declare publicly that that is, in fact, the deal.  Read the Terms of Awesome here.

“I love having messages to my clients captured in CoachAccountable.  It would be nice if I could just send a regular email without having to log in, and have it show up in their file.”

– Like, a dozen coaches.

CoachAccountable messaging is nice, a quick way to fire off messages between coach and client, affording tidy, on-topic comment threads and becoming part of The Record of the coaching process.  But traditionally, messages sent via CA had to be send from within CA.  Wouldn’t it be lovely if you could post a message to your clients from right within your usual email?

Introducing CoachAccountable System Email Addresses

CoachAccountable now supports posting messages right from your usual email program, no logging in required.  As coach, you can find a system email address for each of the clients you are coaching.  This magic email address is tied to a specific client, and routes through CoachAccountable.  Sending an email to this address is equivalent to posting a message to the corresponding client from within CoachAccountable.

To do this, a coach needs only find the system addresses for his or her clients, and (probably a good idea) add those addresses to his or her email contacts for easy reference later.

System email addresses are found under Settings >> System >> System Email Addresses.

Lots of goodies here. For now, System Email Addresses is what we’re concerned with.

The System Email Address page offers a listing of all of your clients and their respective, magic email addresses:

You could do a bunch of copy-and-pasting between here and say your Outlook address book, but there’s a quicker way. :)

To make getting these magic addresses into your email address book easy, you can have CoachAccountable send you emails from each of them, putting you two clicks away from adding the right “from name” and address for each.

Gmail actually requires a few clicks nowadays… hover over the sender’s name, click “More info” to see the sidebar on the right, then click the little teeny “add to contacts” button.

Having the “via CoachAccountable” (or whatever suffix you tell the system to send with) makes it easy to keep system email addresses separate from an individual’s regular address: one will route through and be recorded by CA, and one won’t, so you’ll want to be sure you’re sending to the right one.

Once added to your contacts, addressing a message to your client to be sent via CA is a simple matter:

Type a few characters and the system email address pops right up from your contacts.

Then compose an email as you usually would, and send:

Within a minute, this email is received by CoachAccountable, posted as a message in your client’s stream…

…and sent along to your client via email as usual:

Want to add a little formatting to your email, perhaps even a picture?  No problem, just put it all into your email as you normally would and CA will handle it:

Ponies.

This goes right into CA as you’d expect it:

Finally you can also share files this way.  Attached files will be stored by CA as shared files under the Files tab:

Attach one or many, they’ll all be stored.

The email your client receives comes with links to the file or files you shared.  This is nice in that this way you’ll be able to see if (and when) they viewed the file, and the file will be delivered in embedded fashion when applicable:

And of course these files will be accessible from the recipient client’s Files tab:

What do you mean Mikayla has never accessed these yet; I sent ’em like 3 minutes ago?!

There’s one other trick to using System Email Addresses: if you just want to share a file and don’t necessarily want to post an actual Client Message, you can do so by sending a specially crafted message: have the subject line start with exactly “File:”, and attach exactly one file.

This example illustrates:

The subject line prefix “File:” is the key.

Files shared in CoachAccountable have both the file name (e.g. “lotsOponies.png”) and a title (e.g. “Ponies”).  A title is nice in that it can be a more descriptive label than just the raw file name.

Shared files also can have a description, a simple blurb about the file.

Unlike when posting files as attachments to a regular message email, sharing a file in this way allows you to set both the title for the file (which otherwise defaults to the file name) and a description (which otherwise defaults to blank).  The title will be whatever follows “File:” in the subject line, and the description will be the body of the email itself.

Here’s what the file from the email above looks like captured in the Files tab:

Note how the title derives from the email subject, and how the description matches the email body.

So system email addresses allow the coach to post, from their regular email program, messages and files to each of their clients.  What about the other direction, clients posting to their coach?

The process works just the same in reverse: clients each have a system email address by which they can post a message (or share a file) with their coach.

Much like you can have CA send you all the email addresses for easy adding to your address book, you can have CA send to each of your clients a message that gives them the magic address by which they can post messages to you.

The System Email Addresses page as found under Settings has a tool for exactly this:

The email your clients receive will allow them to get the magic address to post to YOU.

System Email Addresses are another way to empower communication between coach and client in a way that is seamless and in the natural workflow of all parties, while getting the full benefit of CA for managing, tracking, and documenting things.  Enjoy!

As a platform for making details and happenings within a coaching relationship clearly documented for all interested parties, CoachAccountable excels.  The same is true when it comes to its handling of Group coaching.

In fact, perhaps too much so.

A nutritional and weight loss program of well over 100 participants has, as part of the program, the whole Group participating in a Group Metric to track weight over the span of the program.  By default, Group Metrics make visible to all group members not only the Group’s aggregate numbers (be it averages or totals), but the specific, individual numbers as well.

In a weight loss program that large one can well imagine the potential problems with THAT much detailed information on display for the whole group.

So in response to the most understandable concerns this brought about, I’ve added settings for Group items to make it entirely up to the coach how much information is appropriate to share among all group members.  Here’s the new setting, which applies to Group Metrics, Group Actions, and Group Worksheets:

How much should group members see of a given group item? It’s up to you.

These four options bear a little elaboration.  From most secretive to most open:

• Totally hidden as a Group Item means that, as far as your group members are concerned, the Group Item doesn’t exist.  The item will appear as just an individual assignment with no ties to the group. This forgoes any group comment thread about it.
• Visible as a Group Item but hide group performance means they’ll see it as a Group Item, can have a group conversation about it, but not see the overall result: for Metrics that means no aggregate graph will be visible, for Actions and Worksheets that means they’ll have no idea of the overall level of completion of the assignment among their fellow group members.  You as coach get to see aggregate performance, of course, but they won’t.
• Visible including aggregate performance means group members will see, for example, how many other group members have completed the assignment and how many have not, and among those completions how many were on time and how many were late.
• Visible including aggregate and individual performance offers a level of complete transparency.  With Actions, everyone knows who’s done it and when did they get it done.  With Worksheets, all members can read the completed worksheets as submitted by all other group members.  And again, with Metrics, everyone can see the exact reported numbers of everyone else.

The last level is so very open it often works wonders for group collaboration when appropriate, and indeed in some instances is simply not appropriate.  Total transparency is often quite nice for smaller, more intimate coaching groups, but as CoachAccountable is employed for increasingly large and sophisticated programs it is a very good thing that the level of transparency among group members can be reeled back to just the right level.

Here’s an example of what a Group Action looks like at each of the visibility settings:

Fully visible including group and individual performance:

Visible including group performance:

Visible but no performance info:

And not that anyone really needs to see a diagram illustrating the “hidden” setting, for grins here’s an artist’s rendition:

Yep. Intentionally.

For total flexibility, this visibility setting can be set by the Group coach on a per-item basis, and can be updated at any time as well.  Here’s to keeping group members informed of their fellow member’s participation at just the right amount!

I can’t speak to other professions,  but in programming crafts the whiteboard is the ubiquitous wall-mounted display of a collaborative work in progress.  Marked with a few of the standard dry erase colors (red, blue, green and black), the whiteboard contains lo-res drawing of high-impact ideas, priority lists of things to do, and hastily scribbled notes capturing the key takeaways of recent collaborative pow-wows.

It is often a crude yet to-the-point map detailing the state of affairs, proudly displaying the what’s so for all parties who should gaze upon it.

For example, here’s my whiteboard for CA:

My wife tells me CA Land looks a lot like Europe.

For the sort of ongoing, collaborative work that coaching relationships entail, the whiteboard is a worthy addition.

Conventional whiteboards are mounted to the wall of someone’s office, and so are useful only when both parties are in physical proximity.  For the sort of virtual collaboration that coaching so often comprises, CoachAccountable offers virtual whiteboards.  Let’s take a look at how they work.

This is easy to miss.

Whiteboards live in the widgets column, on the side of a client page or the coach’s dashboard.  This is to keep them ever present: unlike journal entries, worksheets, and other such items they aren’t dated and thus don’t get buried in the historical record of happenings within the relationship over time.

To add one, just bring up the widget control panel on a given page by clicking the little double arrow icon just above the widget column, and then click the Whiteboard “Add New” link.

Upon creating a whiteboard you’ll see the familiar WYSIWYG editor.  Type away, add pictures, and otherwise create on this blank slate.  A whiteboard can be shared with your client or kept private.  If shared, you can either allow or disallow your client to make edits herself.

Let’s look at a few ways to employ whiteboards in your coaching.

Refining a draft

If you’re helping one of your clients write up an important piece, say something central to their marketing, a whiteboard is a perfect way to do back-and-forth feedback and iteration.  Using different colors both coach and client can highlight their comments and changes made across revisions.  The series of drafts accumulates to show the evolution of the document.

Both parties can make their edits, and view earlier drafts to see the evolution.

Sharing easy-access info

Because they stay put in the widgets column for your clients, Whiteboards are an ideal holding place for information that needs to be accessed frequently, such as recordings of coaching calls, links to tutorials, and conference call dial-in information.  This way, the client doesn’t have to search in their history of past notes to find information quickly.

Whiteboards are also a great place to store info central to the coaching process itself, like assessment results, overarching aims, and anything else that is big picture to a specific client.  These can be shared or not with a client as appropriate.

Tracking the state of things

One of the reasons Whiteboards were created came right from a request made by a CoachAccountable user:

I want to create a couple of updatable areas to maintain a changing list of challenges that need to be addressed.  What I am trying to do is to create a Green, Blue and a Red Sheet. Green means these are the areas where the coachee is doing awesome. Blue is that he is okay and getting by. Red requires immediate attention.

Idea here is that we can inventory and categorize all areas based on their current state and then as they coachee works on it and things improve they can move them across buckets. This then allows a coachee to review all 3 buckets at any time and get a complete perspective on where they stand.

This is a nice structure, the utility of that complete perspective is unexpectedly high.  It’s easy to set up (and makes a fine getting-started task to assign to your clients), and updating is as simple as cutting and pasting an item from one list to the next.

Whiteboards have been technically out for, uh, a while now…

Whatever the purpose, Whiteboards have a number of other useful features about them:

• The history of saved drafts made by both parties are kept and can be recalled at any time.  This is nice to look back at the evolution of the whiteboard through weeks and months.
• Any whiteboard draft can be saved off as a Journal Entry with a few clicks, a useful way to take a snapshot of things for the running historical record.
• Whiteboards are readily emailed to the other party with just a few clicks.  Printing is just as easy.
• Again, Whiteboards are not just for sharing with clients: they can be added to a client’s file for the coach’s eyes only.
• Coach can add a whiteboard to his or her own dashboard, for more general use not connected to any particular client.

Session Notes, Worksheets, and Journal Entries are highly complimentary ways of documenting and sharing written work, but indeed there are a few use cases and workflows where they are just not ideally suited.  The addition of Whiteboards nicely rounds out the mix.

Actions are very much a bread-and-butter way to use CoachAccountable to support your clients in following through on their coaching.  This 7 minute tutorial video walks you through how to make the most of Actions, including how to prepare your clients mentally to take their action plans seriously.

For reference, here’s the narration transcript:

The hallmark of good coaching is taking action.

Through action a difference gets made and real world impact becomes possible. Without it, coaching reduces to a lot of good ideas, most of which will be soon forgotten.

CoachAccountable Actions provide a way for you and your clients to set good ideas in motion, make them real, and cause reliable follow through.

Every person you coach in the system has their own Action plan, just waiting to be set up. Setting up an Action is simply a matter of indicating WHAT to do, and BY WHEN it is to be done.   To set one up, click on your client, browse to the Acti ons tab, and click the “Add an Action” button.

Again, we just type in what to do, and by when to do it.

Note this hint here for clients in different timezones.

Reminders can be set for your client or even you, at times relative to the due date.   If you’re in the US or Canada and have entered your cell phone (see the My Account page to do this), CoachAccountable will know to offer you the option of sending reminders via text, as an alternative to email.

You can optionally add a comment about the action, and I recommend this: just a little note of context, perhaps a recap of why or how to effectively go about getting the task done.

Click “Add” and you’re done: you can add a sequence of actions rapidly for a given client if that’s what there is to do.

Now on the client-side of things, they have EXACTLY the same view of action items as you do, which makes this a truly shared list: they know unambiguously the action plan you two have created together, and can manage it from there until your next session, marking things complete as they go.

Action reminders will fire off to your client on schedule which is vital: this mitigates the all-too-common phenomenon of just plain forgetting to follow through.

A reminder keeps awareness up in the middle of the week between sessions, and makes it dead-simple to mark an Action complete: your clients need only reply “Done”.

For you as coach, this means you have an up-to-date window into how things are unfolding with your clients’ action plans: you know what’s done and what’s not on a given day, which empowers you to intervene with a little encouragement or support when things just aren’t getting done.

A little encouragement goes a long way. And even if you don’t want to be so high touch as to reach out between your sessions, just the very fact that you are able to peek in on your clients progress is powerfully motivating.

Furthermore, having updated view of what’s done and what’s not before going into your sessions is a very nice leg up: this allows you to tailor your coaching intentionally to the situation at hand, rather than reacting on the fly to the update your client provides.

Now then, there’s a color convention to Actions: green means on time, red means late, and yellow means either about to become late, or it was done a little late. This makes it very easy for both you and your clients to get a sense for how reliably things are getting done. An all-green action plan becomes something for your clients to aim for.

There’s an art to creating good action plans and you want to guide the process skillfully. You want to set your clients up with the right balance between stretching and boredom: not too much that they can’t possibly finish on time, and not too little that they are merely coasting.

If you have a week when a lot got done late or went undone entirely, note this and reel back accordingly for next time.

Try to avoid making actions for things that your client was already going to do as a matter of routine anyhow, and instead focus on the novel efforts that will move them forward according to the coaching you’re providing. By doing so, the growing record of completed Actions will be a satisfying monument to the things your client has accomplished within your coaching.   This is a nice souvenir at the end of your coaching relationship, and nice reminder that they’re accomplishing a lot during it.

Remember that comment you added when you first setup the Action? That can be found again by you and your client by clicking this little comment icon. Comments can also be found for Actions (and everything else) under the Stream Tab. Use comments to create a dialog between you and your client about the Action as it is in progress: this is great for asking for and giving support. Comments are easily added while logged in, and also by replying to reminders about a given Action.

There’s one other piece I want to show you about Actions, and that is Action Projects. Any Action you create can be assigned as part of a project. These allow you to group related actions together, useful for multi-step efforts, and for creating roadmaps and milestones.

Actions that are part of a project can be given a weight, which is just a way of telling the system how significant a given Action is relative to the entire project. You can use whatever numbers you like; for example quick little tasks might have a weight of 1, and more major accomplishments within the project might have a weight of something more like 10, which is to say “this action is 10 times more important than one of those little ones”.

As your clients mark Actions complete, the progress meter of the Project will fill up according to the weights you’ve set. If checking off items on your to-do list is satisfying (and for most folks it is), seeing this little progress meter fill up is really a delightful bit of eye candy for your clients. When your clients mark an Action complete via email, they get back an updated view of the project.

You and your clients can arrange Projects however you like: using this drag icon you can move more immediately relevant projects up, and projects that aren’t currently relevant for whatever reason can be collapsed by clicking this arrow here.

Like elsewhere in the system, both Actions and Projects can be edited by clicking this icon.

That’s everything there is to know about setting up Actions. Armed with this you can now have a truly tangible record of what is and isn’t getting done within your coaching. With this in place, you can impart to your clients a powerful lesson: that doing what you say you’re going to do, by when you said you would do it, MATTERS.

Think about it. When you do this, when you reliably follow through, you know yourself as genuinely effective. And when you don’t, you can’t help but degrade that sense of self. That’s just the way it is for people—for you, your clients, pretty much everyone.

So let your clients know that you’ll be watching, and that they too will be able to see quite clearly the degree to which they’re following through as they said, and the degree to which they’re not.

With CoachAccountable the record of this performance is real in a way that it seldom otherwise is, so this is your chance to support and guide your clients, to knowing themselves as reliable and effective. So let them know that you’ll be expecting them to do what they said they would, and that they should expect it of themselves as well. THAT, without even counting the value of the actual Actions they’ll be taking, is a powerful thing to offer the people you coach.

To recap:

• Have your coaching be acted upon through Action plans
• Set reminders to assist your clients in following through
• Let the record of what’s getting done and what’s not guide your coaching
• Make realistic and meaningful action plans, and in return EXPECT timely follow through to be the norm

Do this and CoachAccountable will be doing its part to make you and awesome coach through Actions.

Want more?

• Check out this in-depth explanation of Action Projects as mentioned in the video.
• Use the same (or a similar) Action sequence for multiple clients: build a Course.

And if you’re ready to just start building stuff for your clients already! you should probably sign up for a free trial of CoachAccountable.

If you use CoachAccountable to manage your appointment scheduling with clients (and this is highly recommended, by the way) you can have the appointments that you schedule with a given client pipe directly into his or her online calendar (e.g. iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar).

This is because, in addition to calendar feeds of all appointments available for coaches, CoachAccountable offers a calendar feed for clients consisting of their appointments with you.  The setup to do this is a one-time step.  Tell your clients to find their listing of Appointments with you the next time they login (found in the column on the left), and beneath that listing they’ll see a button: “My calendar feed…”

When your client clicks the button, they’ll be given instructions on how to add their appointments with you to their online calendar of choice.

What they have for their calendar feed is exactly what you have as coach, so if you’ve added your appointment feed to your online calendar you’ll be able to talk them through the process.

Once they’ve added their appointment feed to their online calendar, any appointments you (or they) setup within CoachAccountable will automatically appear in their online calendar.

This is a nice convenience and a powerful way to integrate your coaching into the rest of their life and schedule.  Seeing their coaching appointments with you amid all of their other happenings in life provides a nice reminder to make the coaching work they are doing a priority, and might even cause them to complete one or two more assignments prior to your next session.

So let your clients know as they’re getting started with you on the platform: add the feed of their appointments with you to their online calendar of choice, and they’ll have their current and future sessions with you effortlessly added into their schedule.

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.

Here’s what the setup looks like on the Course builder:

Action assignments in your courses can be freestanding or part of a project.

Just type in the name of the project that a given Action should be filed under, and assign a weight (i.e. a value of how big or important is this action relative to others in the project) and CA handles the rest.  A given Course could entail Actions which fall under multiple projects, or all under the same one.  When typing in a project name, CoachAccountable suggests Action Project names which you’ve used elsewhere in your course so that it’s easy to ensure that they all line up.

As a Course with Action Projects progresses, those projects are automatically created and tucked away in your participant’s Actions tab:

The weights set originally in the Course builder determine how much of the progress meter gets filled as Actions are marked done.

When you’ve got big, complex courses whose Action assignments logically build towards one or more overall fronts, partitioning them off into Action Projects is a fantastic way to organize the experience for your participants.