The CoachAccountable Blog

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.

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.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find a ribbon of the exact shade of CA green, #6C9C31.

Goodness they grow up so fast when they’re young, don’t they?

Just yesterday CoachAccountable turned 1: it was one year ago that I released it from my laptop in Peru to deliberately very little fanfare.

In those days very few people who tried it really got the concept, because there wasn’t much by way of illustrating the why and the wins of using the system.  Now with explainer videos, an illustrated manual, a heap of blog posts, and a richer, more encompassing set of features people are much more able to understand the value of using CoachAccountable and put it into their practice (the change in my conversion rates make this most obvious!).

Year one of CoachAccountable’s public existence was marked by intentional obscurity.  Because I was traveling around the world as I went, I didn’t want the added responsibility of large amounts of traffic & interest (no, seriously).  The trickle traffic I got from search engines¹ was quite sufficient to cause a steady stream of new people trying out the software and reaching out to me.  So I got to grow and evolve things at a steady and very workable pace, considering the fact that during travel I would be offline for a week at a time now and then.  All this happened without doing a lick of advertising².

The result is a system I’m very proud of, and one which dozens of coaches have personally expressed to me their appreciation using nothing less than the L word (yeah that’s right: Love).

So it’s been a good year.  For CoachAccountable’s second year on the market I look forward to releasing support for both group coaching and teams of coaches, an enterprise edition, a manual written for clients, and a whole lot more besides.  And I’m going to forgo the luxury of obscurity before long: CoachAccountable has vetted itself as good enough that I may as well start promoting the darn thing in places outside of its own home on the web.

If you haven’t tried it, it’s just as easy to get set up with your own account it was on day one: in in 60 seconds, no credit card needed, 30 days free to play around.

And if you have tried it and already dig it, feel free to join in CoachAccountable’s emergence from obscurity by spreading the word (whilst earning a tasteful kickback in the process) by becoming an affiliate.

Thanks for being along this journey with me.  Here’s to coaching being great.

After 365 days of living and traveling abroad, my wife and I returned last month to the US.  Last weekend we moved into a home here in Denver, and just yesterday I setup my desk and my trusty ol’ desktop computer for working.

Prior to leaving the country last summer we road tripped about the US for 3 months.  Thus this marks the end of a full 16 months of working on CoachAccountable exclusively on my laptop.

Put another way, the bulk of CoachAccountable 2.0’s creation thus far has happened with my very minimalist setup whilst traveling.

Working on CoachAccountable while traversing the globe afforded me ample time to think through what I should work on and how to approach it.  So every time I actually sat down with good internet access, I had a very clear sense of my approach.  My efforts never came from an impulsive “ack, I gotta add this or try that!” but rather always from a well reasoned, carefully thought out place.  The intentional quality by which things have played out (to my surprise, everything I’ve built/written/created has gone over really well in terms of forward progress) is in many ways thanks to the slow pace that working while traveling mandated.

It also gave me a hands on experience of the internationalization features, especially managing timezone differences with clients on the other side of the globe.   It’s been a great way to polish these otherwise hard-to-experience aspects to perfection.

A few highlights from around the world:

• I launched CoachAccountable 2.0 from my kitchen table in Cusco, Peru exactly one year ago.
• I created the Coaching With Software course in the Euro Cafe in Granada, Nicaragua.
• I built Courses and wrote the Coaching With CoachAccountable manual whilst on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.
• I created the first explainer video introducing CoachAccountable while house sitting in  the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.
• I made a video illustrating CoachAccountable in action as well as a proper welcome for newly registered coaches in our house amid rice fields in Ubud, Bali.
• I met CoachAccountable’s first customer while passing through Singapore.
• I migrated to a bigger and better hosting environment from my bed in a guest house in Luang Prabang, Laos.
• I did a proper audio recording job for the marketing videos at a recording studio in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
• I migrated to an even bigger and better hosting environment from a cafe in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• I made a video about scaling coaching while looking out at the Libyan sea from our apartment in Crete, Greece.

Now that I’m settled here in the US with a much more regular living arrangement, I’m excited to do much more focused work on the platform.  (And I promise to not let my ability to do unfettered, heads-down work compromise the well thought out approach that this year has instilled in me.)

Much more to come in the coming weeks, it’s good to be home!

This is a facet of functionality that I’ve been deliberately dragging my feet on for a while.

The vision I’ve had of CoachAccountable as a collaborative workspace between client and coach has always assumed, naively perhaps, that everything should be completely open and shared between client and coach within the scope of their relationship.

So I never put much work into special controls/options to make certain content visible to coaches but not their clients, or vice-versa.  Sure, I had the ability to add private comments to stream items, but the partitioning of information between coach and client has remained willfully primitive for some time.

I figured I’d get around to it sooner or later.  As the range of usage of the system gets wider and wider, the genuine need for coaches to keep notes on their clients that were not necessarily for the clients to read was bound to come about. And then, in the last two weeks, I saw 4 requests from 4 different parties all requesting just that:

July 22nd: “I would like to keep notes about my client – future questions, reminders, etc – within my clients file – without my client seeing the note. How do I do this?”

July 22nd: “Where do you recommend the coach log their private notes on their clients?”

July 29th: “How can i save some notes and documents – related to the Coachee.. but not visible to him..”

August 6th: “Any suggestions on how to deal with the need I have of keeping a private (only I can read) journal/log about each client?”

I figured this remarkable when compared against the prior 10 months, during which the request only came up I think twice that whole time.  So it seems like today is a good day to add private journal entries and session notes.

Useful reflections on the state of coaching, visible to the coach and not to the client.

So now, for coaches, privacy is as simple as a check box when creating session notes or a journal entry.  If checked, the item will show as private in both the Notes tab and in the stream, and the client will never see it.  Similarly, as you might expect any comments made by the coach on a private item will NOT be shared with the client.

Though I’m slightly remiss to deviate from the model where everything is out and the open shared, without question the ability for coaches to have CoachAccountable as a repository for client notes WITHOUT having them all shared with clients has some seriously useful applications.

All in all a good day of work to take CoachAccountable one degree further in its versatility.  My thanks go out to the four coaches who, unwittingly in concert, tuned me into the importance of this.

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!

Literally since the 5th day after CoachAccountable’s public release back at the end of last August, I’ve received slow yet steady stream of inquiries regarding the ability to house multiple coaches under a single account.  The specific needs and desires expressed in each of these inquiries have varied, but all point to a real need for coaching software to manage things at a team (or organizational) level with administrative oversight.

My response in private emails or telephone conversations has been to allude to a forthcoming “Enterprise Edition” of CoachAccountable, but first things first: there is to perfect the supporting structures for the fundamental building block in all this, the coach-client relationship.

Things are close enough now to that point that it makes sense for me to publicly announce the plan for supporting teams of coaches at the organizational level.

If you’re interested in CoachAccountable for teams, check it out.

Similar to the tweaks to make Actions better, I’ve added a few bits to improve Appointment scheduling as well.

Exceptions to scheduling availability

As coach you can set up your typical availability for your clients to schedule themselves into your calendar, but what about the occasional day or week off?  Sure, appointments scheduled by clients are just pending requests, subject to your approval, but missing was a way to block off bits of time before requests for not-actually-available dates were made.

Now you can add as many exceptions to your upcoming availability as necessary, and CoachAccountable will subtract those out from the scheduling options presented to your clients:

To make sure that you’ve got everything setup correctly regarding your availability (and exceptions thereto), you can now preview the options that your clients will see when they go in to schedule themselves:

See the options available for a given  appointment just as your client would.

Time zone coordination in scheduling

When scheduling an appointment with a client in a different time zone, a coach can see immediately what a given appointment time will be in that client’s time zone.  Most handy to avoid confusion to the tune of “is that in your time zone, or mine?”

As you change the time, the client time changes with it.

Scheduling a regular sequence of appointments

Often times you have a regular weekly call with a given client.  If you know it’s going to be the same for several weeks to come, you can now schedule a sequence with just a few clicks:

Just a click and the option to schedule a regular series appears.

And there you have it!  Just a few improvements to make appointment scheduling easier for you.

I’ve added a number of improvements to Actions lately, touching on each of ease-of-use, better collaborative communication, and more visually satisfying.

Scheduling for clients in different time zones.

Throughout CoachAccountable, times are generally in the eye of the beholder.  Meaning, for example, that if you as coach specify an action do be done at 7:00pm, that’s in your time zone, and CoachAccountable will convert it to your client’s time zone as needed.

Now, when the client’s time zone is different from yours, CoachAccountable provides you with a real-time display of what time time is implied for your client:

As you change the time, the client time changes with it.

Comments and Notifications for New Actions

Sometimes there’s just a little more to an action than what fits in a “to-do list style one-liner”.  Extra comments including specifics, the recommended approach, or even a little bit of motivating context are often quite useful.  Now when creating actions these can be added right in with the action itself.

Sometimes a few extra clarifying bits make all the difference.

Beyond that, a notification of the new action can be sent to the client by ticking a check box.  (Like before, unless turned off notifications are always sent to the coach whenever a client creates a new action.)  The notice conveniently includes the action, the due date, and any comments added by the coach.  While I was at it, I made comments render in a more visually meaningful way:

The head shot of the coach makes the message a little more personal, thus has the client take the assignment a little more to heart.

Marking Actions Complete

The window for marking an action complete got a little bit of an esthetic boost.  After all, the happy happening of marking something done deserves a big, pretty display.

Finally, when an action is marked complete a tidy message swoops in to summarize its timeliness.  (The way it flies in and out of view looks really sharp so long as you’re using a modern browser–essentially anything but IE9 or older.)

Even if it’s from a computer, the little pat on the back is welcome.

So those are the recent improvements to actions.  Already with some very unscientific observations I can say that the communication bits of comments and notifications make actions a little more real for clients to take on, and I can only assume that the little “action complete, hooray!” message makes marking things complete just a smidge more gratifying for clients.  (Ah, and for sure as I travel around the world, it’s rather nice to know what time in my clients’ time zones I am actually scheduling actions for!)

Enjoy!

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.