The CoachAccountable Blog

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.

So I continued with the next paragraph:

(You know, as I’m thinking about how to do this I’m struck by how there isn’t a really great way to share files via URL, just a few okay ways.  I think I’ll add “Share by URL” as an option in the file sharing system today, which I think will be a really good fit for your setup–stay tuned!)

Now we’re talking.  I sent off my reply, and inspired at the realization of a juicy bit of lacking functionality of CoachAccountable, I set off to make good on my word.

Later that day I wrote:

…
I’ve added the ability to share files by URL.  For now it’s limited to just library files, I figure I’ll let this play out in the wild a little and then extend it to one-off client file sharings once the current setup is vetted as solidly on the right track.

Give it a try: you’ll note the new “Add a File Hosted Elsewhere Online” section under My CA >> My Library.  You can add files that are themselves links to other files (say, ones hosted at dropbox) or even external webpages that have one or more files there to download.  This is nice because you still get the organization of having the file in the files tab, notification emails, commenting on the file in the stream & by email, and the system will track when they have most recently accessed the file, if at all.

I hope that serves, and thanks for the inspiration!  I bet a lot of other coaches will find this similarly useful.

The reply was a treat.  Assurance that, yep, I’d gotten it right:

This is a terrific update. I, for sure, will use this.

It wasn’t long after I added this ability that another user of CoachAccountable chimed in some insightful thoughts:

A quick note to say thanks for the adding files from other sources… now I think I can make my courses self-contained within CA and thus a little more idiot proof. Just one thing, can we please add a title for linked files – otherwise they see the file link – which is rarely obvious what it is and it would help when they are searching in the library for a particular file – for those that don’t follow the notification link.

Good point.  Direct links to files hosted with services like DropBox or Evernote are often garbled messes.   I set about adding titles to library files, including files uploaded the “old fashioned” way:

What I really like about this is that it allows coaches to share many megabytes worth of files with their clients without bumping up against their plan’s disk space quota.  There are so many services online that are better for big file hosting, I see no reason for CoachAccountable to try taking their place!

My thanks go out to both coaches, whose use of other file hosting services for their coaching resources made it clear how to best roll roll such file sharing into CoachAccountable.

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.

Now then, by default it’s my duty to be super selective about which suggestions I take to heart.  In software development there’s a concept called “feature dilution”.  We all have limited attention to give to the software tools we use, and every feature that is added necessarily dilutes the attention we can give to all the others.

This is most easily recognized in software that is bloated, over complicated, and ultimately not fun to use.  Sure it does everything, but in trying to be all things to all people it ends up loved by no one.  MS Word has like a million features, only about 6 of which you need.

So I must carefully weigh suggestions for new features against the impact of feature dilution, and do my best to make additions to the system that make it more powerful without making it more complex.    Even if I could assume all coaches using this thing were willing to take on being technically savvy, the ease and joy of using CoachAcountable cannot be compromised for the many more who are coached.

This tale of delightful collaboration is about long term goals and progress, and comes from Twila Gates of the ADHD Success Network.  During an exchange by email, Twila said to me:

In the future would it be possible to have a section specifically for major goals for the coaching.  In my second session with clients we focus completely on setting these major goals, many of which are long term and not something I would necessarily set up as a metric, but rather as an item that would be subjectively rated possibly every 8-10 weeks. …

This to me sounded like it was indeed a fit for Metrics (ratings on a 1-10 scale, subjective elements captured as comments), but they might require some finessing to make them really work for what she was looking for.  I replied:

Let me mull on this, but I think an 80% solution might be as simple as letting you set the sort order of metrics as they appear in the Metrics tab.  That way you could put all those long range ones towards the bottom, and group ’em all together for easy inspection.

I got back:

Yes, sorting, field identifying type of goal for sorting, or any easy way to separate the goals like “daily planning” (a daily goal) at top from “I follow through consistently” (a less specific goal – assessed every 2-3 months)  visually would be great!  I could make do with that and be happy and leave you alone for a while.

Someday, maybe you might consider having  the goals just be a list with a drop-down graphic view so it is easier to see just a list of the goals to easily find the one you want to update.

And then also:

Oops forgot to ask… could a metric “frequency” be added for every 2 months or 8 weeks.  Once a month would be too frequent for these major goals.

Hmmm… the option to have metrics that called for bi-monthly reporting was easy enough to add, created no real clutter, and would serve longer term goals.  Done and done.  Then Twila generously provided me with a visual mockup of what she had in mind, illustrating the “drop-down graphic view”:

Ahhh… now I get it.  Looks nice, too!  Right then, bi-monthly metrics plus the ability to visually move those less-frequent, more “big-picture” out of the way so they don’t clutter the more regular coaching activities is looking like the right path to nicely supporting long range goals.

Rather than making something fancy and complicated like labeling and grouping for metrics (which would be heavy handed and require coaches to think up fitting organizational schemes), the ability to sort and collapse metrics will make a nice, light way to organize things.  After a bit of prodding (“Just wondering how you are coming with the changes for the major goals (metrics)…”), I added sorting and a little arrow to expand or collapse a given metric, and we’re set:

My gratitude goes out to Twila who let me know what she wanted to accomplish, and engaging me in a dialog about how to cook that up in a way that makes the system generally better.  Delightful collaboration indeed!

A fast, responsive user experience is one of those things that never goes out of style in software.

The CoachAccountable user base and database are getting large enough that certain processing bottlenecks are starting to become noticeable, and thus the system is ripe for a bit of tuning and optimization.

After a fine session of profiling the performance of database interactions that happen with software, I’ve identified a number of wins.  It used to be that a coach with 10 clients would require about 190 queries for data from the database to render the dashboard screen (about 40 of them were to fetch, over and over, the symbol of the currency chosen by the coach–yeesh!).

Now it’s down to about 70.  About 0.5 seconds of total database work to load that page has been reduced to around 0.039 seconds.  Similar wins were reached for loading client pages.  Saving half a second in load time may sound minor, but this amounts to about a 10x increase in the capacity to comfortably and speedily serve users.

More optimization tricks up my sleeve to come over the next month.   Making the system zippier and more responsive is fun and super satisfying, and I know you and your clients appreciate software that is just plain fast.

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.

This problem gives way to an upshot of using CoachAccountable that is easy to overlook, namely: CoachAccountable is designed to be a professional representation of the quality coaching you do.  The structure and documentation of the happenings between you and your clients takes an abstract process and organizes it into something tangible.

Tangible representation of your coaching means your clients get something that is easy to review and revisit, and makes the value and results of your coaching evident (both during and after your coaching engagements).

This tangible representation that CoachAccountable provides also happens to be interactive, and so will be a component of your clients’ overall experience of working with you.  This fact is taken very seriously: if CoachAccountable is non-trivially part of the coaching you give, CoachAccountable better be darn good.

Every aspect of the system has been carefully crafted to be aesthetically appealing and inviting to use.  It’s not just a matter of pretty pixels, but rather serious recognition that visual impressions matter.  Having a system that just plain looks good and feels good to use sets clients up to appreciate your coaching as equally professional and polished.

As a showcase of your work this becomes so much more than a brochure.  Instead, it’s the real this is what my coaching looks like and this is how it works.  As I detailed in the guide to coaching with CoachAccountable, there are a number of ways to do this:

• Set up a demo account of a typical coaching client relationship, complete with actions, worksheets and/or whatever else shows of the sort of work you do.  Share the login or screenshots however you see fit.
• Set up a new (or prospective) client with an account ready for their coaching relationship day 1, including any items that mark the onset of your process (intake forms, first actions, goals, etc.).  Walk them through where things are and how things will work.  Let them see your process and experience firsthand what it will be like to work within it.
• Use embedded metrics to showcase results that are typical of your coaching work (possibly pulled from past coaching work, anonymized as appropriate).

CoachAccountable lets you go one step further as a professional representation of your coaching.  If the core system makes your coaching [process and results] more tangible, custom branding makes it more your own.  At your option, you may essentially white-label the platform and brand it as though it were your own, giving a further degree of professionalism to the presentation of your coaching.

So what does your coaching look like?  If you’ve never given it any serious thought, CoachAccountable might offer you a nice path to answer that question.  Your clients, especially future ones, are truly interested to know. Try CA free for 30 days.

Sometimes in a coaching session you might determine that you want your coachee to take on a regular practice for the coming week.  It might be some new habit that will be most beneficial by becoming engrained, or just something that simply deserves to be more than a one-time good idea.

I had this with one of my coachees, Tim, last week.  He’s exploring a new way of offering and selling his services as he moves beyond offering commodity technical services and into more sophisticated consulting.

“Try this”, I said.  “Over the next week, I want you to find 5 occasions to take just 10 minutes and ponder who you might pitch to and what you might present.  Then journal about those 10 minutes, either the ideas you got, the insights you had, or the actions you took.  Just 10 minutes, do it 5 times.”

It should be noted that this sort of thing is generally a lot to ask of someone you coach.  They have to remember to follow through not just once but on five separate occasions, and do so with a behavior that, by its very nature, is not yet natural.

But this is also very powerful: it’s building a practice that sets your coachee up to shift things on an ongoing basis.

Tim said it would be really nice if CoachAccountable had recurring actions.  I suppose it would be, but then again that sort of thing might be cumbersome and complicated to set up.  Then I realized there was a nice way to do it.

I created a single action, and then with a few clicks made a sequence of regular reminders, like so:

This way we had everything we needed to set Tim up to regularly do his thing.  Regular reminders would prompt him to take those 10 minutes on a daily basis.  From the reminder email he could click into CoachAccountable and make his journal entries.

The regular practice ending up bearing real fruit as he gradually trained his mind to regularly look for opportunities to play with his new style of sales.  Tim ended up completing 4 of those journal entries during the week, and having the system remind him to take the time on a regular basis got way more follow through on this exercise than could usually be expected.

I dub these “pseudo-recurring actions”: they aren’t recurring actions per-se, but by smartly setting up a set of reminders for a single, ongoing action you can get the people you coach to follow through a lot more in their practice of new habits.

The benefit of experience and use has revealed a handful of worthy upgrades to CoachAccountable Courses.

Following Items

Sometimes it is useful to share a file or send a note or assign something else only after a given assignment has been completed.  Courses now allow you setup items that follow a given Action or Worksheet.  For any assignment you can have one or more items that follow it, and if those items are either an Action or Worksheet, then THEY can have following items.

Such chaining can go as deep as you like.  If one were so inclined you could create an entire course as just a sequence of assignments, each triggered by the completion of the last (not that you necessarily would).

When the first action is completed, the next one is immediately assigned.

Customize Courses for a Single Participant

You might  have a course that is generally suitable for the collection of people that you coach, but say you want to tweak the content or timeline specially for a specific individual.  Now with a single click you can spin-off a version of that course for that person, and modify their course timeline while keeping the standard course in tact for everyone else.

Clone Entire Courses, Clone Course Items

To make the task of course building easier, you can now clone single course items (great for repeated worksheets) and clone entire courses (a nice shortcut for building a series of courses that are variations on a theme).

See Implied Items of the Course Timeline

Build a course that really flows nicely with a more thorough feel for how the course timeline is laid out.  For example when you have an action assignment that is due 3 days later having a few reminders in between, you can see how the due date and the reminders lines up with other happenings in the course.

A given action assignment with 2 reminders shows up 4 times on the timeline.

Many thanks those who have given me the feedback about using courses which prompted these enhancements.

I am absolutely biased when I say this, so you should be on-guard and skeptical when you hear it:

CoachAccountable is an absolute joy to use for the sessions I have with the people I coach.

I love knowing what’s going on, I love coming prepared based on what’s going on, I love watching my coachees make their coaching plans, I love how clearly everything is laid out for us both when we get off the phone.

Before, it was hard to convey this to people.  You kinda have to use CoachAccountable for a full week to appreciate how the work from one week sets things up for the next, and a bit longer to see how the rhythm of it all builds so beautifully.

Basically, it takes a little time before you wonder how you ever did it any other way.

But I’ve cooked up a video that walks you through how your process can look with the benefit of CoachAccountable.  So today, if you’ve got 3 minutes, I can illustrate the beauty of it for you.  Check it out; I recommend watching in full-screen mode.

We’ve built even more functionality since this post in 2013 – check out our latest features by setting up your free 30-day trial now. 

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.

Follow-through is an uphill battle.  We can make the most inspired plans during our session.  The coachee can be inspired, empowered, and clear what to do next to move themselves ahead.  But what follows in the gap until the next session is often a complete crapshoot. Life comes up, inspiration is perishable, good ideas get forgotten.  Left to one’s own devices, an individual will do what they usually do, which usually has little to do with a coaching plan.

The why of this is self-evident.  An individual is, by definition, coached in order to stretch out of their ordinary ways: to shift their circumstances, to attain heightened performance, to transform the ordinary into something else.  Absent supporting structure to help new, powerful habits become ingrained, a coaching relation often takes a step or two backwards between sessions.  This is because 7 days or more typically pass between interactions, and unless the coachee is exceptionally high caliber at self-growth and creates their own reliable mechanisms to keep the game plan alive and in action, a coach can expect to hear a lot of “No, I didn’t get around to that” or “I forgot to do that” upon reconvening.

Tracking is a haphazard and low-res affair. When it comes to qualitative progress (like income or sales or even happiness on a 10-point scale), coach and coachee tend to deal with only one, maybe two numbers: the current one, and maybe the number from last session (which reveals if things are progressing in the desired direction).  Beyond that, I find a more persistent and cumulative tracking to be rare indeed.  Few coaches take it upon themselves to design and implement a way to keep detailed score for their coachees, and even fewer coachees do so (which is often part of why they’re being coached on it).

This lack of real data robs the coaching process of valuable insights about what’s working and what’s not, and makes actual results and progress much less obvious.  Even worse, the state of going in circles can be completely hidden by a myopic focus on just the new and recent.  Ever notice how overall stagnation can become obscured by disproportionate celebration of the occasional win?

Communication is skimpy and unstructured.  For something like 99% of designated coaching sessions, I think it’s safe to say the communication is top notch: ideas are being explored, things are getting heard and worked through, rapport is strong & highly functional.  That’s what makes a coach a coach, right?  So let us for now take that part for granted.

Outside of these designated blocks, however, communication is generally far less than it could be.  You often have situations where coachee could benefit from a few words between sessions, and coach would be all too happy to provide them.  A little “Hey coach, I’m stuck on this thing and a little input would really help.” in the middle of the week can prevent a complete halt in progress until the next session.

The problem is how to open up these lightweight lines of communication so that a coachee is comfortable reaching out, correcting for the tendency for over politeness (a desire to not be a burden), and pride that wants never to admit needing help.  Even the coach who clearly advertises an open door policy will find coachees who reach out way less than perhaps they should.

Documentation is sparse and scattered.  At the end of a few months of coaching, what a coachee is often left with is often a series of hand-scribbled notes, a few email exchanges, perhaps some worksheets filled out, and memories of some probably pretty great sessions, either in person over the phone.

(And of course the results they got, which may be quite tangible and obvious, but then again may not.)

Sparse and/or scattered documentation leaves a coachee with less by which to appreciate the results and value of being coached, leaves a coach with less by which to gauge effectiveness and improve for future engagements, and leaves an organization with less by which to assess how a given coaching program performed against expectations.

Rectifying these Issues

The above observations are not meant as an indictment of the coaching process or profession, but rather as a candid acknowledgment of common barriers to an overall quite powerful discipline.

Here was my thinking in creating CoachAccountable as a means to overcome these barriers.

All 4 of these barriers are occurrences of omission: they reflect the absence of deliberately created solutions.  These are understandable omissions as the issues themselves are largely invisible, representing missed opportunities more than actual in-your-face problems.  Even the more visible issue of follow-through is widely accepted to be intrinsically hard, but that acceptance betrays a lack of curiosity that the situation somehow could be made better.

So I looked for how software could be the deliberately created solution to the 4 issues, with an emphasis on making it as little work as possible to add to an established style of coaching.  (After all, if using the software created much more work to realize wins, then all it would be doing, effectively, is chiding users to work harder in order to have better results–well duh, that’s not a service so much as an obvious platitude.)

So how can software solve these issues?

Software is really good at sending messages on schedule, so automatic reminders serve to keep action plans alive and visible (for both coach and coachee) during the time between coaching sessions.  Worksheet assignments and the task of tracking quantitative progress (i.e. metrics) are also augmented with automated reminders.  These are all ways by which the coach can give little nudges to coachees between coaching sessions, do so with no extra work, and collectively result in a lot more follow through.

Software is also really good at managing numbers and creating pretty graphs (graphs that reveal a lot of insight about bursts, stagnation, and everything in between).  Coupled with super easy ways to regularly track data (think reminders via email or text and the ability to enter data with a simple reply, NOT needing to log in or even be at a computer), metrics give a major leg up on the problem of tracking progress.

Software provides a handy medium for communication, collaboration and sharing, just ask anyone who’s used a popular social network.  Culturally we’re fast becoming super accustomed to posting and commenting on happenings online, and this sort of interaction turns out to be a great channel of communication between coach and coachee as a coaching relationship unfolds.  When actions, worksheets, metrics and more can all be commented upon, it effectively facilitates any number of on-topic mini conversational threads, all done by email yet all centrally organized.

When software is routinely used to do these other things (structuring action plans, fostering communication, managing assignments, etc.), then the computer already has a pretty detailed record of happenings.  With a nicely organized presentation of those records, a coach and coachee are left with thorough documentation.

And thus CoachAccountable is designed around these principles: follow-through, tracking, communication, and documentation.  These oft-overlooked aspects of great coaching are critical, because ultimately they are a multiplier for the expertise, insights, and perspective that coaching provides.

Ready to up your coaching game and solve these problems with your clients? Start with a free 30-day trial today.

CoachAccountable Metrics are a powerful tool for measuring results over a span of time, yes, but beyond that, there’s magic in the measuring.

To illustrate, I give you PushupTober: a month of doing pushups regularly.  For the whole month the game is to do a single set, done once per day.  Starting at a manageable (but for most people will still make you sore) 15 pushups on day 1, and climbing to a goal of 45 pushups at the end of the month.

I did PushupTober for the month of October.  I want to do more pushups because they are a super easy exercise, work well with my current life of world travel, and I get nice, noticeable definition in my upper body whenever I actually stick to them¹.

The problem is sticking to them.  My usual thing with pushups is to get inspired one particular day, do a set of like 20 or 30 until burnout, be super sore the next day, give myself a few days to recover, and then completely forget to resume when the soreness fades.  I forget because the inspiration has faded with it.

So I created a metric for this pushup problem, to see how deliberately structuring my efforts my help.

As stated above, I chose a starting target of 15 pushups for day 1, and 45 for day 31.  This gives a target trend line that goes up 1 pushup per day.  I knew I wouldn’t burn myself out with 15 to start, and 45 would be a stretch goal for the end of the month.  That was all the thinking I gave to it.  I set a 7pm daily reminder and then let the machine (with its reminders, graphs, and arithmetic) do the rest of the work.

At first it was fun.  I played through the mild soreness of the first few days as my body got back into the groove of doing pushups, clear each time of what I had to hit in order to stay on track.

Then I got hooked on seeing that extra green area on my graph, which happens when your number is above the trend line.  I kept wanting to eek out the extra one or two, because green on the graph looks GOOD: a satisfying visual representation of going above and beyond.

By two weeks in I couldn’t forget: taking the time to do pushups once a day was just simply wired in me, an exhilarating break in my day that was building tangible fitness.  The reminder email that CoachAccountable sent was no longer reminding me, it was just my cue to reply with my number for the day.  A minute later the system would reply to tell me how I was doing, a nice bit of reinforcement.

This is what the daily email back-and-forth looked like, straight from my gmail inbox.

On the 14th I had my first heartbreaking result: my body was wanting a day off to recover, so I did just a dozen to keep with the habit.  With 12 pushups I was below my target for the day, and thus my graph had its first red blotch.

There would be several more throughout the month, and I continued to do the best I could, stayed focused on reaching my end goal (45 pushups in a single set by the end of one month), and added comments as I went with hopes of revealing insights about tendencies, what works, and what doesn’t.  You can see those comments when you mouse over the data points on the graph.

By the end of the month I was acutely aware of how I was stacking up against my goal, and determined to push hard to reach it.  Usually by this time the game of regular pushups would have faded away as just another good idea, already forgotten 3 weeks ago.

By contrast, seeing my graph with just a few data points left to put on it made the here and now very real, the goal and my performance very tangible.

The result was very good.  Though there’s a lot of red, I made my end goal of doing 45 pushups in a single set, and, well, my lovely wife was rather pleased with the results as well. :)

Doing a bunch of pushups is just a small part of life, but a clear illustration of mindfully setting up a goal and having a powerful and essentially automated structure to support it.  Just imagine what sort of goals you could support with the people you coach.

If you don’t have one already, you can get your own account with this premiere coaching software in just one minute, sign up here.

A new major piece of CoachAccountable has just been released: Courses.

Courses allow coaches to define their own courses & coaching programs as a series of Actions, Metric trackings, Worksheet assignments and more.  These items are placed over a timeline which consists of as many days as the course or program is long.  Compose a timeline consisting of these items and the course is ready for people to go through.

Participants can be put into courses at any time, as many as you like and whenever you like, and either all in sync or in an ad hoc fashion.  CoachAccountable handles the release of course assignments and materials for each participant according to the timeline you set.  For greater flexibility, an individual’s participation in a course can be paused at any time.  Course participation can also be fast-forwarded or  rewound however a coach deems appropriate.

As the course progresses for your participants, you can see at a glance how they are doing with respect to their assignments:

At a glance view of how a participant is doing with the collection of course assignments.

If you’ve ever wanted to design and implement repeatable programs for the people you coach, or even if you have a standard sequence of assignments and events that mark the beginning weeks of your typical client relationships, CoachAccountable courses might be just the thing for you.  Courses are also great for routine & repeatable training procedures.