The CoachAccountable Blog

Just released, hot-off-the-press and ripe for consumption: “CoachAccountable’s Poignant Guide to coaching with CoachAccountable”.

CoachAccountable does wonders for structuring coaching relationships, but it takes a bit of experimentation to get into a style that has the tools really work for you.

Until now.

This guide takes the guesswork out of how to set things up for you and the people you coach.  It is designed to be a light but super-useful read, a bit cheeky at times but serious about the subject.  It is not comprehensive documentation of the software and its features, as that would be boring.  Rather it a series of discussions focused on the various benefits that CoachAccountable provides, centered around structural topics that arise over the course of coaching relationships.  Readers are invited to jump around to only those topics that are of interest.

Even if you don’t ever end up using CoachAccountable, the guide holds a lot of ideas and practices that you can apply immediately to your own coaching practice.

Download your copy.

Metrics are great for documenting progress and telling the story behind the numbers.  By the same token they are a great way to showcase the results that your coaching produces for your clients.  After all, nothing demonstrates progress and results quite like real numbers.

CoachAccountable now allows you to embed an interactive metric graph with just a snippet of HTML.  Here’s what one looks like:

[iframe src=”https://www.coachaccountable.com/specialActions?a=EM&x=NZSGjfqAKJcFI2EA3iRw6koLpyLKWc” style=”border: none; padding: 0;” width=”100%” height=”300″]

Mouse over the graph to see annotations and specifics relating to the target: it’s a dense presentation of information that really captures the progression of results over time.

Getting the snippet of HTML for embedding a metric is simple: just click to edit a metric, and grab the embed code from the bottom of the editor window.  Paste it onto your website or in your blog, and you’re showing off results to the world.

Want to impress would-be clients?  Showcase the results you’ve produced with one of your clients at this level of detail, and your prospective customer will have a really clear sense of what they could gain by working with you.  Makes a great centerpiece for a case study, or even a blog post.

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

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

When coaching engagements fail, it is far less likely to be a problem of insufficiently brilliant coaching than it is a matter of simple follow through.

Seriously.  Look in your own coaching, or mentorship or training you’ve provided for others.  Chances are high that you were quite qualified to provide the sort of coaching and guidance you were charged to provide, both in your expertise and your ability to communicate that expertise.  It’s the follow through where things typically fall apart, if they fall apart.  It’s whatever happens in the days or weeks following a coaching session when you’re no longer there while the rest of generally busy life is.  The spaces in between your coaching sessions are the real wildcard in your coaching and thus coaching results.

Life comes up.  Inspiration is perishable.  Good ideas fade.  We all wrestle with these truths as we strive to cause great outcomes with the people we coach.

With surprising regularity, follow through and failure to follow through is a just matter of awareness.  Assuming we are doing good coaching, we don’t set up our clients with an action plan that is unrealistic¹.  Also assuming we are doing good coaching, we don’t set up our clients with an action plan that isn’t meaningful and worth doing.

So if a plan is genuinely doable (it should be), and worth doing (it should be), then just plain forgetting about it is the most likely opportunity for it to be derailed.

Never underestimate the power of forgetting.  I myself have been in coaching programs where, during a session, I finally take out my action plan from last week, haphazardly mark off the things I happened to get done, and say “aw shucks” to the rest.  It wasn’t that the sizable percentage of undone things was too hard, or that it wasn’t worth doing.  It’s just that I assumed I would remember, because I was so excited about the plan when I made it in the first place.  I didn’t really have any structure for making myself remember to check in on the plan a few times during the week, and so I was always surprised when “Wow, what do you know–the week is already over and I didn’t look at this thing once.”

The people you coach do this too.

Forgetting is the default, and without a real structure to remember that’s better than “I’ll remember to check on this later when I’ve got a few minutes” it will be exercised with frightening regularity.

Now then, you can’t be looking over the shoulders of the people you coach all the time, but you can put some structures in place for the people you coach.  This is what CoachAccountable has been rigorously polished to do in a smooth and unobtrusive way.  When your client creates an Action in CoachAccountable, they are simply entering the “What” and the “By When”.

But beyond that, Actions come with reminders.  The system suggests 2 by default as a useful nudge².  As many as desired can be set, just a few clicks and all relative to the due date.

Reminders are the way to keep the action plan alive and in motion between your coaching sessions.  Because your client can respond to a reminder (either by email or text) to mark the action done, it’s very little work to keep current with what’s done and what’s not.  Better yet, it’s satisfying to mark actions complete in a purely hedonistic way.  It’s the gamification of follow through.

So reminders help your client keep aware of what to work on during their week and make it fun and easy to mark things done.  You as coach can keep abreast of things too with Action notifications.  Here are the options you have to play with:

Now this is where it gets to be like CoachAccountable is an angel sitting on your shoulder, helpfully whispering in your ear what’s happening (or not happening) with all of your clients as the weeks progress.  You might prefer to remain hands off until next session, but you also might find you can do a world of good by offering your clients a quick check-up mid-week if nothing is getting done.

 

So that’s what CoachAccountable Actions can do for your coaching.  There’s no silver bullet to making the people you coach fulfill on everything they set out to fulfill, but believe me, taking “I forgot” off the table goes a long way towards ensuring your brilliant coaching advice gets acted upon, and your clients get the results they came to you for.

If you don’t already have a CoachAccountable account you can try one for free for 30 days, sign up and try our smart to-do lists and so much more.

In coaching we often need to share files.  File resources for your clients can take all kinds of shapes: e-books, images, slides, videos, audio clips.  In the course of a coaching engagement, your style may call for sharing such files.

The most obvious and basic way to do this is to email ’em on over as an attachment.  From that simple baseline, let’s look at how CoachAccountable can do you a few better.

CoachAccountable file sharing works by either coach or client uploading a file, and the other party securely accessing it with a single click.  How does this improve upon email attachments?

First, mobility.  You might use web-based email (meaning your attachments are available wherever you are), but your clients might not.  CoachAccountable file sharing is inherently web-based, meaning you and your clients can always access shared files with an internet connection.

Second, accommodating large files.  Audio and video tend to be in the 10’s of MB or more.  Most email providers still have a cap on how large a file you can send, making emailing impossible for most substantive audio and video.  While we’re on the subject of file size, large files sitting in your inbox use up valuable disk quota in web-based email systems, which might affect you and/or your clients (i.e. a video might take up 20MB in your account as the sender, and 20MB in your client’s account as the receiver). With CoachAccountable, you can even embed video and audio files so they play right in the app.

Third, sharing the same file with multiple people.  Perhaps your coaching style entails one or more file resources that you share with everyone you coach.  With CoachAccountable you upload files once to your library, and with a few clicks share them with clients as called for.  If you have 30 people that you’re coaching and your program calls for them all to watch the same video, it is much nicer to upload it just one time to your library, and share it with all 30. You can also share multiple files with multiple people at once, or share with a group.

Forth, secured private access.  This is no different from the email route, but a nice benefit over other ways of sharing files like putting them on a website.  Without a lot of hassle, files shared in CoachAccountable are accessible only to authorized parties.

Fifth, awareness.  CoachAccountable tracks if and when your client accesses the files you share with them, giving you a little window into how well they’re keeping up with the materials.

Sixth, comment threads.  When you share a file, there might be a little back-and-forth about it, dialog like the one below.  Commenting on a shared file is as simple as replying to the email notification, and CoachAccountable files this all in context in the coaching stream which makes it easy to review later.

File sharing online is nothing revolutionary, but CoachAccountable provides a few ways to make it a little nicer and a little easier.  Best of all, it fosters dialog between you and your client, allowing you to better know where they’re at and offer timely support.  Just a few more wins you can get when you use specialized coaching software.

One of the hardest things about incorporating technology into a given style of coaching is knowing how to do so in an unobtrusive way: to find structures that are useful, but not burdensome to you or the people you are coaching.

Do you email worksheets back and forth?  Set up  a shared Google doc?  Incorporate some sort of online appointment scheduler?  How about a system for setting invoices and receiving payment?  Or a to-do list app that can be shared?

There are a lot of options to wade through, and it is NOT obvious how to have a system that really hums, jibes with the way you coach, and is easy to use for clients.

It turns out I’m kinda passionate about the intersection of coaching and technology, so I’ve got some thoughts to contribute on the matter.  I’ve created a 30 day email course that goes deep into the subject, and provides a lot of insight about how and why technology can provide big wins for any style of coaching.

This course is free and delivered as a series of 8 emails.  In it you’ll learn how to employ technology to make your coaching easier, more engaging, less time consuming, more effective, easier to sell to new clients, and more.  When you sign up you’ll immediately get your free report: 5 ways to improve ANY style of coaching with technology, which is a primer on how you can start using technology tools in coaching.  Check it out.

A number of new goodies have been added to CoachAccountable, this time with an emphasis on making the system even easier and smoother to use.

One-Click Access to Worksheet Assignments

When you assign a worksheet to one of your clients, the email notification of the assignment they get now contains a magic link that puts them one click away from working on it.  It’s a marked improvement from earlier, which was a link that took them to a page which first prompted them to log in.  Making the process of being coached by you easier is always a good thing.

One-Click Access to Shared files

In a similar vein, whenever you share a file with a client (and vice-versa), the email notification contains a magic link allowing the receiving party to download the file with a single click.

Email Reminder Reply Replies

Earlier I added the ability of people to reply to reminder emails in order to record metric data or mark actions complete–a nice shortcut to keeping things up to date without having to log in.  Now when someone enters data in this way, and email reply comes back letting them know how they are doing.

For metrics, it’s a message about how things are stacking up against your goal:

40 has been recorded for the 17th.

You are 9 push ups above your 10/17  target (31 push ups).

If you need to change this for the 17th, just reply to this email with a new number.

For actions, it’s a statement of how you did relative to the due date:

Add email reply functionality has been marked complete as of 9:34am on Thursday, October 18th.

This action was due 7pm on Friday, October 19th, which makes it done 1 day ahead of schedule.  Nice!

Comment on (Almost) Any Notification

Whenever files are shared, session notes or journal entries are emailed, and worksheets are submitted, the other party gets a notification.  In addition to containing the particulars of the item, either coach or client can reply to the email to make a comment on that item.  Comments appear in your coaching stream, and are instantly emailed to the other party (which can they can then reply to).   This makes a nice touch point for communication between coach and client about particular items in the coaching relationship, and it’s all captured and organized by CoachAccountable.

Gravatar Recognition

Gravatar is short for “globally recognized avatar”, meaning folks can have a picture of themselves associated with their email.  Now when any user is created (i.e. a coach signing up or a coach adding a new client) the system now checks Gravatar for an avatar associated with the email, and imports it right on in if found.  This saves everyone the step of uploading a head shot.

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And that’s what’s new.  Nothing earth shattering, just a lot of nice little bits that give the system a really polished feel.

On Friday morning I had a call with an organization considering CoachAccoutable to be the platform for one of its new programs.  During the interview about the system and its capabilities, I was hit with a question I knew would come sooner than later from a more enterprise outfit: “Is there a way to export our data?”

My interviewer went on to elaborate concerns that I found completely understandable and might’ve anticipated: the data of their coaching over the span of a year amounts to so much of their client relationships, and to lose it would be catastrophic to the trust and integrity of those relationships.  “It wouldn’t even have to be readable: something that our admins could run as a weekly backup and have in case anything happened to CoachAccountable’s copy, something we could re-import if ever necessary and be back in business.”

It’s usually my job to say no to feature requests, and only give an eventual yes to the ones that come up for a lot of users (otherwise the system quickly becomes a bloated mess that no one likes).  But in this instance, the peace of mind factor alone really makes the case.

It turns out that a big button for a coach to press to export all of their client data has been on my radar for a while now, something I knew I’d be doing but amid many other fronts it hadn’t yet made the top of my priorities.  I’m a big believer that your data is yours: you should be able to do whatever you want with it and I’ll be darned if any system I create will get in your way.  Moreover, holding customer data hostage an attempt to keep customers tethered to your platform is a nasty practice, and suggests, in my opinion, a weak and insecure way of doing business.

So on Friday the push to prioritize data export came: the time was right to build that big button, stand by my principles on the matter of letting data be free, and let the organization I was talking to know that I took their concern seriously.

This is what I love about being a one-man development team: I can get things done really fast and nimbly re-prioritize to handle what’s important in a given moment.  By early Friday evening the export was all done and ready to deploy.  I had wanted so much to email my prospective customer and let them know the feature they thought was important was ready to go and that I wasn’t just making false sales promises when I said “Yeah, that should take about an afternoon to build and I’ll probably get that in in the coming week.”

But alas, the internet connection here at Hacienda Merida, on Lake Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua went down.  I know, it’s an excuse that sounds like “my dog ate my homework”, but them’s the breaks: occupational hazard while traveling.

So here on Sunday I’m releasing this feature.  I’m happy to say that no one ever need feel that the vital data and documentation of their coaching relationships is in any way inaccessible.  Your data is yours.

It’s exciting when something you’ve been working on a while has finally borne its first fruit.  Here, 31 days after launch, CoachAccountable has earned its first dollar with the billing of accounts whose 30 day trial has just expired.

Moreover, as I reckon my fellow coaches (whose programs and guidance touch the lives of the people they coach) will recognize, it’s exhilarating to create something of value for people.  I look forward to on the road ahead whereupon I get to build and improve on what’s already in place.

Yikes.  Two nights ago I introduced a subtle bug into the system which resulted in disabling sign up for new accounts.  No problem for existing users, problem for new ones.  Talk about a poor first impression.

To the three people who emailed to let me know of the issue I thank you for the heads-up.  To others who tried to sign up for an account today and yesterday, I apologize for the hassle and hope you’ll give it another try.  This time you’ll get what you came for in the 60 seconds as promised:  https://www.coachaccountable.com/signUp