Coach.me: Self-improvement in Your Pocket
What’s stopping you from realizing your full potential and achieving your dreams? Could it be yourself? Time to try out Coach.me.
What Coach.me Can Do For You
Track your good habits, get rid of bad habits, and join courses to improve your quality of life. That’s Coach.me in a nutshell. You can use it on your own, find an accountability buddy, or even hire a personal coach right inside the app.
Coach.me’s mission is to enable anyone to either get a coach or coach someone. “Why would I need a coach?” Lots of people ask this. It turns out you can perform better when confronted with external feedback and appropriately challenged. There’s even a famous TED talk by Bill Gates entitled simply “We All Need Coaches.” But not everyone can afford their very own personal coach. And so, Tony Stubblebine (known on Medium as Coach Tony) has made it his business to make sure anyone can benefit from what coaches bring to the table.
Before its pivot and rebranding in 2014, Coach.me was known as Lift. Lift was a simple habit tracker that helped nurture our healthy habits and get rid of the damaging ones. Today, Coach.me still works in a similar way; so if you are looking for a tool to help you simply with accountability, you should definitely check it out. It’s power has been illustrated in Thomas Oppong’s “This is How to Increase The Odds of Reaching Your Goals by 95%” published on The Mission.
But Coach.me goes way beyond the simple dotted calendar. For each habit you want to track, there is also an option to hire a coach. The simplest plans are text-only coaching and they start at $19.99 per week or $64.99 per month. That’s right. You can have your own private coach for a price of a few beers a week!
There are different areas you can choose to be coached in. Among the most popular ones are diets (of course), relationships, self-confidence, fitness, and mindfulness. There are also coaching programs like Heavy Mental designed to make us push our barriers and apply the latest psychological research to our own lives.
You can read more about Coach.me here on Medium. There’s also a related publication that is definitely worth following called Better Humans; both people from the Coach.me community, as well as outsiders, can contribute to it. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the ten biggest Medium publications with over 250k followers (at the time of writing this article).
Why It’s Good
Coach.me is such a fantastic source of valuable knowledge due to its extensive resources available: challenges, self-improvement courses, and workshops (both free and paid). Just the aforementioned Heavy Mental program features a comprehensive archive of Q&A and exercises covering topics like Money Mastery, Single Tasking, Meditation, One Priority, and Stoicism.
On top of that, since most Coach.me plans have daily exercises, it encourages you to create new habits as well. And for each habit, plan, or challenge you start, you can either hire a coach to help you in fulfilling your aims or use good old peer pressure by making your accomplishments public and engaging with the online community.
How I Use It
Even though I also use Coach.me for the challenges and self-improvement programs, I like to balance it with a bit of fun. So right now I can categorize the tickboxes into the following categories:
- Self-improvement, challenges, growth (like Hanging Month, Heavy Mental Training Program)
- Upkeep (Wake Up By 6:30, Take Vitamins)
- Relax (Walk/Nature Time, Listen to Music, Take a Relaxing Bath, Play)
Some of my habits are daily; some of them are weekly. I try to have a relaxing bath and listen to music at least once a week, and I aim to wake up by 6:30 at least six times a week.
There are people who like to pack all of their desired habits into Coach.me. As the default view is a list and sorting seems to be rather random, this can lead to unwanted clutter pretty quickly. I’d prefer some way of grouping or sorting habits by priority, but this is not an option — at least not on the Android app. Partly due to this, I like to form my daily habits into routines (giving them funny names, like Nighttime Birds) and let Coach.me manage everything that falls outside of those routines. This means I don’t track habits like Five Minute Journal, meditation, exercise, and daily planning since they are a part of my morning routine. But I do track my more irregular activities (like workouts or relaxing baths) or the ones I haven’t grown a routine around yet (like reading Blinkist until recently).
I have to say that many good changes in my life, from the way I work to the way I enjoy my free time, have been influenced — and inspired — by Coach.me. Particularly in the area of professional development, Coach Tony’s Heavy Mental Program made me work less and achieve more. Definitely worth a try if you’re looking to de-stress and break through the latest barriers you face.
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