In this post we’ll discuss personal connection in online coaching, why it’s essential to successful learning, and the success of clients in online programs, including yours.

Have you ever bought an online course?

If you have, odds are you did almost nothing with it. Or perhaps you started it, but got distracted and just never got back to it.

What percentage of users do you think complete typical online courses? It’s a tough statistic to find. Probably because no one wants to admit how low the percentage is. 

It’s stating the obvious, but if someone doesn’t engage the course, they obviously won’t learn or get any value out of it. In fact, if someone doesn’t engage the material repeatedly, they likely won’t retain much of it at all. And again won’t get much value out of it. So why are these traditional online courses getting so little engagement and what can we do about it?

These questions bring me back to the early days of Nudge and a simple little experiment.

Personal Connection Outperforms Self-Guided Persons

When we first launched the coaching side of the Nudge platform several years ago we ran a little test. At this early piloting phase of our business, the app had a standard set of daily health and wellness trackers built into it for every user.

The idea was to track them each day and build your ‘Nudge Score’ closer to 100 over a month’s time.

In a little experiment, we divided our first several thousand users who signed up using the app into two groups for comparison.

1. Self-guided users motivated to use the app to stay personally healthy

2. Users who were personally connected to a coach just via the app so they could message with them as they tracked their habits

Then we looked at how each group performed over their first 120 days on the app. What do you think happened?

As we went down the list of metrics, each one clearly favored the group of users who were connected to a coach for in-app messaging.

They tracked 18% more water, 20% more fruit and vegetable servings, 18% more daily steps, and 26% more daily cardio.

These increases were significant, but when we looked at engagement over the period, the difference became much more stark. And this led to one crucial statistic.

Those connected to a coach were 3.3 times more likely to still be actively engaged in tracking their habits after those 120 days.

While our platform has evolved over the years to now allow coaches and professionals of all kinds - business, life, health, niches you’ve never even thought of - to create their own custom tracking experiences and educational programs, this lesson remains at the core of what we offer.

We let you create a program that includes a personal connection with a coach to support the client’s success.

The personal connection is the most essential ingredient to helping a customer learn, change a behavior or reach a new goal. This is especially true online.

In other words, its fundamental to what we call “online coaching”.

To circle back on the question about why those online courses aren’t engaging… Perhaps because there’s no one there to engage with. And without a personal connection, sometimes there just isn’t enough to keep us accountable and focused on what we know we should be doing when life is happening all around us.

The Philosophy of Personal Connection (Or Philosophy of Online Coaching)

So at this point our philosophy states that if your mission is to create a successful program for clients - defining success as something clients engage with to the point they get some value from it - the personal connection is essential.

Have we uncovered a truth here?

If you think you’ve found a consistent truth or common thread that you can count on in the human experience, in my experience you should be able to confirm your suspicion by finding that your truth has been covered at length by a real life philosopher.

Emmanuel Levinas was a great one, and if I had to try to boil down his ocean of ethics to a simple concept, I’d say that he believed that we most fully exist within the process of our personal connection to others.

He would call it an ‘encounter’ with an ‘other’ in which we exist with them and we become responsible to and for one another through the power of the ‘face’.

Philosophers use fun language, but you get the idea. Our fundamental responsibility to one another drives us, and makes us human. And as it turns out, it keeps driving us. And keeps us human, even when surfing on an often inhuman feeling internet.

Conclusion

If you have a learning or coaching business and you’re thinking of publishing an online course, find a way for it to involve a connection to a person.

This raises a course to the level of what I would call actual “online coaching.”

Personal connection isn’t essential for everything you create, but I think it should be somewhere along your client’s journey if you really deeply care about your clients’ success. For example, if you’re trying to scale this type of business you could explore the ATM Coaching Formula we discuss here.

If you agree, one of the best ways to build an online coaching experience like this is by creating it using Nudge.

And if I’ve gotten you this far, I’ll leave you with an even broader parting thought to consider.

My philosopher friend, Emmanual Levinas’ favorite saying comes from a book called The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky:

In other words, I think we’re here on this earth for each other more so than for ourselves. Agree or disagree?

I’d be curious to hear what you think of this post. Let me know below.