Your coach uses Grove to stay in touch with you between sessions, and this guide covers everything that happens between the invite email landing in your inbox and your first ordinary week using the app. It’s short on purpose: five or six things to know, not a manual. If you’d rather just poke around, that works too, nothing here breaks anything.
Grove is built around one idea: the days between sessions matter as much as the sessions themselves. A thirty-second check-in each morning, a habit logged when you do it, a note to your coach when something comes up, that’s most of what you’ll use. Nothing here is a productivity app trying to gamify your life; it’s a quiet, private place that your coach reads so your next session starts from where you actually are.
The terms you’ll see
Grove uses a small, consistent set of names for its main screens. Here’s the map:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Today | The screen you land on when you open Grove, where your daily check-in lives. |
| Check-in | The short daily log of how you’re doing, the thing that keeps your coach current between sessions. |
| Habits | The screen where you track the specific habits you and your coach are working on. |
| Goals | The screen showing your goals, actions, and any targets your coach has set up with you. |
| Messages | Where you and your coach message each other directly inside the app. |
| Settings | Where your account and notification preferences live. |
Before you start
- You’ll need an invite from your coach. Grove accounts start from a coach invite, not open signup, so if you don’t have an invite email yet, ask your coach to send one.
- Have about five minutes free the first time. After that, a daily check-in takes under thirty seconds.
- Grove works in a browser and has a native iPhone app. Either way you sign in with the same account.
Steps
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Open the invite email and tap the link. If this is your first time in Grove, you’ll land on a screen that reads “[Your coach’s name] invited you to Grove”. Enter your date of birth, accept the checkboxes for the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, then tap Continue with Google or Sign up with email to create your account. If you already have a Grove account (from a different coach, or from coaching yourself), you’ll instead see “Join [your coach’s name]‘s practice?”. Enter your date of birth and accept the checkboxes again, then tap Join to confirm.
Heads up: invites come from your coach, not from Grove marketing. If you were expecting one and don’t see it, check spam before messaging your coach to resend it.
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Walk through the welcome. Right after joining, Grove greets you by name, with your coach front and center and a short note from them. The whole setup takes about a minute, and you can stop at any point and pick up where you left off. It starts practical: what Grove should call you, your timezone, how the daily check-in works, when you’d like a reminder, where things live, and one screen that spells out exactly what your coach can see. Then it asks about your why in three short questions: “Who do you want to be?”, “What would feel different?”, and “What would you like to work on?”. Answer in your own words, a sentence is plenty, or skip any of them. Nothing is graded, there are no wrong answers, and skipping just means you and your coach cover it in conversation instead. A “Here’s what we heard” screen reads your answers back, and you can edit anything now or later.
Heads up: your answers go to your coach so your first session can start from what matters to you. And if your coach’s practice uses Sage (their AI assistant), the flow asks a plain yes-or-no choice about it before your first check-in. Saying no loses you nothing but the Sage reflections.
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Do your first check-in. The setup ends with your first check-in, right inside the flow: how was today, any habits your coach prepared, and an optional line about your day. The send button says exactly who will read it. That’s it, “That’s your first check-in”, and Go to my Grove lands you on the Today screen. The daily check-in is the one thing worth doing every day, everything else in Grove builds on it.
Tip: if you miss a day, nothing breaks. Just check in again the next day. Grove doesn’t punish a gap.
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Find your habits. Tap Habits to see the specific habits you and your coach set up together. Each one shows whether you’ve logged it today, tap it to mark it done. This is separate from the daily check-in, some days you’ll do both, some days just one.
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Message your coach. Tap Messages to open a direct thread with your coach. Type a note and send it whenever something comes up, you don’t need to wait for your next session. Your coach sees it and replies when they’re back at their desk, not necessarily right away. Scroll up and tap Load earlier messages to see older messages.
Gotcha: Grove isn’t built for anything urgent. If you need help right now, use whatever your coach set up for emergencies outside Grove, not a message here.
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Set your notification preferences. Tap the menu icon, then Settings. Find the Notification Settings row (it’s described as “Email reminders and check-in nudges”) and open it. From there you can turn toggles like Coach Responses, New Messages, Session Plan Updates, Session Reminders, and Daily Check-in Reminder on or off individually, so Grove only nudges you about what you actually want to hear about.
What’s next
That covers everything you need for an ordinary week: check in, log your habits, message your coach when something comes up. From here, the best thing to do is just use it for a few days and see how the rhythm feels. If you want the fuller picture on privacy and who can see what you write, see how your data is protected and the client FAQ. And if anything about the app itself still doesn’t make sense, message your coach, they can see everything you can see and usually the fastest answer.
