ICf Coaching certification

1. 8.5  questions we keep getting asked about coach training

2. 1.  Can anyone learn to be a coach? • Yes….and no. Yes, it’s true that anyone can learn the skills needed to coach (creating a safe environment for the client to reflect; asking powerful questions; empathizing; devising action plans) but the journey is not an easy one. Giving up the urge to tell other people what to do; learning to confront your own fears of inadequacy when you’re struggling with the same issue the client is; letting go of the need to have control…it is a transformative, almost spiritual journey. Not everyone has the space in their lives or the willingness to look inwards that a good coach really needs.

3. 2.  What’s the difference between life coaching, leadership coaching and coaching? • The core skills are all the same as is the intent – which is to help clients achieve the goals they want for themselves. If you apply these core skills when coaching leaders in an organization, that’s being a leadership coach. If you apply them when coaching someone on a life, non-work goal they have, that’s life coaching. Coaching is still a relatively young field and coaches who are setting up in business will use segmentation as a marketing strategy (so you could have strength-based coaches, EI based coaches, entrepreneurship coaches, women leadership coaches, youth coaches…I could continue to invent segments, but I think you get the point). Sure, there would be frameworks for concepts that each segment relies on that are distinct from others, but the core competencies remain the same.

4. 3. Do I need to have significant work experience to be a coach? • The answer to this is an emphatic no. We’ve had people with as little as 5 years of work experience go through our coach certification program and be as effective (if not more) than people with 30 years of experience. Sure, you do need to be able to understand the context that the client is coming from but you do not need to have lived through a similar experience to be an effective coach.

5. 4. I’ve anyway been coaching my team for a while, why do I need to train? • If you’ve been using the skills as described in the first question above, sure, you don’t need to train to be a coach. It is true however that coaching is a much-misunderstood term and can be (wrongly) interpreted as mentoring, problem solving, giving feedback or even just listening to people. It is also true that while there are a very small group of people who are just naturally gifted coaches, for most of us, it’s a competency that needs to be developed (refer the first point above)

6. 5. Do I need to be certified to be a coach? • You do need to build skills in being a coach; if you want to be a coach who develops capacity and a sense of agency in your clients. You don’t necessarily need to be certified in order to coach others well. Having said that, if you’re intending to go into business as a coach, organizations and individual clients are increasingly becoming savvy about certification and you probably will get asked if you are certified. Even if you don’t  intend to set out on your own, I have found that the rigor of the certification process that the International Coaching Federation mandates does substantially increase the capability and the confidence of people who go through it.

7. 6. How difficult is the process of certification? • I can answer this question with regard to the ICF process (the largest certifying body for coaches in the world). It is a rigorous process but a satisfying, capacity building one. You will need • -       64 hours of coach specific training • -       100 hours of coaching experience • -       10 hours of mentor coaching • -       One audio recording • -       Passing a multiple-choice exam • This can seem like a lot to start with but atleast with us, you will experience a lot of support along the way. The quickest that anyone has done this has been 4 months (only one person ever J); most people who are keen on certification finish it between one year and three.

8. 7. How do I get the hundred hours of coaching? • If you’re doing the Navgati program, you can get a significant chunk of this through the peer coaching that happens while the program is underway. We also have an active community of people who have been through our coaching program over the last eight years that we have been running it and you could find opportunities for peer coaching there. Coaching people within your organization (barring your direct reports) is also counted as paid coaching. Many coaches have found creative ways of finding clients (working with your alumni; offering to set up a coaching initiative within your organization; using Linkedin; working with a couple of initiatives that match coaches with clients etc).

9. 8. How do I decide between the various coaching certification courses available? • Now that’s a question that could merit an entire post in itself but I will attempt to answer it briefly here. The ICF itself does not offer coach training but it accredits organizations such as Navgati to deliver training that helps participants build the ICF competencies that will be assessed for certification. The ICF does not mandate how these competencies are built which is why various training organizations work with various ideological frameworks to offer different courses. Some questions you should be asking yourself • 1.     Is this course accredited with the ICF (and check on their website)? • 2.     What is the balance between synchronous (workshops) and asynchronous components (reading books etc) of the training? • 3.     How much opportunity is built into the design to practice the skills and receive feedback? • 4.     What are the key frameworks that will be used in the program? • 5.     What is the profile of the organization and the facilitators? • 6.     What kind of support do they provide when it comes to certification? • 7.     What feedback have they got from people similar to yourself who have been through their course in the past?

10. 8.5  Do you offer coach specific training? • That’s half a question because you’ve probably figured out by now that the answer is yes J . Check out https://www.navgati.in/virtual-training/ for more details or write to deepa@navgati.in

11. Thank you