As a busy coach, balancing your career, clients, and personal life can often make professional development feel overwhelming. You know the importance of maintaining your ICF credentials—whether it’s your ACC or PCC—but finding the time to earn the necessary Continuing Education Units (CEUs) and navigate the recertification process may seem like an impossible task. That’s ..read more

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is by learning how not to do it. With that idea in mind, this article shares examples of bad coaching habits that you should avoid if you want to be a successful coach. As you probably already know, coaching is partly the process of asking ..read more

The Center for Executive Coaching is delighted to have been awarded accreditation from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) as a Level 2 organization. This is a result of a rigorous process of assessing our complete organization, policies, methodologies, and process for evaluating quality of instruction and participant satisfaction. This means that professionals seeking executive coaching ..read more

You get a call from a prospective client. Let’s say they want you to provide executive coaching for a group of executives in the company. Here are some questions to ask to be sure you understand the opportunity. Note that the prospective client will expect you to have suggestions, and we teach you options when ..read more

  If you ask the following six questions during a coaching session, you are more likely to get results. These are standard questions — nothing advanced here — just basic good practice to run an executive coaching session. These questions work as executive coaching questions, or business coaching questions to ask your client to illicit ..read more

Prospective participants in the Center for Executive Coaching want to be sure that they are joining an executive coaching certification program with other successful professionals. Following is a list of some of the companies where our members and graduates work/have worked. Participants in our executive coaching certification program come from leadership roles in organizations of different sizes and in almost every sector, including for-profit, non-profit, government, and education. They tend to be highly educated, many with advanced degrees, although that is not a requirement. What our membe ..read more

We have trained internal coaching groups at a number of different organizations in the past year. This has given us excellent insights into the pros and cons of different coaching models. Following are some thoughts on using external coaches, managers as coaches, and a dedicated internal coaching group within Human Resources. First and foremost, and regardless of which model your company chooses, the question of coaching model is secondary to the larger question of how best to develop leaders within an organization. While we are an executive coach training company and therefore biased, we woul ..read more

The best coaches do less, not more. The more you talk, the less you learn about a client and how that person is thinking about challenges they face. The more you step in and solve the client’s problem, the less you allow the client to develop. Coaching is about building capacity and developing people, not about showing how much you know. Consider the ideal of finding just one question to ask during a coaching session – a question that somehow changes everything for the client. Perhaps you have had the good fortune of being in a meeting with a coach or a leader who had this ability. That person ..read more

Many prospective executive and leadership coaches wonder whether coaching would be a good fit for them or not. We have posted a video on Youtube to help you answer that question for yourself. Basically, we have found that there are four criteria that suggest that someone would find coaching to be a fulfilling next step in their career: 1. You have a passion for helping people develop and be their best. Many of our members share that developing others has been among the most rewarding activities and achievements in their careers. 2. You have a natural orientation towards possibilities and oppor ..read more

One reason professionals join the Center for Executive Coaching for executive coaching certification is because of the great people you will meet and our supportive community. After training coaches for almost 20 years, we have learned about the most effective ways to connect members for support, to form alliances, and to share common interests and opportunities. They include the following: – If you join the full ICF training, you will be placed in a cohort of 10 coaches as part of the ICF mentor coaching training. Over three months, you will form powerful bonds with your fellow coaches. You p ..read more