AC

We get phonecalls all the time from people who are interested in becoming coaches and are being told hundreds of different things about what training to go for. Choosing a coach training course is so confusing! To help you make an informed decision about coach training, we have developed an impartial information pamphlet . Wherever you decide to learn, we hope you enjoy the it!

Please click here to download the pamphlet.

At The Performance Solution® we are passionate about training coaches who can go out into the world and use their coaching skills alongside the codes of ethics and practice of the major professional bodies in our field. Coaching is being pushed to regulate itself and we are fighting the good fight to make sure that coaches trained by TPS are safe, qualified, and know what they’re doing.

As a result we have spent the last few years in and out of meetings with various professional bodies, attending conferences, hosting meetings, helping with research and contributing in any way we can. This is why we are so proud to be able to announce that the long awaited accreditation for our coaching programme has come through from the International Coach Federation (ICF)!

In order to obtain the prestigious title of Accredited Coach Training Programme we spent a year having all our course materials, rationale, exams and qualifications audited by the ICF and they have decided that we meet the criteria.

At the end of last year we were equally excited to be approved as a recognised provider for the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) and before that we were overjoyed to have our courses recognised by the Association for Coaching.

So what does this meant for our students? Any delegate who successfully completes our coach training programme can apply for personal credentialing through the ICF as an ACTP graduate and will not have to put together the entire portfolio that others do. We’ve done the hard work on that front so the ICF know that our graduates are competent. Anyone who graduates from our course also receives a separate certificate from the ILM and 6 months free membership to the ILM’s online materials. Our certificates also come with recognition from the Association for Coaching and students can apply for credentialing through them as well.

Last but certainly not least, we are currently working on our new Coaching Masters degree and our ACTP also counts as credits towards this, allowing graduates of the training programme to delve into the academia of coaching and its applications.

We are so proud to be setting the gold standard for coach training and we look forward to helping make sure that the coaching profession increases in reliability and validity in the future. We hope to see you on the journey.

There are so many coaching associations out there now that shopping for coaching services or for coach training is becoming a minefield of acronyms. Which organisation should you choose? How can you tell who represents what? How do you know that an accreditation is really worth its salt?

To help with this confusion we pinpoint the 3 main associations to help you make your choice:

First the ICF: the International Coach Federation. This is the current world-wide organisation for coaches from all over the planet. In order to become ICF accredited a coach must submit a huge amount of proof that they are capable and that they adhere to the ethics and codes of practice of the ICF. If your coach is an ACC, PCC or MCC, you know they’re qualified. Equally, courses accredited by the ICF have been through rigorous evaluation procedures that take about a year to complete. For any company or coach waiting for their accreditation to come through, you’ll probably be cursing these regulations, however for the consumer, you know that they’ve been properly vetted and you’re buying something reliable. The ICF are also committed to research into the uses of coaching which makes them an academic association as well.

Second the Association for Coaching. This for some time had been restricted to the UK but thanks to their huge efforts on “Going Global” in 2010 they are growing. Again this is a stamp of approval for coaches and coaching courses. They put us through our paces in order to certify that the best possible practice is provided. A course recognised by the AfC is a course worth attending.


Finally the EMCC, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council. This one is very academic. They are very focused on academic rigour and research standards. It’s a good mark of standard but it costs a fortune to have courses or individual coaches accredited, for this reason a lot of coaches don’t go down this route.

If the company you’re thinking of going with is associated with any of these 3 associations you’re probably onto a good bet. There are lots more smaller organisations cropping up at the moment but for the time being, I would place my faith in one of these big three when making my choice.

Please feel free to add your comments and advice.

For more photos from the conference go to Facebook or Flickr

Last Thursday and Friday, Allan and I attended the Association for Coaching Going global conference as exhibitors. We’d like to thank all the attendees who came for a chat at our stand and joined in with our coaching games. We had some great quotes, jokes and tips from coaches as well as some interesting chats. We gave away a free iWAM certification course to lucky winner Julia A. Choukhno.

The main eye-opener of the whole conference for me was the range of different people there. I chatted to a woman who teaches coaching techniques to young offenders, a man who runs a mentoring programme for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, a counsellor who wanted a fresh approach, a war veteran who had turned to coaching post-trauma, psychologists, doctors, professors, publishers and authors, coaches who loved psychometrics and some who hated them, NLP-ers, business coaches, life coaches, family coaches, career coaches, HR directors, coach managers, fledgling coaches and experienced ones and do you know what? All of them had a different approach to coaching. Each one of them had a different reason for getting into the profession, and each of them had a different way of dealing with clients and running their coaching sessions.

To add to the variation of backgrounds, there were several international attendees who gave us an insight into how coaching is being carried out in Russia, Portugal and the Netherlands to name but a few. For a conference with a focus on Going Global, it was lovely to see people who had come from the corners of the world to be in London for the conference.

This of course is not to mention the extraordinary local and international speakers who appeared at the conference. Although we were on the stand, Allan and I took turns dropping in to sessions and I would personally like to say what a joy it was to attend Julio Olalla’s opening speech on his life in Chile and the US and his use of coaching to spread his message that there is no joy in pushing for a “better life” when surely the best thing is to live a “good” one. He spoke at length about gratitude and morality and the personal touch that we are losing and I, for one, can say I caught a few fellow coaches wiping away a tear during an emotional story of gratitude and generosity in his own life.

Following his talk I was able to attend varied other sessions where the breadth of coaching and what it can do really came alive. It was great to meet so many people and learn so much. Thank you to the AC for putting it all together and their hard work while we were there. And thank you to the coaches who are striving for the best our profession can be, it was a real joy to meet you all.