Why Coaches Really Do Need to be Credentialed

Note: In this post I talk about credentialing for coaches, and I specify the International Coaching Federation (ICF). This is not the only legitimate credentialing body, just the one I am most familiar with, the most well-recognized credential internationally, and the credential I myself hold. There are other credentialing bodies and some good coaching programs also offer their own credential.

As a dyed in the wool rebel, I am surprising myself a bit in writing this post. Although I have been a credentialed coach through the International Coaching Federation for my entire 20+ year career, I always saw it as more of a pro forma thing. That is, necessary because I train coaches and write about coaching (not to mention my years consulting for the ICF itself). It wasn’t the thing that defined me as a coach.

But more and more recently, I have developed a great deal of respect for the fact that we, as coaches, can be credentialed, and I have decided that yes, indeed, we should. Let me tell you why. If any of you follow my sister blog on narcissism, But Now I Know Your Name, you’ll know I have experience with the whole world of toxic personalities, as well as a passion for education and healing all forms of relational trauma and abuse.

Because of this, I pay attention to all the ways people encounter and are manipulated by toxic personalities. This includes in the workplace, families, intimate partnerships, friendships, religious organizations, and cults. Why? The patterns are highly consistent and the negative impact very similar. And one thing I have noticed and become more and more concerned about is how many new age cults (such as the now-discredited NXIVM, just to name one example) use the term “coaches” for the one-to-one “work” (aka manipulation) sanctioned as part of the way they profess to help people develop.

I also recently listened to an interview on the wonderful podcast A Little Bit Culty. The guest had worked with a non-credentialed “life coach” for over 30 years. This person was so manipulative and coercive it left her severely traumatized — to the point that a professional giving her a neurological assessment called adult protective services.

Let me be clear — this is not coaching as an ICF credentialed coach would understand it. These “coaches” are not trained according to the ICF Core Competencies, and they are not required to follow internationally recognized ethical guidelines. They are, in my opinion, a frightening example of the looseness of the term coach.

Why frightening? Because without adequate training and ethical guidelines, anything can happen. As a neuroscience expert, I know that the way true professional coaches are trained is validated by brain research. If we follow the competencies and ethical standards, we are highly likely to create a positive, open, healthy brain state in our client. Because a core concept of professional coaching is that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole, coaches do not dictate to their clients. And if a credentialed coach is manipulative and coercive, the client has recourse through the ICF ethical standards board.

But as anyone who works in the human development world knows, anyone can call themselves a coach. And to be fair, the term existed far before the idea of life or executive coaching became a thing about 30 years ago. But in this time we have evolved into a respectable profession with a track record of both ethics and results.

And so, if you are a coach, I do recommend being credentialed, whether it is by the ICF or another legitimate credentialing body or program with rigorous training and an ethical code. It helps differentiate you and protects our profession. If you hire coaches as part of an organization, make sure they have credentials. It protects you and your employees. And if you are personally looking for a coach, make asking about their credentials, training and ethical standards your very first questions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Betz is the co-founder of BEabove Leadership and an expert on the intersection of neuroscience, coaching, trauma and human transformation. She speaks, trains and coaches internationally, and writes about neuroscience and coaching as well as relational trauma. Ann is also a published poet who loves cats, rain in the desert, and healthy relationships. 

To order her book, This is Your Brain on Coaching, the Neuroscience of the ICF Competencies, click here.

Entering Softly

The Right Hemisphere and Coaching*

Ah, the two hemispheres of the brain, something we are endlessly fascinated with here at Your Coaching Brain. While it is true that, on a day to day basis, we use both hemispheres for most of what we do (yes, even music, math, art and logic), it is equally true that each hemisphere pays attention to the world in a very different way. The right focuses more on the big picture, the relationship between things, and meaning. The left has more ability to understand and attend to pieces and parts. It is concerned with both the details and process.

The right hemisphere is also attuned to that which is novel, unique and heretofore unexplored, and as such, all new information tends to come to us through our right hemisphere. Conversely, the left deals with what it already knows, the representations (re-presentations) of things already noticed and brought into awareness by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere’s role is as an interpreter of reality, not as much of a direct experiencer. They each have their uses—and their limitations.

One limitation we need to think about has huge implications for coaching. In order for the client to shift to somewhere truly new, to have an experience of transformation, we must make sure they are activating the right hemisphere. All learning tends to start here—with what we don’t know, haven’t noticed, and are yet to experience. However, we also want to be sure the session is practical and useful for the client, and is, of course, what they want, all of which are more left hemisphere concerns.

And thus a conundrum. On the one hand, traditionally as the session begins we ask the client what they want from today’s work and how they will know they have gotten that. We may ask them to think about the measures and markers that they have, indeed, had a useful session, thus potentially activating more of their detail-focused and interpretive left hemisphere and asking it to sort through what it already knows.

On the other hand, current understanding of the brain shows us that often what needs to occur is in the realm of what the client “doesn’t know what they don’t know.” The right hemisphere is tends to be where we will find that amazing “aha” that can turn the coaching in a whole new—often much more powerful—direction. This is the part of brain that can pay more attention to the “still small voice” of what is unknown and undiscovered.

And so, I have come to enter coaching sessions softly. I do ask, what do you want to focus on today, but I generally refrain from getting too “granular” with specific outcomes,** because (usually) I intentionally want to activate the open, learning aspects of the client’s brain. I want them to enter into today’s coaching from a place they do not know, instead of moving around the pieces and parts they have looked at before. Once we have looked and explored in a wide, open way, there is a time to narrow things down, make plans and look to measures. This focusing in is also an important part of coaching–it’s just not always the best place to begin.

Perhaps it feels a bit more in control if you have a clear, specific, measurable goal for every coaching session, which makes the left hemisphere happy (and yes, as noted in my footnote, there are times when this makes sense). The right hemisphere, however, doesn’t tend to care that things be linear, predictable and measurable, because its focus is a greater integration of the whole. And ultimately, I would argue, this is what really matters in coaching.

*An important note on language. In this blog post I use the words “tends to” and “more,” because nothing in the brain in general or the hemispheres specifically is absolute.

**A notable exception is if the client has already, perhaps in other sessions, done enough exploration and they really at this point just need to make a plan.

 

Thank you to Iain McGilchrist for his amazing book The Master and His Emissary, and the new documentary, The Divided Brain. McGilchrist spent over 20 years synthesizing wisdom from philosophy, history, art and neuroscience to help us understand the real difference – and challenge – of the two hemispheres of the brain.

You Don’t NEED Neuroscience

In which I explain whatever possessed me (an artist and poet) to take myself off to neuroscience school….. 

When I got my training as a coach almost 17 years ago, I was working as a consultant in the non-profit world. My background was theater, poetry, art, and philosophy and I think I’d perhaps taken one or two science classes in my life. I came into coaching full-on and full-hearted; its power and magic blew me away in my very first class.

I certainly didn’t need neuroscience to prove that coaching is effective. I could see it. The evidence from stories and examples was overwhelming—who needed numbers and graphs? In my coach training, I was completely fine with the instructors saying “trust us, it works,” then trying it myself, failing, refining, and eventually WHOA, a moment of true transformation for my client. WOW. Who cares HOW this works? It DOES!

But when I first became a coach I was married to a lawyer with a science background. He had a tendency in those days to dismiss and diminish coaching as fluffy, ungrounded, woo-woo and self-indulgent. Little did I know at the time what a blessing this would be, painful as it was. Again and again, I found myself completely tongue-tied and inarticulate when he would cross-examine me about how coaching works. And falling back on my defense of “trust me, it does!” was not particularly satisfying to either one of us. While I hated being cross-examined, I did long to know what the heck was going on. Why did coaching work so well when people just gave it a shot? How could I explain this magical, amazing world of personal growth and transformation in a more compelling way? Was there a bridge to be built between the trusting mystics and the doubting linear thinkers?

Fast forward a few years. I’m divorced (I could only take so much cross-examination, after all), teaching a model of consciousness with my dear business partner Ursula, and a newly-minted faculty member for the Coaches Training Institute (CTI). Three things happen: one, I am watching our students challenged by the same confidence and communication issues I had as a new coach; two, we were struggling to get people involved in our work on consciousness; and three, I kept seeing little tastes of neuroscience in the news. This was eight years ago, and while it was NOTHING like today, with thousands of articles and books, and a new finding about the brain almost daily, there were some intriguing bread crumbs in terms of both coaching and consciousness.

Do you ever get that question that won’t leave you alone? The one that wakes you up and pokes you? The one you think, “now THAT’S a good question?” Well, proving what we were really up to in the business of human development/transformation, that was my question. How does this all work? Is it simply mystical and unknowable, or are there portions we can know? And so, to the amusement of my family (Neuroscience? I didn’t think you had any interest in science) and the bafflement of my partner Ursula (You go ahead, dear, I will NOT be joining you in neuroscience school!) off I went.

The impact was almost immediate. I was amazed. While at the time there wasn’t any direct neuroscience research on coaching (or consciousness, for that matter, but that’s another blog post), almost everything we studied was correlative, applicable, and ultimately expansive. For example, when we went through the research on how to manage stress, it mapped elegantly with the three core principles I was teaching at CTI. Learning about the right and left hemispheres of the brain helped me understand the different ways we tune our listening: to level two (more left hemisphere) or level three (more right hemisphere). And so much more. After every class I’d call Ursula and say “Guess what I learned?!” and we’d debrief and look to see how we could take this learning to a new level. And six years ago this May, our flagship program, Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Transformational Coaching, was born. This stuff was just way too cool not to share!

As we developed and trained this amazing information, Ursula, a prosperity guide, Akashic Records reader, and author of a book on blessings, became a huge neuroscience fan and expert as well. She likes to say “If I can learn this, anyone can!”

And for both of us, it hasn’t killed the mystery at all. It’s created innumerable new mysteries that have us exploring the edges of quantum physics, the heart’s resonant field, hyper-communication, the power of vibration, and much more. We have come to see that consciousness is ultimately about integration of the highly complex system of being human, and coaching is one of the best things we can do to create lasting integration. Therefor, we argue, coaching literally raises consciousness. That’s all. Just that. No big deal.

Recently I saw a post on Facebook from some blogger calling life coaching a fraud, and I was thrust back to the dinner table of 15 years past. remembering spluttering and stammering as I tried to defend a profession I hold very much in my heart. Except this time, I calmly and serenely thought, “Oh, you have NO idea what we are really doing to people’s brains and world. No idea at all.”

For a comprehensive overview of the neuroscience of the ICF competencies, see This is Your Brain on Coaching. For more brain states at different levels of consciousness, see the Seven Levels of Effectiveness ebook.