My Journey Into Coaching: A New Certificate

Things keep moving forward on my path as a life coach, and it is time for an update on my newly acquired certificate from Certified Life Coach Institute! This post is part of my blog series My Journey Into Coaching.

In This Post

I cover the following in this post:

1. Certificate Upgrade
2. My Thoughts On The Training
3. Wrapping Up

1. Certificate Upgrade

My new certificate is called Master Certified Life Coach, MCLC, and just as the previous one, issued by Certified Life Coach Institute, CLCI.

This means all 60+ hours worth of training required by the International Coaching Federation, ICF, when applying for their Associate Certified Coach, ACC, credential are now done.

After the ICF updated their requirements in 2022, CLCI was approved once again to offer “ICF-credentialed training.” The ICF themselves do not offer training, so this is a heads up for transparency purposes, in case you are looking for a coach, and happen to stumble upon someone claiming to have an “ICF certificate” (those do not exist!).

2. My Thoughts On The Training

Both trainings for the certificates I have earned so far were incredible. They made a lasting impact and I had so many thoughts arising, falling in place, and new ideas popping up that a few nights afterwards were spent in deeper sleep than usually.

There are some amazing people out there, who are entering the world of coaching alongside me, and I will happily refer you to some of them, if it seems as though my niche, the quite broad life-balance coaching, isn’t quite what you need after all.

It was a privilege to be coached and to coach people with different backgrounds, from different parts of the world. Also, I thought it very helpful to simply be paired/tripled up randomly to avoid any sort of bias in the moment.

As a result, my own “clients” arrived with vastly different matters to ponder, both large and smaller. Most coachings happened right before or after midnight in my time zone, which felt rather challenging both physically and mentally. On the other hand, it is good to know that I can concentrate well even that late, when need be.

We covered a lot during three days and thematically it spanned across not only coaching as a practice, but neurophysiology and business as well.

If you are interested in becoming a certified coach, I warmly recommend this route. The trainers are ICF-credentialed coaches and the standard shows. In each training, there was one ACC and one PCC/MCC present, so the input came with a lot of experience from numerous hours working with different clients over many years.

CLCI offers mentor coaching, too, so there is no need to look anywhere else to ensure the coach fulfils ICF criteria for mentor coaches.

Feel free to get in touch, if you have questions you don’t want to post in the comment section below.

3. Wrapping Up

While it is fantastic to have a training foundation to lean on, the work really doesn’t stop here. There are many skills to learn and keep honing still, and as an unregulated field the future is wide open.

It is very likely that the EU starts to regulate coaching eventually, so in order to pass tests and other criteria as swiftly as possible, my intention is to continuously study, participate in trainings, and so on. This applies whether there are official requirements placed on me or not.

Are you worried about the state of coaching (because I am)? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

 

Photo credit: Gosia Oledzka.