Becoming a Master Coach: The easy way to your ICF and EMCC mastery certification

By Kirsten Dierolf, ICF MCC, ACTC, EMCC MP, ITCA MP, ESIA

As the coaching profession matures, more and more coaches look back on decades of experience and are pondering a certification at a mastery level. The two largest coaching associations, the ICF and EMCC are both offering such designations: The Master Certified Coach for ICF and the Master Practitioner for EMCC.
The author has run Coaching Masterclasses for the preparation for ICF MCC since 2018. She is a member of the ICF assessor team for MCC and has contributed to the development of the new MCC BARS (criteria for the performance evaluation).
This book is aimed at coaches who would like to celebrate their lifetime achievement by receiving a mastery level certification. Both certifications are described in detail: the requirements, how to meet them, the process, your mindset etc. The book is intended to answer all questions about these potentially daunting certification processes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SolutionsAcademy Verlag
• Release date: Oct 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9783944293127

Kirsten Dierolf, ICF MCC, ACTC, EMCC MP, ITCA MP, ESIA

Kirsten Dierolf, M.A., ICF MCC, EMCC MP, ESIA, ITCA MP, IASTI MASFP is the owner and founder of SolutionsAcademy, a global coach training academy with ICF and EMCC accredited programs. Kirsten has been mentoring ICF MCC and EMCC MP candidates through innovative programs and individual mentoring. She served as president of the German Chapter of the International Coaching Federation and as a member of the ICF assessor teams for MCC and PCC and a subject matter expert on team coaching. She is the author of "Solution Focused Team Coaching", co-author of "The Solutions Tango" and "Coaching plain and simple" and editor of "Solution Focused Practice around the World". Kirsten was instrumental in founding the first peer reviewed journal for Solution Focused work in organizations "InterAction" in 2008 which she edited from 2008-2016. She has published over 50 articles on Solution Focused Coaching, writes on her weekly blog and contributes to the ICF Germany's podcast.

Book preview

Becoming a Master Coach

Becoming a Master Coach

Introduction

What is mastery in coaching?

Client satisfaction

Clients achieve their goals faster

Coaches get better at a certain coaching model

Length of experience or training

Feeling of personal mastery

Shu Ha Ri

The coach can help a greater variety of clients

Deliberate Practice

Reflective Practice

Mastery designations

The ICF philosophy of credentialing

The EMCC philosophy of accreditation

ICF

Coach Training

ICF accredited training

Non-accredited training

Mentoring

Experience

Performance Evaluation

Your mindset

Tips for performance evaluation recordings

Overall Behaviors for MCC-level Coaching

Core Competency 1: Demonstrates Ethical Practice

Core Competency 2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset

Core Competency 4: Cultivates Trust and Safety

Core Competency 5: Maintains Presence

Core Competency 6: Listens Actively

Core Competency 7: Evokes Awareness

Core Competency 8: Facilitates Client Growth

Transcript of a masterful coaching session

Tips for performance evaluation transcripts and translations

ICF Credentialing Exam

EMCC

EMCC Application Process

Coach Training and Continuous Professional Development

Experience

Supervision

Feedback

Reflections / Case studies

Contribution to the profession

Summary and Recommendations

ICF and EMCC Comparison Table

I am an ICF PCC and ICF is my home

References

Copyright

Becoming a Master Coach

By Kirsten Dierolf, ICF MCC, EMCC MP, ITCA MP, ESIA

Introduction

As the coaching profession matures, more and more coaches look back on decades of experience and are pondering a certification at a mastery level. The two largest coaching associations, the ICF and EMCC are both offering such designations: The Master Certified Coach for ICF and the Master Practitioner for EMCC.

SolutionsAcademy is offering an ICF Level 3 program and helps coaches with their EMCC Master Practitioner applications. We have run Coaching Masterclasses for the preparation for ICF MCC since 2018 and have many MCCs on our training staff. The author of this book is a member of the ICF assessor team for MCC and has contributed to the development of the new MCC BARS (criteria for the performance evaluation).

This book is aimed at coaches who would like to celebrate their lifetime achievement by receiving a mastery level certification. Both certifications are described in detail: the requirements, how to meet them, the process, your mindset etc. The book is intended to answer all your questions about these potentially daunting certification processes.

I went through all the trials and tribulations of becoming a Master Certified Coach and Master Practitioner myself and believe me – I probably made all the mistakes that I am talking about in this book. My mentoring experience was not easy as the criteria were unclear to me. Ever since then I have made it my mission to state what is required in an easy-to-understand way.

I hope that you will enjoy reading the book and your application process to a well-deserved certification. Do get in contact if you would like our personal help! Just write us an email at www.solutionsacademy.com or book a free information call.

This book would not have been possible without the constant input and support of my colleagues at SolutionsAcademy: this book is for you!

Special thanks go to Caitlin Bower-Tredoux for her support in proofreading and editing. Of course, all remaining mistakes are entirely mine :-)

What is mastery in coaching?

In coaching (and in many other professions that focus on supporting people through conversations talk), every case is different. So, the question of what is mastery in coaching is very difficult to answer and one can approach it through many different lenses. The argument that it does not makes sense to categorize coaches into a four step (EMCC) or three step (ICF) taxonomy can also be made quite convincingly. Tatiana Bachkirova and Carmelina Lawton Smith (2015) even state that the approach taken by most professional bodies towards gradation of professional expertise is based on competency frameworks that are as yet unsubstantiated. In the following, I would like to describe how we might notice mastery in coaching and talk about the sense and nonsense of such a description. If you are mainly here to learn about what you need to do in order to receive the EMCC or ICF mastery designation, skip to the respective chapter. Personally, I am not 100% convinced that either the EMCC or the ICF certification processes really measure what they purport to measure. But the sense and nonsense of the certification systems aside – if you want to show your quality to your customers, a mastery level certification is very useful. If you want to engage in some general reflections about these systems and about what mastery in coaching might be, engage with the following paragraphs.

Client satisfaction

The first thing that always comes to mind when we are speaking about how to recognize good coaching is client satisfaction. It is almost a no-brainer: great coaches should have satisfied clients. However, does the opposite hold? Are all coaches who have satisfied clients masterful coaches? A survey comparing customer satisfaction with the help received from conventional providers like medical doctors, psychiatrists or psychotherapists with help received from friends or family and alternative providers like psychics concluded that ratings of overall effectiveness of help by those consulting psychics were greater than for the three other groups (Farhall et al., 2022, p. 326). Also consider coaches who professionals might locate in the corner of charlatans and money grabbing scammers. They also have very satisfied and enthusiastic clients, at least for a while. Therefore, I think we cannot make client satisfaction the only measure of what makes a masterful coach.

Clients achieve their goals faster

One touch stone for the master coach might be that when coached by them, clients achieve their goals faster than if they were coached by not so masterful coaches. Makes sense, right? However, this is incredibly hard to measure. In psychotherapy, you might measure the speed at which someone returns to mental health by comparing the number of hours or the treatment time required for certain diagnoses (if you follow an approach that believes in a medical model of mental health). In coaching, however, we do not have comparable categories of clients and client problems. Someone who helps clients achieve their goals faster might simply be someone who only deals with very easy clients and issues which are easily resolved. So, very sorry to say, that this is probably not a reliable signal of mastery.

Coaches get better at a certain coaching model

A master coach may be a coach who has mastered a coaching approach. They are skilled at using this approach and know all the ins and outs. You can probably observe whether someone is using the Solution Focused approach correctly or not, or you can see if someone is skilled at using NLP or not. When Wampold and Imel (2015) compared the effectiveness of different psychotherapeutic approaches, they found that the approaches mostly delivered the similar results. On top of that, only a small percentage of the success of a therapy process seems to depend on the model at all. Wampold and Imel propose important common factors instead: The relationship between therapist and client, a good setting, a therapist who provides a psychologically derived and culturally embedded explanation for emotional distress which is adapted to and accepted by the client and a set of procedures or rituals between therapist and client that help the client enact something that is positive, helpful, or adaptive. What follows is that mastery in any approach is not going to make a therapist a master therapist and probably the same is true for coaching (but we do not know, as similar research has yet to be carried out in coaching).

Length of experience or training

You could presume that a master coach has better outcomes than a rookie coach. Sadly, at this point, we do not have any data to corroborate that presumption, or, if it exists, I have not been able to find it. When you look at data from psychotherapy research, performance of therapists seems to decrease with experience. Yes, this is not a typo: the more experienced a therapist is, the worse the outcomes. The largest study on the impact of experience on treatment outcomes, which collected data from 75 therapists over 17 years, showed that the average therapy results worsened slightly over time (Goldberg, S.B. et al, 2016). So, apparently experience does not guarantee mastery. Little difference in the effectiveness of trained individuals, students or volunteers could be shown in one study from 2010 (Nyman, S. et al.). There are also a few studies in coaching which report that benefits from coaching can be reaped even from very inexperienced coaches (Gyllensten et al., 2010; Franklin & Franklin, 2006). So, if what we suspect about psychotherapy is also applicable to coaching, a master coach cannot really be recognized by how much training or experience they have. There is 20 years of experience doing something wrong as discussed in the next paragraphs.

Feeling of personal mastery

20 years of experience can lead to well-practiced mistakes. Actually, most of us (not only beginners) overestimate our competence. I used to be a fan of the Dunning-Kruger effect that posited that most beginners in a field overestimate their competence (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). However, when data scientists examined the study, they found that the data analysis did not stand up to statistical scrutiny (Gignac & Zajenkowski, 2020). According to them, the data rather showed that everybody tends to overestimate their capability a little bit, irrespective of their skill level.

To illustrate what can happen with this overconfidence, I want to relate a story my colleague Svea van der Hoorn tells about a piano student being scolded for his lack of practice. Taking his teacher’s words to heart, the piano student practices a lot the week after, only to hear his piano teacher exclaim: O my, you have practiced this mistake well!

In our master classes for ICF MCC credentialing (an ICF level 3 course), we work with very experienced and mostly wonderful coaches. Sometimes it happens that due to their years of practice, one or two participants have become very attached to the way they coach. They have a feeling of personal mastery. Suddenly they are required to adapt their style to the ICF requirements and that can be hard. They have a lot of experience in their practice but have become set in their ways a little bit (as we all do!).

So: our own assessment or feeling of personal mastery is not a reliable indicator of mastery. Sad but true.

Shu Ha Ri

Agile coaching sometimes borrows the Japanese martial arts classification of Shu, Ha, Ri. I am not a martial artist, but what I understand is that the beginner (Shu) learns how to do things the right way by copying their master and by learning the structures and movements of the practice. We could compare this to a beginning coach, who starts learning a coaching model: Solution Focus, NLP, transactional analysis, etc. Maybe this could be compared to what the ICF asks practitioners to demonstrate at ACC level and the EMCC at foundation or practitioner level. At the Ha level, the practitioner is departing from the regulated Shu practice. They become more flexible and adaptable. A Ha practitioner is able to respond to the situation at hand more automatically and less concerned with the rules or doing it right. The initial form of the coaching model can be left behind in service to the situation at hand. This might correspond to the ICF PCC level or the EMCC senior practitioner level. At the Ri level, the practitioner may completely depart from the form while still not overstepping any of the laws of the martial arts practice. At ICF MCC level, the practitioner is also asked to coach in a flowing, natural way without breaking the rules of coaching. This sounds very plausible as it describes the way that most coaches experience their development – however, if we go back to the psychotherapy and coaching research which seems to