5 Steps to Coaching Accreditation | Step 2 - Experience

Building a Coaching Culture - #122: 5 Steps to Coaching Accreditation | Step 2 - Experience === J.R. Flatter [00:00:41]: Hey. Welcome back, everybody. This is JR Lucas again Hello. Talking about your requirements for ICF accreditations. Last time we were together, we talked about the first requirement and that was education. If you miss that, you can go back to our website and look it up, session 1. This is session 2 where we're gonna talk at length about the experience requirements necessary to get an ICF accreditation. All right, Lucas, experience requirements. J.R. Flatter [00:01:11]: I'll reiterate because this is the 1 where I think, we get the most confusion and frustration with people coming to our programs. And that is experience under an accredited program. You might have been coaching for many years or maybe a year, and you come to an accredited program because you've decided to seek an ICF accreditation. The clock starts the moment you start with that accredited program. And it's a very legitimate requirement because of the 5 phases of an ICF accreditation, you and I observe the student coaches for 4 of those and the ICF observes them for the 5th. And so we actually affirm for the ICF that you're ready to sit for the examination to include your coaching experience. You're gonna keep an education log and you're gonna keep an experience log. We're gonna review those only to affirm them because it is the honor system. J.R. Flatter [00:02:10]: If you said you coached for an hour or you said you were in an hour of education, we're a secondary firmer of that information, but the log is yours. But the log can't start until you've started with an accredited program, unless you're going to go through the portfolio path, which again is finding the education, finding the experience, finding the mentor and a performance evaluation on your own rather than joining an accredited program. So experience, and again, the ICF goes back to the clock to count experience by the number of hours of experience you have. And upfront, it's a relatively simple journey. A 100 hours of experience for ACC, 500 hours of experience for MCC, and 2, 500 hours of experience for MCC. There's a few caveats to each of those. Again, the clock must start when you started in an accredited program. And secondly, what can you count and what can't you count? So the first 1, you can't double dip. J.R. Flatter [00:03:21]: So if you're in an education session and you spend an hour of that session coaching, it's education because it was in an education session. Secondly, you can't count coaching to direct reports, which I could kind of see the ICF's reasoning there, that it might be a conflict of interest. But on the same hand, we talk about and teach coaching as a style of leadership. And so there's a bit of disconnect there and we're in dialogue with the ICF about that. There's a few wrinkles in this global organization, that we're working with them. And hopefully we can reconcile that. Because the ethics and core values tell us how to behave as a coach, yet I can't coach by direct reports, even if I have a coaching culture and I employ a coaching style leadership. So those are the 2 big ones that jumped out for me hours, that you can't count. J.R. Flatter [00:04:18]: Other than that, the ICF's pretty open about what you can count. It is an hours, it adds up to hours, but it can be minutes aggregated to hours. If you're coaching anyone other than your direct report at work, that's considered paid coaching. If you coach anyone peer to peer, like you're a student coach and I'm a student coach, or you're a coach and I'm a coach, that's considered peer to peer, and you can count all of those hours. The, experience requirement is used as a long pole in everybody's coaching journey. We strongly recommend the set a date, and there's 2 ways to set that date. You could set the date as I can coach this many hours a week, and therefore I'll be done in this number of weeks, Or you set a deadline for yourself, say you wanna finish by the new year and it's this many weeks away. You divide that number of weeks into how many hours of coaching you need, and that's how many hours a week you need to coach. J.R. Flatter [00:05:21]: Realistically, those of us that are working a full time job have family and self requirements. 4 hours a week is probably really doable for most people. It's less than 1 hour per work week a day. But, you know, it's entirely up to the individual, you know, based on when they wanna finish. But certainly set a date. Otherwise, it'll fall into your inbox and you'll inch closer every time you think about it. But if you have an objective, it's probably gonna be a lot easier for you. With regard to timeline, we find that most people finish their 100 hours around a year or 18 months. J.R. Flatter [00:05:59]: You don't wanna rush through it because you don't have the opportunity to learn from your experience and reflect on that experience and then put it into your coaching style. But you don't wanna drag it out too long either because it just becomes 1 of those things that you never get around to finishing. So I'll pause there and see what your questions might be on experience. Lucas Flatter [00:06:21]: I just think a lot about when I'm, you know, tracking whether it's education hours or this experience hours, how am I keeping track of it and how do I keep track of it in a useful way? Like 1 idea could be to keep the coaching agreement and like maybe notes and your hours altogether. So maybe you can like look back on it as a retrospective. Do you have any recommendations as far as that? J.R. Flatter [00:06:49]: That's a great question. Lucas Flatter [00:06:50]: We talk J.R. Flatter [00:06:50]: a lot about the ICF competencies. And if you're in a coaching program that's accredited by ICF, you know them well. We talk about them in other podcasts. 1 of the ICF competencies, and I believe it's competency 2, asks us to have a reflective coaching practice. And so the competency coaching actually asks you to do what you're describing. Learn from your coaching, get better at your coaching. The competency asks us to be engaged with 1 another and collaborate. So I have several coaches across the globe that we collaborate on a regular basis, that we coach each other. J.R. Flatter [00:07:26]: We seek them out for advice on coaching cases that we have. Of course, maintaining confidentiality. Yeah. So that's, 1 way to do it. I color code my calendar. And so I have the color of coaching, and I can just glance at my calendar and see if I have any coaching that week, see if I have any coaching that day. So there's many different ways that you can remind yourself. Keep a journal. J.R. Flatter [00:07:55]: You and I and all of our education programs talk about journaling. Journal about your coaching. How did the session go? Maintaining confidentiality. Your journal's private. You're not gonna publish that. So there's a couple good ways, I think. Lucas Flatter [00:08:09]: Yeah. I guess with the idea in mind that you know, you have this requirement, but you don't just need to check the box. Like, how do you make it more useful for yourself and learn more while you're doing it? J.R. Flatter [00:08:20]: Yeah. That's a good question. And we really focus on that in our programs. The human brain can only absorb so much so fast. Some of us are extraordinary, not me, but some people can absorb a lot more a lot quicker. But when you're getting your experience, you wanna be purposeful. Don't rush through it. Make sure that they are meaningful engagements and they're not superficial to count the hour, that you are, back to coaching competency 2, you're keeping a coaching mindset throughout this educational experience. J.R. Flatter [00:08:54]: I guess you could draw the analogy between taking a college course for the credits or taking a college course for the knowledge. We really focus on knowledge and experience rather than just checking a box. And I think, you know, 1 of the reasons that the ICF wants us to examine you through all 5 4 phases prior to the exam, is to get that sense of are you engaged or are you going through the motions? And so you and I will tell the ICF, this person's ready. Lucas Flatter [00:09:23]: So we haven't mentioned yet the requirement that of the 100 hours, 75 of them are paid. What does that look like practically if I'm a student who maybe doesn't have commercial clients? J.R. Flatter [00:09:38]: Yeah. So that's the great thing about peer to peer. We have a global cohort of students that are active and students that have finished. We stay in touch with all of them. And so you can plug into that global cohort and coach peer to peer per your availability and the availability of your peer. And that's how the majority of people get through the starting of their a 100 hours. What they find normally as they coach, they get referred to others who are actual revenue generating relationships or within a sponsored environment, which you and I work a lot in sponsored environments, they find themselves getting referred to people in their world to go coach them. And those are, paid, considered paid. J.R. Flatter [00:10:24]: I just had this conversation yesterday with a student coach that they had their 1st paid coaching session. And like I tell everybody, your coaching's never gonna be the same. There's something about trading value for money, that really makes it real beyond the fulfillment of changing the course of a person's life. It's always nice to get compensated for that. Lucas Flatter [00:10:48]: And then finally, we usually recommend having a longer term relationship with a client so, you know, you have the arc of the relationship over time. There is a requirement that in addition to the number of hours, there's some specifications on like how many clients you should have for each level. For example, a minimum of 8 clients for ACC. And that 25 out of the 100 hours are with repeat clients. And the way that we usually recommend to structure it is 10 or more sessions per client over the course of, you know, a certain amount of time. So in that case, you don't really butt against these. But do you wanna go into that a J.R. Flatter [00:11:34]: little bit? And this is the ICF asking us not to draw this out too much. If you're just poking away at this, you could take years years to get an accreditation. And the hours that you started 10 years ago and now you're finishing, are they still relevant? So this is the ICF moving ahead and not letting us draw it out too long. They don't want us to rush through nor do they want us, and they don't want you to coach just 1 person. They want you to experience, a multitude of different customers. You see their styles and you get to learn, from the different styles of engagement. So, yeah, a couple of requirements that are pretty legitimate in in my opinion. Lucas Flatter [00:12:19]: And also not 60 clients or a 100 clients, 1 hour each. Yeah. Exactly. A little ridiculous. J.R. Flatter [00:12:25]: Yeah. So, that goes back to what you can count and cannot count. So you keep a coaching log and there are data points in that coaching log, who you coached, when you coached them, how many hours you coached them, and their contact information, to include an email and a phone number. When you do the coaching agreement, which is part of the coaching journey, you have to talk with your customers about that and say, I'm gonna count these hours towards my ICF accreditation. Do you mind? And will you give me your contact information in case they ask? Mhmm. If they won't, you can't put them in your journal. You can't put them in your law. Lucas Flatter [00:13:04]: Could that also be covered as part of the coaching agreement? Like, can we agree at the beginning that? J.R. Flatter [00:13:09]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so we're jumping a little bit out of this session here, but I think it's relevant that before you start coaching, we strongly recommend you put a coaching agreement in place. And it's not a coaching contract. It's an agreement between 2 adults, about what you're going to do, what your expectations are of each other, maybe some goals and objectives that the person has. If not, could still move forward. But that would be the time to identify, I need your contact information. I'm gonna share it if asked by the ICF. It's not part of the application process. J.R. Flatter [00:13:42]: When you apply, you won't submit your logs. You'll affirm your logs in a yes or no. That wraps up session 2, talking about experience. And next next time we get together, we'll talk about mentor coaching part 3. Thanks, everybody. Well, that concludes this episode of building a coaching culture. I I truly hope that this episode was helpful to you. If it was, be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. J.R. Flatter [00:14:13]: Maybe stop and give us a rating or review and share this podcast with someone who might find it helpful as well. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.