One of the trickiest competencies to demonstrate is establishing the coaching session agreement because it can often feel like a dilemma between being in the flow with the client, and feeling like it’s mechanical to discuss a tangible outcome for the coaching session.
If you don’t take the time to do it, then it’s likely the coach is driving the agenda for the session based on what the coach thinks important to ask the client about.
If you do take the time to set the purpose and measures of success for the session, you might feel like you are out of the flow with the moment.
Serving the client through discovering the purpose of the conversation
In a recent mentoring session with a coach moving toward her MCC credential certification, I mentioned that the coaching session agreement helped to distinguish this conversation from any other type conversation because it was a conversation with a purpose. What was the purpose of the session from the client perspective? What did the client want to use his valuable time for? What would indicate to the client that the purpose of the conversation had been met?
That description really resonated with her, and shifted her mindset from a mechanical mindset of something you must do to demonstrate the Coaching Agreement core competency to an ICF Assessor, to a meaningful reason for more consciously establishing the purpose of the coaching conversation.
We currently have a set of behavioral markers for the PCC credential that indicate the elements of the coaching session agreement. For the MCC credential, the ICF has a public document called, Competencies Comparison Table which gives specific language for each core competency.
In our group and individual mentoring programs, we use both sets of core competency information to mentor clients toward MCC, PCC and ACC credentials. We also have recordings from clients who have passed each credential level in our Private Pages for our mentoring clients to listen to and learn from. This ability to listen to coaching recordings, evaluate against the core competencies in written and verbal form, and compare between competency levels is a very robust and insightful learning approach.
Experiment with the Markers
The PCC Markers are an excellent resource for those preparing for the MCC credential as well. And for ACC credential holders ready to increase their coaching skill, the PCC Markers will deepen your learning. I’ll use the PCC Markers and make comments about the difference to the MCC behaviors in the next blog article due out on July 14.
In the meantime, I invite you to read the PCC Markers for Creating the Coaching Agreement, and the MCC information for this competency in the Competencies Comparison Table.
What elements can you integrate or experiment with in your coaching?
What opens up for you if you consider there is value in creating the coaching session agreement from the place of it being an on-purpose conversation for your client?
Continue reading Part two of this article
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Carly Anderson and Karen Boskemper offer an awesome mentor coaching group and individual program that has many exclusive offerings for our participants. Both have been trained by the ICF to assess using the new PCC Markers. Carly also assesses for the ICF MCC credential.
One of those offerings is an extensive library of MCC, PCC and ACC coaching sessions for our participants to listen to, evaluate, debrief, and learn from, along with The Target Approach to demystifying the ICF core competencies. These are incredibly valuable learning tools, and will accelerate your understanding of competency distinctions.
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