If you searched for a way to earn your ICF continuing education hours, you have probably found the same thing everyone else does: a checklist.

• Forty class hours to renew your credential, including
• At least twenty-four Core Competency hours
• Three of Core Competency hours in ethics
• Up to sixteen more hours in Resource Development
• Submit your documentation, done.

Every guide on the topic, including the ICF's own, walks through the same math and stops there.

Here is what most of those gui…

When you look at the landscape of coaching today, the environment can feel as though you are being pushed into a corner. You have your credentialing requirements, your hours to track, and an ever-evolving set of standards to meet. Some people might tell you that the path to your ACC or PCC is simply about memorizing behavioral markers and locking you safely within a predetermined line.

At Awaken, we hold a distinct vision. We feel that an over-reliance on rigid behavioral markers is jeopardizin…

Coach Certification Training: The Complete Guide

When you first feel the pull toward coaching, that sense that you're meant to hold space for others' transformation, the path forward can feel overwhelmingly complex. Do you need certification? Which credentials matter? How do you choose among hundreds of training programs? And how much will this cost, both in money and in time?

I've spent years training hundreds of coaches and guiding them through the credentialing process. I personally intervi…

The coaching industry is in the middle of a real shift. The ICF is introducing a new standard for mentor coaches, the Mentor Coach Specialization, which will be required for registry as a mentor coach in 2027. Coaches at every stage are asking the same question: what does this mean for me?

Here's what we believe it means: freedom, not restriction.

For years, credentialing has pushed coaches toward memorizing behavioral markers and treating a checklist as the goal. We understand why. When you'r…

Awaken trains coaches to sit with one person with real depth and presence, and many feel a natural pull afterward to take that same gift and offer it to a room. Group coaching certification is exactly that progression, training you to hold a whole room's process at once, and to trust the room itself as sacred ground where healing multiplies.

Awaken's ICF-accredited group coaching certification course is built on our bespoke five-element framework for what actually creates lasting, soul-level ch…

I've got a pretty wonky body because I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which is a collagen issue. Things that are meant to be highly elastic (like skin, veins, and the digestive tract) are kind of saggy, like a worn-out rubber band.

That means that I often have mysterious aches and pains. Often the issue really is physical, and I need to drink water, take my magnesium, increase my salt intake, wear good arch support, and put my feet up.

Those are all responsible choices, and I'm not advocating fo…

You've seen me write before about practices that make coaching a spiritual experience. Today, I want to share three more of the practices that make Awaken's way of coaching so deep and life-changing.

When I first started coaching, it shook my world entirely, as I've talked about more deeply in my memoir, Holy Rebellion: Waking up from Religious Abuse. I had spent the first decades of my life in a patriarchal, hierarchical worldview built on success and failure, right and wrong, and other black-…

Transformational coaching certification trains you to work at a different level than most ordinary coach training. Rather than teaching you to help clients set goals and build action plans, it trains you to help people recognize who they already are, beneath the roles, fears, and self-concepts they've accumulated. With that recognition, real and lasting change follows on its own.

"I've spent well over a decade training hundreds of coaches, and I've watched what happens when a program teaches te…

The coaching industry is at a crossroads. For years, we have been obsessed with cognitive behavioral markers, word-based frameworks, and the neat, tidy architecture of solving problems through language.

But guess what? AI can now do the word-based stuff. If all you do in your coaching is word-based, which is what a lot of the coaching education industry if now doing, as they continue to "teach to the test," you're moving toward irrelevance at top speed.

Awaken has always gone deeper. We believ…

Why Performance Coaching Falls Short

Some people think coaching is about doing more: setting sharper goals, pushing harder, keeping clients on track, and measuring progress at every turn. That kind of coaching can look productive on the surface. When I first started in 2009, I was stunned by how quickly people could reach their goals in just a few sessions.

But in today’s AI-driven world, where apps and algorithms can already remind us of our goals and track our steps, that kind of performance…