“Don’t sell things to coaches.”

I don't like most of what gets sold to coaches. I'd guess 95 percent of it seems like garbage, and it makes me cranky. It makes me not want to compete with the garbage, but also not want to sell coaches anything at all.

I got a pointed reminder of this at the close of the ICF Midwest conference last month. A panelist, an MCC himself, was asked for one piece of advice to leave the room with.

He said, "Don't sell things to coaches."

The room laughed, because everyone in it knew exactly what he meant. We're something of a lizard eating its own tail, an entire cottage industry built around selling coaches on how to be better coaches. Not everyone is particularly good at either coaching or teaching it.

And yet. Some of the most meaningful progress in my own coaching has come from paid relationships. A couple of mentors, a coach supervisor, people I paid real money to share their presence and tell me the truth. So I don't actually believe paying for this kind of help is the problem. Most of what bothers me isn't even coming from coaches. It's marketers and lead-gen consultants who've figured out that coaches are an anxious, easy audience to sell to.

Then the ICF nudged me into a decision anyway. I've been mentoring new coaches for a couple of years through Georgetown University's certificate program, the same one that launched me into my own practice. It's work I genuinely love. Starting next year, continuing to do it requires the new Mentor Coach Specialization. Not optional, not something I sought out. A condition of continuing to do the thing I already wanted to keep doing.

Since I was already being pushed, I decided to pick the direction. I realized I could do mentor coaching my own way, closer to the spirit of the ICF competencies than the letter of them. With real room for who you actually are as a coach, not just what you can recite.

That's what I've built. Ten hours, a small group, real coaching instead of lectures and checklists.

It starts in January, and it's called Mentor Coaching with Openness, not Dogma. 

If you're curious, the details are here.