Practice Mastery

Through our Practice Mastery pages, we endeavor to support your continued learning and connection with our community. By empowering you to become more successful, we achieve a key initiative of ours - to increase the market penetration of coaching. Please see below for a variety of resources, especially compiled for you, our members.

Remember, we are here to support you in your practice. Your feedback is integral to our mission. If you have any comments or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you! Please email us at info@instituteofcoaching.org.

 

Practice Essentials

Practice Essentials offers practical tips and guidelines for the professional beginning their practice. Members interested in learning about how a veteran coach approaches a leadership coaching endeavor will also benefit from these resources.

Grow Your Practice

Growing your practice requires not only a comprehensive knowledge base of educational material, but help in creating good business practices. There is no one way to create a practice. In this section, we share guidelines on building your practice from both personal and business perspectives. Basic marketing and defining your unique value proposition based on the Values in Action Signature Strengths Survey are introduced. We discuss the concept of Evidence-Based Marketing - utilizing research articles and works of scientific thought leaders to articulate what you do in compelling ways - and how it might play a role in making your practice successful.

Advanced Practice

Many of us have unique coaching challenges and niches. In the Advanced Practice section, we discuss some common challenges - abusive bosses, the coaching relationship, global coaching, and vertical development. Links to our most popular and relevant articles and MasterClasses help round out your education.

Coaching Science

The good news: theories that support the practice of coaching abound. The bad news: these theories are often buried in articles and resources on select academic sites, written in obscure and dense academic jargon. We at the Institute believe in distilling the science into pragmatic interventions to support your practice. In our Coaching Resources section, you can access both exclusive interviews and videos of the scientists and thought leaders that promote the practice of coaching. Through these videos, it becomes apparent that much of what you do intuitively, has a strong scientific foundation as well.

Coaching Tools

Our Coaching Tools page offers dozens or practical tools and aids that you are free to use with your clients. These tools help facilitate day-to-day practice activities such as onboarding. As these are offered exclusively to you, our members, we ask that you do not disseminate them to non-members. Note: Lew Stern’s copyright must be maintained on all tools.

Supervision and Support

Self-care is absolutely essential for us to be personally and professionally sustainable. Supervision is a fast-growing niche and, for practicing coaches, has a very different spirit than psychological or business supervision. There are many ways to support ourselves, individually and collectively.  Though you may practice on your own, we hope you take advantage of the Fellows and Affiliates pages to forge new relationships as coaching buddies. Comb through our extensive practice and research articles on supervision, self-compassion and support.

Coaching has the power to shift how people think and live. The effects of successful coaching ripple out and change our world for the better. Our work here is just beginning. As you move through our site, please reach out to us with your input. Your opinions and needs matter to us, your success in coaching is at the core of our mission.