Phase 2 Schedule

Session 1: Orientation
This session sets the tone for your Phase 2 experience. You’ll meet your faculty, connect with your cohort, and explore how this next level of training supports your development as a confident advanced-level coach. We’ll walk through the structure, expectations, and rhythm of the program, while inviting you to reflect on how far you’ve come and where you’re headed.

Session 2: Coaching with Discernment – Advanced Coaching Skills (Competencies 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
Advanced coaching requires the ability to make intentional, real-time decisions while remaining fully responsive to the client. In this session, you’ll strengthen your capacity to sense what is needed, when to reflect, when to inquire, when to challenge, and when to allow space. You’ll explore how the Core Competencies work together within a coaching conversation and begin developing the discernment that allows coaching to become more fluid, responsive, and integrated.

Session 3: Mentor Coaching Circle 1 – Baseline for Coaching Skills
This first Mentor Coaching Circle establishes a baseline for your development throughout Phase 2. You’ll coach, observe coaching, and receive feedback aligned with advanced-level expectations. This early experience gives you and your Mentor Coaches a clearer picture of your current strengths and the areas that will benefit from focused development as you move through the program.

Session 4: Your Coaching Path: From Practice to Prosperity 1 (Business)
This session invites you to take a fresh look at your professional path as a coach. You’ll explore what prosperity means to you, the clients you are called to serve, and the kind of coaching practice you want to create. The focus is on beginning to connect your development as a coach with a professional path that feels aligned, sustainable, and authentically yours.

Session 5: Ethics as a Living Practice – Competency 1
Ethical coaching goes beyond knowing the ICF Code of Ethics. It requires the ability to recognize ethical considerations as they arise within real coaching relationships and professional situations. In this session, you’ll explore ethical decision-making, professional boundaries, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, and other situations that require thoughtful judgment. You’ll strengthen your ability to bring Competency 1 into your everyday practice as a coach.

Session 6: Ethics as a Living Practice – Competency 1
Building on the previous session, you’ll deepen your ability to apply ethical principles when situations become more complex or less clear. Through discussion and real-world scenarios, you’ll examine how values, assumptions, roles, boundaries, and professional responsibilities can influence ethical decision-making. The focus is on developing the discernment and confidence to recognize ethical issues and respond in ways that support both the client and the integrity of the coaching profession.

           Individual Mentor Coaching Window 1: Early Program Development
This first individual Mentor Coaching session provides personalized support early in your Phase 2 development. Working one-on-one with your Mentor Coach, you’ll review your coaching, identify strengths, and explore specific opportunities for growth based on the ICF Core Competencies and advanced-level coaching expectations. Your Mentor Coach holds the ICF Mentor Coaching Specialization (MCS), reflecting enhanced preparation specifically for the practice of Mentor Coaching. This session helps you establish a focused developmental path that you can apply throughout the remainder of the program.

Session 7: The Ripple Effect of a Coaching Mindset – Competency 2
A coaching mindset influences far more than what happens during a coaching conversation. In this session, you’ll explore the reflective practices, self-awareness, curiosity, openness, and ongoing learning that support Competency 2. You’ll consider how your own beliefs, emotions, assumptions, and ways of being influence your coaching and how cultivating a coaching mindset strengthens your capacity to remain present, flexible, and responsive to the client.

Session 8: Trust, Safety & Presence – Competencies 4 & 5 

Trust and presence create the conditions for meaningful coaching. In this session, you’ll explore how the coach’s way of being contributes to a relationship where clients feel respected, supported, and free to explore what matters most. You’ll deepen your ability to demonstrate empathy, remain responsive to the client, stay comfortable with uncertainty, and create space for the client’s emotions, insights, and experiences. The focus is on allowing trust, safety, and presence to become an integrated part of how you coach rather than something you have to consciously “do.”

Session 9: Neuroscience Part 1 – The Neuroscience of Presence (Competency 5)
Presence is central to powerful coaching, and neuroscience helps us understand why. This session explores what happens in the brain and nervous system when people experience attention, connection, safety, and attunement. You’ll consider how your own presence influences the coaching environment and how greater awareness of these processes can strengthen your ability to remain grounded, curious, flexible, and fully engaged with the client.

Session 10: Neuroscience Part 2 – Rewiring Habits: The Brain Science of Lasting Change (Competencies 7 & 8)
This session explores behavioral change through the lens of neuroplasticity, habits, and the brain’s capacity to develop new patterns. You’ll examine how awareness, repetition, choice, and action contribute to lasting change and consider how this understanding can inform your coaching. The focus is on helping clients discover their own insights and translate those discoveries into meaningful growth and sustainable change.  

Session 11: Neuroscience Part 3 – The Neural Pathways of Connection (Competencies 6 & 7)
In the final neuroscience session, you’ll explore how connection influences the way people think, communicate, and create new awareness. You’ll examine the role of empathy, attunement, and social connection and consider how these processes relate to what you hear, what you notice, and how you respond as a coach. This session supports deeper listening and more intentional responses that invite clients to explore beyond their current thinking. 

Session 12: Creating Powerful Agreements – Competency 3
Strong coaching begins with a clear, meaningful agreement. In this session, you’ll deepen your ability to partner with the client to identify what they truly want from the conversation, why it matters, and what needs to be explored to achieve that outcome. You’ll practice moving beyond the surface topic to create an agreement that provides direction while remaining flexible enough to evolve as new awareness emerges.

Session 13: From Awareness to Impact – Facilitating Transformational Change (Competency 8)
Powerful coaching supports clients in carrying what they discover into their lives. This session focuses on Competency 8 and your ability to partner with clients as they integrate new awareness, identify meaningful possibilities, and determine what they want to do with what they have learned. You’ll explore how to support growth without taking responsibility for the client’s choices, actions, or accountability.

Session 14: Coaching Lab #1 – Focus: The Container
This Coaching Lab gives you the opportunity to put your learning into practice, with particular attention to the coaching container. You’ll work with the skills involved in establishing and maintaining a strong coaching agreement while remaining attentive to trust, partnership, and the client’s desired outcome. The lab provides a space to practice, observe, experiment, and strengthen your ability to create the conditions in which meaningful coaching can occur.

Session 15: Positive Psychology Part 1 – The Science of Flourishing (Competencies 2, 4, 5, 6 & 7)
This session introduces key principles from positive psychology, including well-being, resilience, and flourishing, and explores their relevance to coaching. You’ll consider how a strengths-aware perspective can deepen curiosity about the whole person while supporting trust, presence, listening, and awareness. The emphasis is on expanding what you notice as a coach while allowing the client to determine what flourishing and well-being mean for them.

Session 16: Positive Psychology Part 2 – Strengths in Action; Coaching for Growth (Competencies 2, 4, 5, 6 & 7)
Building on the science of flourishing, this session explores strengths and how they can become a meaningful area of discovery within coaching. You’ll learn to listen for strengths that may be visible in the client’s language, experiences, choices, and patterns and explore ways to invite clients to recognize and understand their own resources. The focus remains on discovery rather than prescription, allowing clients to determine how their strengths may support their growth.

Session 17: Positive Psychology Part 3 – Unlocking Motivation Through Coaching (Competencies 3, 7 & 8)
In the final Positive Psychology session, you’ll explore the factors that influence intrinsic motivation and meaningful change. You’ll examine how values, hope, agency, and personally meaningful goals can influence a client’s willingness to move forward. You’ll practice coaching in ways that help clients uncover what matters to them, generate their own insights, and determine how they want to translate motivation into action and continued growth.

Session 18: Advanced Listening – Beyond the Client’s Words (Competency 6)
Advanced listening requires attention to far more than the words a client speaks. In this session, you’ll deepen your ability to notice tone, energy, emotion, patterns, shifts, contradictions, and what may remain unspoken. You’ll explore how to reflect what you notice without interpreting the client’s experience for them, allowing your listening to become a doorway through which the client can hear and understand themselves more deeply.

Session 19: Evoking Awareness Through Precision (Competency 7)
At the advanced level, powerful inquiry is often less about asking more questions and more about making each intervention count. This session focuses on using concise, intentional questions, observations, reflections, silence, and challenges to invite new awareness. You’ll practice responding to what is emerging in the moment while trusting the client to make meaning from their own experience and discover possibilities that may not have been visible before.

          Individual Mentor Coaching Window 2: Mid-Program Individual Mentor Coaching
Your second individual Mentor Coaching session provides an opportunity to examine how your coaching has developed since your first individual session. Working one-on-one with your Mentor Coach, you’ll receive focused feedback on your demonstration of the ICF Core Competencies, recognize areas of growth, and identify specific behaviors that still need attention. Your Mentor Coach holds the ICF Mentor Coaching Specialization (MCS), reflecting enhanced preparation specifically for the practice of Mentor Coaching. This mid-program session helps you integrate feedback into your coaching while there is still significant time to practice, experiment, and strengthen your skills.

Session 20: Mentor Coaching Circle 2
This Mentor Coaching Circle moves you into the next stage of applying and integrating your advanced coaching skills. You’ll coach, observe your peers, and receive direct feedback from your Mentor Coach based on the ICF Core Competencies. The emphasis is on recognizing what is working in your coaching, identifying specific opportunities for development, and becoming increasingly intentional about how you apply what you are learning in real coaching conversations.