Phase 1 Course Details

The Foundational Path
Core Skills for Coaching Success

Coach Training with Purpose, Clarity, and Heart.

Our training is grounded in timeless coaching principles, deep listening, and real human connection. Each program builds on the last, designed not just to teach coaching but to transform who you are as a coach.

Phase One is where your journey begins, a place to build core coaching skills, grow your confidence, and step into the work with presence and integrity.

Our foundational coaching program equips you with the core skills, structured feedback, and peer practice hours you need to begin your coaching journey with confidence. It’s designed for those ready to learn the basics of coaching with clarity, skill, and ethical presence

Lay the Groundwork for a Confident Coaching Career

Phase One equips you with the coaching skills, knowledge, and hands-on practice to strengthen the foundation of your coaching journey:

• Core Coaching Competencies
• Structured feedback from experienced mentors
• Peer practice in live coaching sessions
• Ethics and Mindset work that set the tone for your career
• Tools to begin building your own coaching signature and business foundation

Whether you’re brand new to coaching or refining your foundation, Phase One meets you with clarity, skill, and a supportive learning environment.

Explore the Full Curriculum, Upcoming Cohorts, Tuition, Application Requirements, Connect with the Training Director, and take your first step with Phase One.

Course List for Phase One

The Foundational Path: Core Skills for Coaching Success

The Foundation is crafted to establish the groundwork for your development as a coach, ensuring you fully understand the core principles and methodologies essential for effective coaching. You will gain a thorough mastery of foundational coaching frameworks, active listening, and ethical presence.

Aligned directly with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) Core Coaching Competencies, our training elevates your practice to the highest levels of integrity, clarity, and competence.

Cultivating these qualities ensures you build a credible, purpose-driven coaching practice that delivers lasting, real-world impact for your clients, as well as, giving you the deep understanding and confidence needed to approach the ICF ACC exam with total confidence.

Phase 1 Course Descriptions:

Session 1 - Orientation

This Orientation session launches your journey at CoachPath Academy, setting the stage for an engaging and fulfilling experience. In this interactive session, you'll connect with fellow participants, learn about the course structure, and explore the core competencies and expectations of a professional coach. We'll outline the program requirements, introduce you to the unique CoachPath model, and provide resources to help you thrive in this course. This is an opportunity to ask questions, gain an overview of your faculty, and establish your intentions for the transformative journey ahead.

Session 2 - What is Coaching

In “What is Coaching,” we dive into the essence of professional coaching, exploring its principles, distinctions, and boundaries. This session provides a comprehensive look at how coaching differs from mentoring, therapy, consulting, and other helping professions, preparing you to communicate these differences effectively with future clients. You’ll begin to understand the unique role and responsibility of the coach and what it means to partner with clients rather than advise, direct, or solve problems for them. This understanding creates an important foundation for the coaching skills and competencies you’ll develop throughout the program.

Session 3 - Mentor Coaching Circle #1: Mentor Coach Demonstrations 

Your first Mentor Coaching Circle gives you the opportunity to experience professional coaching through demonstration and observation. Experienced Mentor Coaches will demonstrate coaching so you can begin to recognize the ICF Core Competencies as they occur within an actual coaching conversation. Rather than simply learning what the competencies mean, you’ll begin developing your ability to see and hear coaching behaviors in action.

Through observation, discussion, and reflection, you’ll explore what the coach is doing, what the coach intentionally does not do, and how the coach partners with the client throughout the conversation. This session begins the important process of developing your coaching eye and ear, preparing you for your own coaching practice and the Mentor Coaching Circles that follow.

Session 4 - Ethics in Coaching 1: Competency 1 

In this session, we begin with what it truly means to coach with integrity, not just in theory, but in real conversations with real people. We’ll explore the role of ethics as the foundation of trust in the coaching relationship and what Competency 1 requires of you as a professional coach.

This includes understanding the ICF Code of Ethics, recognizing your responsibilities, and learning to establish appropriate professional boundaries. Through practical examples and discussion, you’ll begin to recognize where ethical considerations show up in everyday coaching, including the subtle moments that influence safety, trust, clarity, and professionalism. This session begins developing the ethical awareness and judgment you will carry into every coaching relationship.

Session 5 - Ethics in Coaching 2: Competency 1 

Ethics becomes real when situations become complex. In this session, we move beyond understanding the ICF Code of Ethics and into applying it within situations professional coaches may actually encounter. You’ll work through scenarios that challenge your judgment, including moments when boundaries become unclear, confidentiality is tested, multiple stakeholders are involved, or the appropriate role of the coach requires careful consideration.

You’ll practice thinking through these situations with clarity while maintaining trust, protecting the client, and remaining grounded in your responsibilities as a professional coach. The goal is to strengthen your ability to recognize ethical considerations as they arise and make thoughtful decisions consistent with the ICF Code of Ethics and professional coaching standards.

Session 6 - Making a Living as a Coach Starts with an Agreement

Discover the practical side of coaching in “Making a Living as a Coach Starts with an Agreement,” where we explore the many ways professional coaches build coaching into their careers, from private practice to corporate and organizational coaching. You’ll begin exploring who you want to serve, how you might position your coaching, and the different ways coaching can become part of your professional life.

Most importantly, you’ll learn why a clear coaching agreement is essential before beginning a coaching relationship. Using what you learn in this session, you’ll begin developing your own Coaching Agreement so you have an important foundational piece in place as you start working with coaching clients.

Session 7 - The Foundation of Being a Coach: Competency 2 

In this session, we explore what it actually means to be a coach, not simply learn coaching skills. While the competencies provide structure for coaching conversations, it is the coaching mindset that brings those skills to life.

We will focus on Competency 2, Embodies a Coaching Mindset, and the internal work required to coach with openness, curiosity, flexibility, and trust in the client’s ability to create their own awareness and solutions. You’ll begin recognizing how your own thinking, assumptions, biases, and desire to help can influence the coaching process and learn to manage yourself so the client remains at the center of the work. This session lays the foundation for everything that follows by developing the self-awareness and self-management necessary to grow as a professional coach.

Session 8 - Developing You: Part 1 

“Developing You” focuses on the personal growth and self-awareness required to become an effective coach. Who you are enters the coaching conversation with you, including your experiences, beliefs, assumptions, strengths, biases, reactions, and patterns.

Through reflection, exercises, and discussion, you’ll begin exploring yourself with greater awareness and curiosity. You’ll identify qualities that support your coaching as well as places where your own perspectives or reactions could influence how you listen and respond to a client. Developing this awareness helps you become more intentional about how you show up and creates a stronger foundation for authentic, client-centered coaching.

Session 9 - Developing You: Part 2 

Continuing the work from Part 1, this session takes your self-awareness deeper and connects your personal development directly to your development as a coach. You’ll explore how your internal reactions, assumptions, need to know, desire to help, and personal experiences can enter a coaching conversation, often without you realizing it.

You’ll continue developing the ability to notice what is happening within you while remaining present and curious about what is happening for the client. As this awareness grows, you become increasingly able to trust the coaching process, stay out of the client’s way, and allow the client’s thinking, wisdom, and choices to lead the conversation.

Session 10 - Client Agreements 1: Competency 3 

In “Client Agreements 1,” you’ll explore the essential role agreements play in creating a clear, professional coaching relationship. This session introduces Competency 3, Establishes and Maintains Agreements, beginning with the agreements that establish the foundation for working together.

You’ll learn how coaches partner with clients and relevant stakeholders to clarify expectations, roles, responsibilities, confidentiality, boundaries, and the overall coaching process. Creating this shared understanding allows both coach and client to enter the relationship with clarity and establishes the foundation for effective coaching.

Session 11 - Client Agreements 2: Competency 3 

Building on the previous session, “Client Agreements 2” brings the focus into the individual coaching session. You’ll learn how to partner with the client to identify what they want to accomplish during the conversation, what makes that outcome meaningful to them, and how they will know they have achieved what they wanted from the session.

You’ll explore how a strong session agreement creates direction without restricting where the coaching conversation can go. You’ll also practice remaining attentive to the agreement as the conversation develops so you can continue partnering with the client around what matters most to them.

Session 12 - Coaching Lab #1: Creating a Strong Agreement 

This first Coaching Lab gives you the opportunity to put Competency 3 into practice. Rather than simply learning about agreements, you’ll begin developing your ability to establish them within an actual coaching conversation.

Through practice, observation, feedback, and discussion, you’ll work with the elements of a strong session agreement and begin recognizing what happens when an agreement is clear, as well as what happens when important elements are missing. The lab provides a supportive environment to experiment, receive feedback, and strengthen your ability to create agreements that give the coaching conversation focus while remaining centered on the client.

Individual Mentor Coaching 1 - Early Development

Individual Mentor Coaching 1 begins your experience with ICF’s new Enhanced Mentor Coaching process. You’ll work one-on-one with a Mentor Coach who holds the ICF Mentor Coach Specialization (MCS), the new qualification required by ICF for mentor coaches working with credential candidates beginning in 2027.

Your Mentor Coach will observe your coaching through the lens of the ICF Core Competencies and credential-level skills, helping you recognize what you are already doing effectively and where continued development is needed. Through structured observation, individualized feedback, reflection, and conversation, you’ll begin identifying the habits and patterns that influence your coaching and developing greater awareness of how your skills are showing up in actual coaching conversations.

Rather than waiting until the end of your training to evaluate your coaching, Enhanced Mentor Coaching allows you to receive feedback throughout your development so you can apply what you learn as your coaching evolves. This session happens outside of normal class time and is scheduled directly with your assigned MCS Mentor Coach.

Session 13 - Connecting to the Client: Competency 4 

“Connecting to the Client” focuses on Competency 4, Cultivates Trust and Safety, and the coach’s responsibility for creating an environment where the client feels safe enough to think, explore, and express themselves openly.

You’ll explore how respect, empathy, acknowledgment, openness, and responsiveness contribute to trust within the coaching relationship. You’ll also learn to recognize and respect the client’s unique identity, experiences, perceptions, talents, and insights. Developing this competency allows you to create the kind of partnership in which clients can bring more of themselves into the coaching conversation.

Session 14 - Coaching Presence: Competency 5 

“Coaching Presence” introduces Competency 5, Maintains Presence, and the ability to remain fully conscious, responsive, and connected with the client throughout the coaching conversation. You’ll explore what it means to stay curious and flexible while allowing the conversation to unfold rather than becoming attached to where you think it should go.

You’ll begin developing your ability to manage your own thoughts and reactions, become comfortable with silence and uncertainty, and remain responsive to what is emerging for the client in the moment. Developing coaching presence helps you move away from trying to figure out the right thing to say and toward trusting yourself, the client, and the coaching process.

Session 15 - Coaching Presence: Competency 5 

“Coaching Presence” continues the development of Competency 5, Maintains Presence, with a deeper focus on remaining fully connected and responsive throughout the coaching conversation. You’ll explore how to stay curious, flexible, and confident when the conversation moves in an unexpected direction and how to remain present when you do not know what comes next.

You’ll continue developing your ability to manage your own thoughts, emotions, and reactions while staying focused on the client. Through practice and exploration, you’ll strengthen your capacity to trust the client, trust yourself, and allow the coaching conversation to unfold naturally.

Session 16 - Listening for the Client: Competency 6 

“Listening for the Client” introduces Competency 6, Listens Actively, and the ability to listen beyond the words a client is saying. You’ll learn to pay attention to the client’s language, emotions, energy, values, beliefs, and the meaning they attach to their experiences.

You’ll begin exploring how a coach listens for the whole person rather than simply listening for information or trying to determine the next question. Developing this deeper level of listening allows you to notice what matters most to the client and respond to what is emerging in the conversation.

Session 17 - Listening for the Client: Competency 6 

Continuing our focus on Competency 6, this session deepens your ability to listen for patterns, themes, shifts, contradictions, and what may be present beneath the client’s words. You’ll explore how the client’s language, tone, emotions, and changes in energy can provide important information about their experience.

You’ll also practice using reflection, summarizing, silence, and clarification to help clients hear and explore their own thinking more deeply. As your listening develops, you’ll become increasingly able to follow the client rather than the story and respond to the person who is sitting in front of you.

Session 18 - Questions are the Key: Competency 7 

In “Questions are the Key,” you’ll begin exploring Competency 7, Evokes Awareness, and the role curiosity plays in helping clients discover new thinking for themselves. You’ll learn how thoughtful, open-ended questions can invite clients to explore their beliefs, assumptions, perspectives, values, needs, and possibilities.

You’ll practice asking clear, succinct questions that emerge from what you are hearing rather than questions designed to lead the client toward a particular answer. The goal is to become more comfortable asking a question and then creating the space for the client to think, discover, and create their own awareness.

Session 19 - Questions are the Key: Competency 7 

Building on the previous session, you’ll deepen your ability to evoke awareness by helping clients move beyond their current thinking and explore new perspectives and possibilities. You’ll examine how questions, observations, reflections, and appropriately offered challenges can support clients in seeing themselves or their situations differently.

You’ll continue practicing how to stay curious without directing the client, allowing their discoveries to emerge from the coaching conversation. As you strengthen this competency, you’ll become increasingly skilled at creating the conditions where meaningful insight and new awareness can occur.

Individual Mentor Coaching 2 - Mid-Program Development 

Individual Mentor Coaching 2 continues the Enhanced Mentor Coaching process with your MCS Mentor Coach. By this point in the program, you have received additional training, practiced more of the ICF Core Competencies, and had more opportunities to coach. This session allows you and your Mentor Coach to look at how your coaching has developed since your earlier mentor coaching experience.

Through observation and structured feedback, you’ll identify competencies and skills that are becoming more consistent as well as areas that still need attention. Your Mentor Coach will help you recognize patterns across your coaching, understand specific opportunities for development, and determine where focused practice can strengthen your effectiveness.

This ongoing process of coaching, observation, feedback, reflection, and continued practice is central to ICF’s Enhanced Mentor Coaching approach. It allows your development to be viewed over time rather than through a single coaching performance and gives you specific guidance you can immediately apply to the next stage of your learning.

This session happens outside of normal class time and is scheduled directly with your assigned MCS Mentor Coach.

Session 20 - Awareness to Action: Competency 8 

In “Awareness to Action,” you’ll explore Competency 8, Facilitates Client Growth, and how coaches partner with clients to transform new awareness into meaningful change. You’ll learn how to help clients identify what they are learning about themselves and their situation before moving toward decisions, actions, or next steps.

You’ll explore how to partner with clients as they determine how they want to use what they have discovered, allowing the client to decide what action, if any, is meaningful to them. This keeps growth connected to the client’s own awareness, choices, and goals.

Session 21 - Awareness to Action: Competency 8 

Continuing with Competency 8, this session focuses on helping clients integrate their learning and determine how they want to move forward. You’ll explore how to partner with clients around goals, actions, accountability, potential obstacles, resources, and support while keeping ownership firmly with the client.

You’ll also examine how to close a coaching conversation in partnership with the client by acknowledging progress and learning, exploring what the client wants to carry forward, and allowing the client to determine how they would like to complete the session. This session brings together the movement from awareness to learning, choice, and meaningful client-directed action.

Session 22 - Mentor Coaching Circle 2

In Mentor Coaching Circle 2, you’ll begin applying the coaching skills and ICF Core Competencies you have been developing throughout the program. You’ll have the opportunity to coach, be coached, and observe coaching while receiving feedback from an experienced Mentor Coach.

This session gives you a supportive environment to practice your coaching, recognize what is working, and identify specific areas for continued development. By observing your peers as well as participating yourself, you’ll continue strengthening your ability to recognize effective coaching behaviors and integrate feedback into your own coaching.

Session 23 - Mentor Coaching Circle 3

Mentor Coaching Circle 3 continues the process of developing your coaching through practice, observation, reflection, and feedback. As your understanding of the ICF Core Competencies grows, you’ll begin noticing more of the subtle choices you make during a coaching conversation and how those choices affect the client and the coaching process.

You’ll receive specific feedback designed to help you recognize your strengths, identify developing habits, and become more intentional in how you partner with your clients. Each opportunity to coach or observe provides another layer of learning and helps you build greater confidence in your coaching.

Session 24 - Mentor Coaching Circle 4

In Mentor Coaching Circle 4, you’ll continue refining your ability to integrate the ICF Core Competencies within a complete coaching conversation. At this stage of the program, the focus increasingly moves from understanding individual competencies to recognizing how they work together naturally in service of the client.

Through coaching practice, observation, and Mentor Coach feedback, you’ll explore where your coaching is becoming more fluid and where you may still be working too hard, leading the conversation, or relying on familiar habits. This session supports you in becoming more aware, flexible, and client-centered in your coaching.

Session 25 - Mentor Coaching Circle 5

Mentor Coaching Circle 5 provides another opportunity to strengthen your coaching through deliberate practice and individualized feedback. You’ll continue working with the ICF Core Competencies while paying closer attention to how you listen, respond, evoke awareness, and partner with the client throughout the conversation.

As your skills develop, you’ll be encouraged to trust yourself and the coaching process more deeply. Feedback from your Mentor Coach and observations from your peers will help you identify the refinements that can make your coaching more effective while allowing your own authentic coaching presence to emerge.

Session 26 - Coaching Lab #2: Listening and Evoking Awareness 

Coaching Lab #2 brings together two essential areas of coaching: listening deeply to the client and using what you hear to evoke new awareness. You’ll practice listening beyond the client’s words for patterns, emotions, values, beliefs, shifts, and meaning, and then responding in ways that invite the client to explore their thinking more deeply.

Through practice, observation, feedback, and discussion, you’ll strengthen your ability to allow your questions, reflections, and observations to emerge from what the client is actually communicating. This lab gives you the opportunity to experiment with Competencies 6 and 7 together and experience how deeper listening can lead to greater client awareness.

Session 27 - Coaching Lab #3: Integrating Coaching Skills 

Coaching Lab #3 brings the pieces together. Throughout the program, you have studied and practiced the ICF Core Competencies individually. In this lab, you’ll focus on integrating those skills within the natural flow of a complete coaching conversation.

You’ll practice establishing a clear agreement, cultivating trust and safety, maintaining presence, listening deeply, evoking awareness, and facilitating client growth while remaining responsive to the person you are coaching. Through practice, observation, and feedback, you’ll identify where your coaching is becoming more natural and where continued attention will help you grow. This lab is an opportunity to experience coaching as an integrated process rather than a collection of separate skills.

Session 28 - Who Am I Going to Coach?

As your coaching skills develop, an important question begins to emerge: Who do you want to coach? In this session, you’ll explore the people, populations, situations, and areas of work that naturally interest you and begin considering where your experience, strengths, interests, and coaching may come together.

You’ll reflect on who you feel drawn to serve and the kinds of conversations and transformations that energize you. This exploration is designed to help you begin developing greater clarity about your direction as a coach without requiring you to have everything figured out. You’ll leave with a clearer sense of the possibilities available to you and the next steps you can take as you continue developing your coaching practice.

Individual Mentor Coaching 3 - Final Individual Mentor Coaching

Individual Mentor Coaching 3 completes your individual Enhanced Mentor Coaching experience in Phase 1. Working one-on-one with your MCS Mentor Coach, you’ll look across your development throughout the program and review how your coaching skills have progressed through the lens of the ICF Core Competencies and credential-level expectations.

Your Mentor Coach will help you identify the skills you are demonstrating consistently, areas where growth has occurred, and any remaining areas that need continued development. Because Enhanced Mentor Coaching follows your coaching across multiple observations, this final session provides an opportunity to look at your development cumulatively rather than judging your coaching from one isolated performance.

You’ll leave this session with greater clarity about your current coaching competence, the progress you have made, and the specific areas to continue strengthening as you move forward in your coaching development and credentialing journey. This session happens outside of normal class time and is scheduled directly with your assigned MCS Mentor Coach.

Session 29 - Cohort Celebration

Celebrate your accomplishments with your cohort in this final session as we reflect on the journey, recognize your growth, and share the insights and learning you are taking with you. You’ll have an opportunity to acknowledge how you have developed as a coach, celebrate the relationships you have built within your cohort, and recognize the commitment and practice that brought you to this point.

This session also marks the transition into what comes next. The coaching foundation you have developed in Phase 1 gives you something meaningful to build upon as you continue coaching, practicing, learning, and developing professionally. The Cohort Celebration honors both what you have accomplished and the coach you are continuing to become.