By Rod Francis
In June 2026 my business partner Sherry and I announced we were discontinuing accrediting the Emergent Coach training with the ICF (International Coaching Federation). Not at all because of any issues between us. We both loved working together as we did delivering the program. And not because we just wanted to go rogue, or that we don’t think professional accreditations matter. They do—providing they’re contributing to something better for all. I’ll clarify that shortly.
Let me also be 100% clear that while our decision was mutual, I’m writing about my reasons for choosing to discontinue. They may be the same, but I’m not speaking for Sherry here.
Nonetheless, I wanted to say something from the heart about this. Partly because if you’re in our training community you may want to understand why I’ve chosen this path, and the same if you’re here just interested in coach training. Additionally, if you’re running an ICF-accredited program you may find this useful context. And finally, because it’s just better out there than me slinking off into the dark to nurse my disagreements into resentments.
Hopefully some good may come of it.
A little background
I entered the coaching industry almost two decades ago while still living in the UK. Like many who come to coaching, at the time I felt a powerful call to work developmentally with others, and coaching simply won out over therapy. I was invited to begin working on a coach training program in the UK about 15 years ago, and subsequently relocated to the USA after a later invite to help set up and lead a program for a large health company based here. At that point I shifted from working with a UK-based accreditation organization to the US-based ICF, as it seemed logical considering my new US focus and their reach. Around 6 years ago, prompted by a valued industry mentor, I left that program to establish my own. I’m now in my 10th year of heading ICF-accredited programs and I’ve long been a solid advocate for accreditation and credentialing in an industry we all know is beset with ethical and standards issues.
Over my time working with the ICF I’ve witnessed some pretty significant shifts for we educators, most of them in the last 5-6 years: in the competencies, ethics, exams and pretty well every area of our function. Alongside all that, particularly in those same last 5-6 years, I’ve seen the ICF expand enormously as an organization, siloing out into several branches as they did.
If it seems like I’m tuning up my violin and prepping to play an ode to “the good old days,” I‘m not. I welcome change and progress—providing it improves things for the many. Yet if I believed these above were doing so, I wouldn’t be here writing this now. I also know I’m not alone in believing that these changes have not all been positive, either for educators or for the industry we serve. That might even be you.
Sidebar on all that: I recently posted for the first time ever in the Engage educator forum regarding my concerns. I noticed that posts typically seem to get around 5-15 responses. Mine had 80+ and counting by the time the ICF turned it off saying they were no longer able to manage it due to the amount of responses. (This genuinely surprised me as it was a perfectly civil and valuable professional educator thread in an educator forum, albeit one the ICF controlled.) Clearly there was a considerable level of interest in the topic. Most of the public responses shared similar concerns to mine. Many others even reached out to me privately (LinkedIn etc.) with several saying they agreed but didn’t want their views to be seen by the ICF. To me, that raises significant questions regarding how a culture manifests where grown professional adults don’t feel confident to freely voice their thoughts in a professional forum.
Anyway let me turn now to my main reasons for this move.
It just keeps on coming
If you’ve been an ICF educator and/or program owner over the past 5-6 years, you’ll have been privy to a rather relentless stream of changes. From the two versions of competencies (2019 & 2025), ethics, logos, shifting to leveled trainings, exams, markers, BARRS, and now a version of mentor coaching that is to form the assessment pathway going forward, though we’re all emphatically being told it’s not a performance evaluation (It is!) or that it’s a developmental form of assessment (TBC on that). And most of these are not at all small things for us to fulfill. Many (like the new mentor coaching and certainly the leveled programs) took, or will take, up to a year to implement and manage. Many bearing considerable amounts of data and paperwork, program updates, websites, films and documents to be remade all at our expense, ourselves and faculty to be retrained (our expense again), not to mention all the new and increased fees attached to them. Mentor coaching costs are sure to rise for mentees as well from next year.
And in my experience there has never been any consultation period preceding any of it. Just: Here it is. It’ll be good for everyone. Get on with it.
What’s always astonished me is how consistently poorly managed the implementation process has been. Take for example the leveled programs. We were informed about them in late 2021 if my records are correct. The newish competencies were only just in place. We were all just emerging from COVID and all the wild levels of disruption that brought. And we program owners were told we had to have it all completed by December 2022. Huge changes for many of us. This also meant we all had to have completed our assessor trainings in order to submit, but guess what? The PCC assessor training wasn’t anywhere near completed or available to us. For that matter, I recall we didn’t even have the updated PCC markers. The ACC BARRS trickled out even later than all of them. The training for those even later still. A new credentialing exam was launched and quickly criticized about everything from the frankly odd demand for a best/worst answer (Why on earth a worst answer as well?), to the unnecessarily rigorous external proctoring of it (Why is that even a thing for this type of exam? Could it be that it now offloads all responsibility to an outside entity? Or is it academic theater?). Then in a blink we’re told the ACC candidates are going to get their own knowledge-based version, which at least to me, says either someone quickly realized how unfit this new “improvement” was, or was it just more bad planning and implementation?
I could easily go on, but this is simply to illustrate how poorly managed these huge changes have been from my perspective, how disruptive it is to us downstream, and how little (if any) consultation has occurred with those it affects. When I’ve asked an ICF rep about consultation, the response has usually been that they’ve consulted with “industry stakeholders,” but considering the kneejerk shifts, I’m left pondering who these stakeholders might be. They certainly don’t appear to share my experience.
I believe a strikingly similar time extension has just occurred with these new mentor coaching assessments, and a similar problem with not all the information needed for educators to implement these changes being available from the outset has also once again occurred. All seemingly indicating that lessons just weren’t learned the last time. When I recently asked a senior person at the ICF if they’ve ever done an impact assessment on small to medium program providers—who I suspect actually make up most of us—they had to admit they never have.
The bottom line for me is that these changes are always at no small expense to the training organizations, and we smaller ones who do not have vast budgets and support teams seem expected to bear it and cough up. What’s made it worse for me is that in these challenging macro-economic times I cannot see how we can pass these expenses on through what is already expensive training in an already squeezed market. So that leaves us to pick up the tab once again. The ultimate effect may very likely be that the ICF-accredited coach training industry will slowly bias more and more to large, established players who can absorb these costs better.
The bigger point here for me has been that considering all the above, and the unwillingness to engage in longer term meaningful consultation, or to show willingness to make genuinely significant alterations and adaptations when feedback is given, I simply cannot believe more of the same isn’t on the way. This alone is a significant reason for me to walk away now. That well-worn definition of insanity is to expect something different from the same conditions. Unfortunately, considering the precedent, words alone will not convince me otherwise at this point.
Where’s the feedback box?
If you’ve been an ICF educator and program owner for some time I do wonder if you’ve ever been consulted about any of these changes. I used to throw my name in whenever a request was put out but nada. I appreciate we all can’t be called, but who then is in on the consultation? Is it only large providers who have admin departments and resources to accommodate these “improvements.” Or is it folk who work at the edges but don’t actually own or manage a full program? Or a go-to list of regulars, consultants or academics? Whichever, the haphazard implementation, and the introduction of things that simply don’t seem fit for the job despite the confident rhetoric saying otherwise, all seems to indicate little understanding of the actual challenges many of us on the ground face and what’s really needed.
On the subject of feedback: I recall one of the educator community calls (which I used to fastidiously attend until, well, this) being devoted to bias. Another participant asked late in the session about the ICF bias which clearly caught the moderator off guard, and they then asked what the person had meant by that. Fair enough, but I think the idea of institutional bias is hardly news to any of us, though it seemed a completely novel idea to the facilitating team. Or maybe it was just something no one wanted to touch. As we were close to closing the moderator suggested that seeing it was obviously a rich topic that we continue and make the next session also about bias, which I took to mean the institutional one we’d just unpacked. Next session, however, there was nothing about that thorny area, and we just reverted to discussing the coach’s biases. I raised my sense of surprise and disappointment towards the end yet all I recall receiving was a competently professional listening response. Exactly as one would expect from a coach. Yet that’s about all I ever seem to have received when I (or I hear others) raise points that might be perceived as critiques, or in some way tricky: We hear you and will take it back to confer. And into the ether it seems to go.
If this sounds a little harsh, please remember this is the organization I’ve committed a decade to supporting and have now left as a result of this type of inaction, real listening, and lack of real responsiveness. And none of this was sudden for me. Did I have good conversations with individuals? Absolutely. I have a lot of respect for the individual efforts. But all too often the organizational result on anything really meaningful, certainly in the past 4-5 years, is underwhelming.
I have suggested to a senior person that much more industry-wide consultation period was needed before any these types of changes I’m flagging are implemented. Obviously that would be expensive and time-consuming for them, but the mess we’ve been consistently handed sure has been for us. I hope the ICF will feel suitably motivated to undertake such a thing in the future.
Let’s talk a little more about bias
Late in 2025 I published a peer reviewed article in the journal The Philosophy of Coaching in which I urged “the industry gatekeepers to align their standards and credentialing markers with current cognitive science.” While the science of mind and cognition has made some astonishing leaps in the last few decades, their implications seem to have been missed or overlooked by many in the industry and certainly by the ICF. As I outlined in some detail in the article, a significant bias is quite evident within the competencies and markers. One that disallows or overlooks many emerging empirically-based approaches, particularly those embracing areas of embodiment, somatics, reflective inquiry, process theory, ecopsychology, among other theoretical and applied models.
Each time a competency or marker update emerged, I hoped that these areas would be accommodated. I mean it’s hardly as though many of them are news, but you wouldn’t know it from what we have to work with. Every time I’ve been disappointed. In fact, it seems that they actually move further away from accommodation and not closer. And for the record, I’m not talking about my opinion, if this view has passed critical review by academic peers then it would seem worthy of some attention at least.
In fact, I feel confident in saying that the markers (and BARRS) as they stand not only largely fail to account for where the science of mind has taken us, they are often failing to even accurately reflect many ways many coaches are actually functioning in the real world, or even where the industry has moved to in real life. An indicator of this for me was when the last competency update added something about the coach offering knowledge, the sheer amount of strident debate I saw across LinkedIn quite surprised me. It seemed preposterous to some that any self-respecting “real” coach should ever introduce any knowledge, or information. I’m aware this has been a long-standing truism in some parts of the industry, but I’m confused how then might a health coach be expected to function? Or a business coach, a relationship coach, a leadership development one, or even a life coach for that matter?
When there have been changes to competencies or ethics, it often seems to me that accommodations are more a nod towards current cultural shifts rather than any real review that might better reflect the current industry diversity (and that science of mind). One example I see is in the long-standing and persistent emphasis on organizationally-biased questions in the credentialing exam, something I encountered many years ago and was just informed that this was equally surprising to a candidate from my training who’d recently taken the “updated” exam. And this coach had been an HR professional. I recall in the ICF annual report that organizational coaches appear to form the most significant percentage of membership who responded, yet could this be down to a selection bias because the many other varieties of coaches out there don’t see themselves represented and so either lapse or don’t bother responding?
When I recently inquired about the research or data that any of the changes have been responding to, the reasoning has always seemed to me a curious mix of the anecdotal, the opaque, and the emphatic: Most industries consider it best practice do this every 5 years (Most, is that true? What industries? Are they comparable?); AI will mean participants can use it to mimic their voice in another person’s session or generate a recording from transcripts (I find this proposal absurd, scaremongering, and the least worry we coaches have about AI. Besides, you think we don’t know our students?); it’s a formative and developmental assessment protocol while still being mentoring (Oh boy. Saying something is doesn’t make it so.); and there are others of course.
Look I do believe industry organizations are populated with good people trying to do good things, but these type of unquestionable, emphatic rules, changes, updates, and demands have never seemed to have much real research or substance under the claims. Or room for questioning what is presented as given fact. I have again long harbored a concern around who these credentialing committees and teams are as well, for these “updates” so often appear more the product of an echo chamber reconstituting the same ideas than something from a truly open system.
The above considered, it seems to me that a significant tranche of the industry—including the ICF—has a rather narrower vision of what coaching is and how it should be functioning than I (and clearly many others also) hold. My current paper is dealing with AI within human developmental interactions, and highlights how the very biases, blind spots, and behaviors I’ve been raising are directing the industry away from what I believe, and the data shows, will be needed to meet the coming challenges—and I’m not only meaning those posed by LLMs. I believe we require a much bolder broader vision than any I’ve seen to date. It needs folk who will actually step back and take a significantly wider, longer view of what this industry really requires in order to serve humanity best in these and the coming days. One that might take a peek at say 4E cognition at least, or process theory. And certainly one that responds to all the voices it claims to represent better than is currently happening.
Ker-ching
Before I finish, I want to touch on something that is always at the heart of things—money. It makes the world go around after all.
One of the reasons I’m wanting out is simply about business. I was previously an entrepreneur, and part of my current coaching practice is working with founders, so I know a thing or two about business. And while this step into running my own program was never about making a fortune, even making it work fiscally has become increasingly more challenging over recent years. And I know it’s not just us. I have colleagues who’ve been in the game for 30 years, with big brand recognition who are struggling to fill cohorts. These are not easy times and all these changes have not made it easier. Quite the opposite.
In fact, it has been pointed out that in their drive for growth, the big move from the ICF could be seen (and has been by other voices in Engage) as a rather canny shift of financial responsibilities from the ICF’s balance sheet onto ours as program owners. Whether intentional or not, it is true. And these recent changes have merely intensified that shift. Look it’s a good business move to increase revenue and reduce cost and debt (and similar also could be said about adding new requirements for educators and mentors that require not insubstantial further ongoing payments to the ICF for us to stay in the game) but as the ICF isn’t a for-profit enterprise, what might this serve? Well I imagine it at least partially supports the rapid expansion we’ve witnessed over the past 5 years—and what’s likely coming. I only wish similar consideration had been provided for more of us.
Alongside their own stated quest for growth, the ICF has also repeatedly announced an exponentially increasing membership and number of accredited training providers over the years, and they’re certainly not the only ones to extol the idea that our industry is in the ascendant. But do the figures really say all is rosy?
I encountered this chap Tim Brownson who has quite a different analysis of the 2025 ICF industry stats. It makes for a sobering read. Certainly more training providers does not necessarily mean real industry growth as in increased earnings, profitability, sustainability, and more opportunities. I’m currently left thinking it means a far more crowded marketplace, which would accord with my experience and that of many others I’ve connected with.
As Tim’s analysis above points out, a similar picture seems to emerge regarding credentialed members and their real financial prospects and experience, which raises another issue for me. So many of my participants—really great coaches—have certified with my programs (I estimate about 2000 have been through them over the years) but sadly not many have been able to make coaching pay. I mean like a real income. Yes we have business development in our program and all the rest to support them, plus we’re very direct about the challenges, but I still find myself mulling the question “Are we selling a nice fantasy?” Not to say you can’t be a successful coach, but how many does the market actually need? Or will it really support? Or what does it actually take in these rapidly changing times?
While the recent advent of the many service aggregators like BetterUp has provided an easier avenue for coaches, not many I speak to seem overjoyed at how much they have to work in order to even make a decent subsistence. To me that often looks like a bit of an assembly line for many and quite the opposite of why they chose to train as a coach in the first place.
Perhaps an uncomfortable truth to pick at here is that signing up more and more members and new training organizations carries zero risk for the ICF. In fact, the more one has on one’s books, the more successful a professional body might look to the outside world—and, of course, the more income you get. The same might be said about getting folk into and through one’s coach training program. But the reality on the ground has looked far less golden to me for some time. And recent pressures whether macro-economic, technological and from the ICF itself, do not make this an easier road for either practitioners or program owners.
Yet another money angle I’m sitting with is that if all, or a substantial part, of one’s income as a coach comes from other coaches—whether to recredential, upgrade credential, mentoring, supervision, or otherwise—that can start to look a lot like a lizard that survives by consuming its own tail to me. A kind of circular economy resting on fulfilling the very requirements the industry demands of us to stay in the game, and the more I look at that, the less comfortable I find myself feeling about it.
I didn’t enter the industry to be an educator. I was invited to become one. I always wanted to serve others as a coach and still do. I’ve loved being an educator, but feel I’ve woken up to something here and want to ensure that whatever I’m doing is in integrity and truly serves the world and other practitioners best, and I find myself quite uncomfortable with what I’m seeing here. We need good educators and mentors of course, but if our personal business model is heavily weighted to making income off coaches forced to fulfill a growing list of requirements imposed by the ICF (or any industry body) and not from real, non-industry clients, we might want to reflect on that a little. So many of these changes can seem to be creating a burgeoning secondary industry built around fulfilling the requirements to remain as a credentialed coach, a mentor, an educator, a supervisor and on, rather than actually coaching.
And there’s that lizard again.
All journeys end, and new ones begin
I think my points are pretty clear. If I sound frustrated or angry, I am. I’m also a bit sad and disappointed. I believe in the fundamental intentions of coaching. I also believe in the coaching approach I’ve been developing, its principles, and I know the science and philosophy that undergirds it is real. I also know it brings something new, something that responds to this new science of embodied mind, and that clients benefit enormously from it. But I’ve had to accept that the way I was trying to make this work—in the increasingly restrictive container I’ve pointed to above—just wasn’t working. I also used to be a very staunch advocate for accreditation and credentialing, though I’m sure it’s not news that my position has shifted somewhat on that as well. The principle underneath I admire and support, but the current reality has left me disappointed.
So for now I’m simply going to pause, sit with things and let them organize themselves a little to see which way is forward. If you know my work, you’ll know that’s part of it.
This is what feels most aligned with my sense of integrity about it all.
I’ve also always been one to speak my mind, that’s for sure. I just hope that in doing so it has helped others. This hasn’t been about just critiquing for its own sake. But things can be better, done better, and if this opens any conversations around that, then great. If you want to know more, or simply to touch base, get support, or learn more about this science of mind, feel free to reach out.
If you just want to argue your point with me, then I’m going to suggest you take it elsewhere. I’m not trying to convince anyone, or debate any of these points I’ve raised. They are all my experience, my feelings, and my views. And I’m entitled to them all.
If the ICF ever want some honest feedback. I’m here. But honestly, I am done for now.
Rod
