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Greetings Future Coaches,

Content

• Invitation and Welcome to The Primer & Competent Coaching Courses

An OLC System Education Overview

ICF Professional Coaching Information

In a little over a month, we will embark on a journey into the exciting world of executive, business and life coaching. This journey is about becoming a navigator to coach leaders into “lands of not knowing” to discover aspirations yet within. As you will learn, coaching is a new discipline in our world and is becoming a central ingredient for business, academic and personal development. You will learn the basic coaching skills and methodology according to the guidelines of the International Coach Federation (ICF) www.coachfederation.com – the Premier Coaching Certification Agency in the world.

The first course you are taking will grant you 30 hours of ICF Core Competency Education (ICFCCE) with the ICF. You need 60 ICFCCE’s to obtain the Associate Certified Coach (ACC)designation. In the second week of Dec (14th)The Competent Coaching Course will start and will grant another 40 hours of ICFCCE education (combined you will have a total of 70 hours) which will fulfill the education requirements for ACC with 10 hours over to be applied to the Professional Coaching Course (PCC)designation – of which you need 125 hours of ICFCCE. This is considered the completion of an L1 ICF Coaching School.

The normal cost for the courses is as follows and your cost is to the right…

To be clear you need the following to get to the ACC

• 60 CCE Education hours (125 for PCC and 200 for MCC)
• 10 hours of mentor coaching (Same for PCC)
• 100 hours of practical coaching (75 must be paid hours) (500 for PCC and 2500 for MCC)

Engage and pass the Coach Credentialing Exam (You only take this once)

The schedule below is a schedule to get the 30 hours of The Primer Coaching Course done before The Competent Coaching Course starts on 17 December 2024.

The schedule for both Courses (70 hours) is as follows: Notice there are weekend training courses. The bad news is – it will be a long day these weekends and the good news is – half of the course is accomplished in these sessions and you graduate February 25, 2025, with everything you need for the ACC educationally. What a great Gift to yourself.

PRIMER/COMPETENT COACHING COURSES SCHEDULE–Fall 2024

Course Introduction Meetingis 19 October 2024. The course runs through 22 February 2025.

7 PM CST Thursdays 6 AM CST Saturdays

I am sure there are questions about some of this so feel free to call me for clarification. My number is (210) 710-0998. Feel free to call any time.

Looking to hear from each of you…

Gary

OLC System Education Overview

​The Organizational Leadership Coaching® Institute (OLCi) is an International Coaching Federation (ICF) accredited school offing Levels 1 & 2 training to obtain the Associate Certified Coach (ACC) and Professional Certified Coach (PCC) Certifications. OLCi is ICF approved for 182 hours total which means we can assist coaches toward the coveted 200 training hours for the Master Certified Coach (MCC) as well. In December 2023 OLC started its inaugural course in Strategic Team Coaching (STC) and will apply for Advance Accreditation in Team Coaching (AATC) Certification with the ICF in January 2025. With the 64 hours of the Strategic Team Coach Certification Course approved, OLC can then offer 246+ ICF approved hours with the ability to take certification students to MCC with 200+ hours and train Team Coaches to apply for the Advance Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC).

​The OLCI has intentionally developed its curriculum to be customized to serve any organizations vision, culture, and structure. Our aim is to teach solid basic coaching skills that are transferrable into personal and practical leadership behaviors, into all organizational cultures and enable students to accomplish ICF Certification. In our 15 years of training, we have mastered the ability to produce competent and professional coaches that effectively integrate leadership coaching skills that dramatically impact ROI.

The Primer and Competent Coaching Courses – Our Level 1 (L1) ICF Approved School

The OLC Institute is presently a combination of five (5) courses, The Primer Coaching Course, The Competent Coaching Course, The Professional Coaching Course, The Legacy Leadership® Institute and Certification and soon to be submitted for ICF approval (January 2025) the Strategic Team Coaching Course.

​The Primer and Competent Coach Courses form our Level 1 offering and is intended as a labor of love to servant leaders and organizations who want to grow people while making organizations places of targeted leader development with intentional strategic movement. The Primer Course is the introduction course into the world of coaching and is intended to provide the basic skills toward coaching understanding and awareness. The course covers the four basic skills of Maximizing Effective Listening, Posing Shift Causing Questions, The Art of Targeting Language and Giving Motivating Acknowledgement as well as introducing the OLC Dialogue Model for initial coaching. This course is the first 30 hours of our L1 offering.

The Competent Coach Course is the second of three primary training blocks to build basic coaching competencies and apply advanced tools, methods, and practices to help emerging leaders and train coaches. The Competent Coach covers the skills of Capitalizing on Personality Development, Sculpturing Legacy Leadership, Harnessing Insightful Intuition, Facilitating Effective Change Processes, and Integrating Emotional/Social Intelligence into the coaching encounter. This course is the second 40 hours of our L1 offering for a total of 70 core competency training hours. This course along with The Primer fulfills all the ACC requirements. (Core Competency Education – Mentor Coaching – Coaching Performance Evaluation)

The Professional Coach Course (an additional 62 hours) adds coaching skills to embed coaching best practices, personal foundation building and more advanced techniques and methods. At the conclusion of the trilogy (The Primer/The Competent/The Professional) students will be prepared to engage the International Coaching Federations (ICF) Credentialing Examination. This course fulfils all the PCC requirements.

ICF Professional Coaching Information

What is professional coaching?

ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential, which is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful, and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:

• Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
• Encourage client self-discovery
• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
• Hold the client responsible and accountable

This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.

How is coaching distinct from other service professions?

Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from other personal or organizational support professions.

• Therapy: Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction, and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways. Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future focused. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one’s work or personal life. The emphases in a coaching relationship are on action, accountability, and follow through.
• Consulting: Individuals or organizations retain consultants for their expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is the consultant will diagnose problems and prescribe and, sometimes, implement solutions. With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams can generate their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
• Mentoring: A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling, and coaching. The coaching process does not include advising or counseling and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.
• Training: Training programs are based on objectives set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached, with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path that coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum.
• Athletic Development: Though sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from sports coaching. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behavior of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches possess these qualities, but their experience and knowledge of the individual or team determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.

How is coaching delivered? What does the process look like?

Coaching typically begins with a personal interview (either face-to-face or by teleconference call) to assess the individual’s or business’ current opportunities and challenges, define the scope of the relationship, identify priorities for action and establish specific desired outcomes. Subsequent coaching sessions may be conducted in person or over the telephone, with each session lasting a previously established length of time. Between scheduled coaching sessions, the individual may be asked to complete specific actions that support the achievement of one’s personally prioritized goals. The coach may provide additional resources in the form of relevant articles, checklists, assessments, or models to support the individual’s or business’ thinking and actions. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on needs and preferences.

• Assessments: A variety of assessments are available to support the coaching process, depending upon the needs and circumstances of the individual or business. Assessments provide objective information that can enhance self-awareness, as well as awareness of others and their circumstances; provide a benchmark for creating coaching goals and actionable strategies; and offer a method for evaluating progress.
• Concepts, models, and principles: A variety of concepts, models and principles drawn from the behavioral sciences, management literature, spiritual traditions and/or the arts and humanities may be incorporated into the coaching conversation to increase self-awareness and awareness of others, foster shifts in perspective, promote fresh insights, provide new frameworks for looking at opportunities and challenges, and energize and inspire forward actions.
• Appreciative approach: Coaching incorporates an appreciative approach, grounded in what’s right, what’s working, what’s wanted and what’s needed to get there. Using an appreciative approach, the coach models constructive communication skills and methods to enhance personal communication effectiveness. He or she incorporates discovery-based inquiry, proactive (as opposed to reactive) ways of managing personal opportunities and challenges, constructive framing of observations and feedback to elicit the most positive responses from others, and visions of success as contrasted with focusing on problems. The appreciative approach is simple to understand and employ, and its reach can be profound, opening new possibilities and spurring action.

Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The individual?

The coach:

• Provides objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team’s self-awareness and awareness of others
• Listens closely to fully understand the individual’s or team’s circumstances
• Acts as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making
• Champions opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations
• Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives,
• Challenges blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios
• Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics.

The individual:

• Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals
• Uses assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others
• Envisions personal and/or organizational success
• Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions
• Utilizes the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives
• Takes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations
• Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
• Takes the tools, concepts, models, and principles provided by the coach and engages in effective forward actions

What does coaching ask of an individual?

To be successful, coaching asks certain things, all of which begin with intention. Additionally, clients should:

• Focus on oneself, the tough questions, the hard truths and one’s success.
• Observe the behaviors and communications of others.
• Listen to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
• Challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and develop new ones that serve one’s goals in a superior way
• Leverage personal strengths and overcome limitations to develop a winning style
• Take decisive actions, however uncomfortable and despite personal insecurities, to reach for the extraordinary
• Show compassion for oneself while learning new behaviors and experiencing setbacks, and to show that compassion for others as they do the same
• Commit to not take oneself so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
• Maintain composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
• Have the courage to reach for more than before while engaging in continual self-examination without fear

How can the success of the coaching process be measured?

• Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways: external indicators of performance and internal indicators of success. Ideally, both are incorporated.
• Examples of external measures include achievement of coaching goals established at the outset of the coaching relationship, increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback that is obtained from a sample of the individual’s constituents (e.g., direct reports, colleagues, customers, boss, the manager him/herself), personal and/or business performance data (e.g., productivity, efficiency measures).
• The external measures selected should be things the individual is already measuring and has some ability to directly influence.
• Examples of internal measures include self-scoring/self-validating assessments that can be administered initially and at regular intervals in the coaching process, changes in the individual’s self-awareness and awareness of others, shifts in thinking that create more effective actions, and shifts in one’s emotional state that inspire confidence.