Fully online, 5 live hours a week, alongside the job you already have. After the 12 weeks, we guide you through your ICF application, with sales guidance and monthly supervision.
You learn from people who coach senior leaders every week. They teach what they practice.
Every week you coach other senior leaders in your group of 6 to 8. Five of your coaching sessions are watched from start to finish, and you get written notes on what to keep and what to change, checked against the The specific behaviors the International Coaching Federation looks for when it assesses a coaching session, such as whether the coach lets the client set the agenda. They are how the ICF judges whether someone coaches at credential level..
Every week you coach other senior leaders in your group of 6 to 8. Five of your coaching sessions are watched from start to finish, and you get written notes on what to keep and what to change, checked against the The specific behaviors the International Coaching Federation looks for when it assesses a coaching session, such as whether the coach lets the client set the agenda. They are how the ICF judges whether someone coaches at credential level..
You map the people, power and history around a leader, drawing on The study of systems where many parts affect each other, so no single cause explains what happens. The Method draws on Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework, which helps a coach tell a problem with a known fix from one that has to be explored before it can be solved., to see what keeps sending the same problem back to them.
You take three Three widely used personality tests for executives. One measures your strengths on a normal day, one what drives you, and one how you tend to behave under pressure. You go through all three results with a certified Hogan coach., and one of them measures how you tend to behave under pressure. You go through your results with a certified coach. Then, before you coach anyone, you are coached yourself, in four private one-hour sessions.
You write the proposal and Executive coaching usually has three parties: you, the leader you coach, and the company that pays. The agreement sets out what the coaching is for, what stays private between you and the leader, and what the company will be told. The ICF counts setting it as a core coaching skill., and you get sales coaching on how to package and price what you offer.
5 hours
a week, live online
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:00 – 2:30 pm ETAmericas hours · next start October 20, 2026
1 to 4 hours
a week, on your own time
Coaching began outside business. In sport, coaches helped athletes build skill and improve performance.
In the 1980s and 1990s, pioneers such as Sir John Whitmore brought coaching into management and leadership, introducing frameworks like GROW that made it practical in organizations. Figures like Tony Robbins pushed coaching into the cultural mainstream.
The International Coaching Federation was founded in 1995 and helped establish professional standards, ethics, and credentials. The field has since grown considerably: its 2025 study estimated nearly 123,000 coach practitioners worldwide. Sources: ICF history (opens in a new tab), 2025 Global Coaching Study (opens in a new tab).
Executive coaching has changed and is still changing. In its early years, it was often used to address a specific performance problem. The brief might be to help a manager delegate decisions or prepare an executive to present clearly to the board. These were useful goals. But improvements in a particular task could leave deeper difficulties untouched.
Concern about leadership has a long history. In the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Survey on the Global Agenda, 86% of respondents believed the world faced a leadership crisis. That finding captured a widespread lack of confidence in leadership. It did not measure the effectiveness of training. Source: World Economic Forum (opens in a new tab).
Research on leadership development raises its own concerns. In a global survey published by McKinsey in 2017, only 11% of more than 500 executives strongly agreed that their leadership development efforts achieved and sustained the intended results. More recently, DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that only 26% of leaders rated their leadership development as high quality. Sources: McKinsey (opens in a new tab), DDI (opens in a new tab).
Meanwhile, the demands on leaders keep changing. In Harvard Business Impact’s 2026 Global Leadership Study, 80% of senior leaders rated the ability to function through constant change as very or extremely important. Preparing people for that responsibility requires attention to how they respond when familiar approaches stop working. Source: Harvard Business Impact (opens in a new tab).
Leadership development runs into difficulty when it approaches a change in mindset as though it were a technical skill to acquire. Qualities such as resilience, trust, and empathy involve a person’s habitual responses: how they interpret disagreement, whether they can listen while feeling challenged, and what happens to their judgment under pressure.
A competency assessment can tell a leader they need to trust their team. A development plan can ask them to delegate more decisions. Yet handing over a decision may still feel like an invitation to be disappointed—or to become unnecessary. The advice is easy enough to understand. Acting on it asks something more of the person receiving it.
Our responses involve the body as well as conscious thought. Research shows that stress can affect attention, working memory, and our ability to think flexibly. An instruction that seems perfectly reasonable in a calm conversation may be harder to follow under pressure. Source: review of stress and executive function (opens in a new tab).
Consider a leader who wants to listen more openly but tenses up as soon as someone questions a decision. Reminding them to welcome disagreement leaves much of the difficulty unexplored. They need to notice what happens in that moment and, through experience, become able to respond differently.
This is the work of changing a mindset. Understanding helps, but the change has to become available when it is needed.
Support for leaders is often organized around performance goals or clinical needs. Coaching offers frameworks, targets, and behavioral exercises. Therapy and psychoanalysis offer ways to explore psychological difficulties, including questions that extend well beyond a crisis.
A leader may need help with something that fits awkwardly into this division: who they have become through their work, what authority means to them, or why an achievement they wanted now feels unsatisfying. A performance target can be too narrow for these questions. They deserve room in leadership development.
Experienced coaches have long explored such questions, sometimes intuitively. McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026 also emphasizes personal growth and self-leadership as foundations for leading others. Recognizing the importance of this work still leaves the practical question of how to undertake it. Source: McKinsey (opens in a new tab).
The person accompanying a leader through this work matters. A coach’s experience of examining their own assumptions and defenses gives them a reference point for understanding what a client is attempting.
Their unresolved difficulties can also shape the conversation. A coach who feels compelled to have the answer may rush a client toward certainty. One who finds disagreement threatening may struggle to explore it openly. The coach’s own habits become part of what the client encounters.
For Claristrat, this makes the coach’s personal development a prerequisite. Coaches must examine how they respond to uncertainty, criticism, and their own need for control before asking clients to undertake comparable work.
That principle shapes the Claristrat method and the program you are about to experience.
The toolkit
Six modules in three blocks of four weeks. Each one gives you something you can use with a client.
I can’t begin to express how valuable this development was. I wish I had done this as a younger leader. Even if you don’t want to be a coach, if you manage people, lead organizations, boards or teams, these skills are invaluable.
Every ICF credential works this way: a school trains you, and the ICF awards the credential.
With Claristrat
Finish the 12-week live core and the required mentor coaching to earn the Professional Certificate.
We stay with you in between, with practice tools, sales guidance and monthly alumni supervision.
The ICF process
Log 100 coaching hours with at least 8 clients, 75 of them paid, and at least 25 within the 18 months before applying.
Submit your certificate, mentor-coaching verification, and coaching log for the ACC path.
After ICF review and approval, pass the ICF Credentialing Exam. The ICF awards the ACC.
Covered by Claristrat
Yours, with our support
Four steps from applying to your first live session, including a conversation with lead faculty to align the program with your goals.
Choose your start date and how you want to pay.
A one-to-one conversation to align the program with your goals.
Take the Hogan assessments and turn the debrief into your learning plan.
Your materials open right away. Live sessions start with your cohort.
Both pathways begin with the same live foundation. The decision is how far you want the work to go.
No. The certificate documents the education, mentor coaching, and performance evaluation the ICF Level 1 path requires. You then log 100 client hours, apply to the ICF, and pass its exam. The ICF awards the ACC.
That is the normal order. You receive the Professional Certificate when the 12 weeks and the mentor coaching sign-off are done, keep building coaching hours at your own pace, and apply to the ICF once you have logged 100.
From the day your coach-specific education starts. The ICF’s ACC requirements today: 100 hours with at least 8 clients, 75 of them paid, and at least 25 within the 18 months before you apply. If coaching is part of your job, the hours you spend coaching count too.
Yes. Fully online, in a cohort of 6 to 8. The 12 weeks plus mentoring total 110 program hours, about 60 of them live.
Yes. It is built for people with full-time senior jobs: two live sessions a week, 5 hours in total, plus 1 to 4 hours of recorded material. Mentor coaching comes after the 12 weeks.
After the 12 live weeks. 10 hours: seven one-hour group sessions and three one-hour individual sessions with credentialed faculty.
Yes. The admissions team can provide a short business case, program documentation, and invoicing in the form your organization needs.
Your seat is held while faculty review your application. If the cohort turns out to be the wrong fit for your goals, your payment is refunded in full.
Yes. You share the first 12 weeks with the Advanced cohort and can decide by week 12 whether to continue into the full 24-week pathway.
Two live sessions a week, alongside the job you already have, in a cohort of 6 to 8 senior leaders. Use it in your current role, on boards, in fractional advisory or in your own practice.
After you apply, you speak with Fabiana, our lead faculty. If the program isn’t right for you, you’re refunded in full.
