How to Hire a Coach

The Certificate Trap

Two coaches sit across from you in back-to-back discovery calls. Both list “ICF Certified”. Both show the same badge. One has completed roughly 100 hours of supervised coaching — the minimum for the entry-level credential. The other has completed over 2,500, the threshold for Master Certified Coach. That is a twenty-five-fold difference in lived practice sitting behind an identical logo, and nothing on either website will tell you which is which.

Certification proves someone completed a training pathway. It does not prove they can hold a room, read a silence, or tell a CEO something she does not want to hear in a way she can actually receive. The credentialing bodies have brought real standards to a once-unregulated field, and that work matters. But a standard is a floor, not a ceiling. It filters out the worst. It says almost nothing about the best.

I hold those letters myself — ICF, and Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder-Centred Coaching. I pursued both deliberately, after four years coaching inside a large organisation, because I wanted to see the craft through two lenses before trusting my own. I do not regret either. But asked which made me the better coach — the letters, or the fourteen years of engagements since — the answer is not close.

So the more useful question is not is this person certified. It is can this person actually move you? Physics recognises four fundamental forces holding the universe together — forces you cannot see, whose effects you cannot miss. Coaching rests on four of its own.