A field guide built around four questions that matter more than any credential — not a sales document, a tool you can use on any coach, including me.
Download the free ebook (PDF)
A coach’s job is to walk beside someone while they do something hard. It’s fair to ask — has this person ever done that to themselves?
Every year, more people call themselves a coach. Fewer of them can actually move a life.
This isn’t a sales brochure. I’m a coach myself, and yes — if it helps you find the right one, some of you will find your way to me. But that’s not why this exists. It exists because I’ve watched too many capable leaders hire the wrong coach on the strength of a certificate alone, and get nothing but a badge on a wall for it.
This is my attempt to hand you a better set of questions than “are they certified.” Use it whether or not you ever hire me.
— Sudhakar Reddy Gade, The Organisational Physicist
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.
Can they actually move you?
Ask: what changed for the last three leaders you coached, and who says so besides you?
Do you change, or just feel good in the room?
Ask: what did a stakeholder observe six months after the engagement closed?
Would you trust them with what you haven’t told anyone?
Ask: what do you do when a client goes quiet, or lies to you?
Have they tested their own limits?
Ask: what have you attempted in your own life that you might have failed at?
Free, no signup wall, no catch. Fifteen questions and a scorecard you can use on any coach — including the author.
Download the free ebook (PDF)