Competency Advantage extends your foundational coaching mindset into advanced professional practice. You learn to engage the whole person — their concerns, values, tensions, and underlying assumptions - so that coaching conversations become spaces where their meaning-making can be seen, questioned, and re-organised.
Grounded in the ICF Core Competencies at the PCC level, you build the capability to respond fluidly rather than follow a script, creating richer, more finely attuned conversations that enable people to change how they see themselves and what they are facing.
This Advantage consolidates your existing strengths into a reliable practice you can draw on when conversations are complex or emotionally charged. Through a focused sequence of labs and mentoring, you refine a way of working you can trust in high-stakes situations and grow into a practitioner whose work carries weight in demanding environments.
Deeper Impact - hold more spacious dialogues where people can work through what truly drives their choices and behaviour.
Shareper Thinking - see what is happening beneath the surface in real time and shape your responses with precision.
Stronger Position - grow your practice against a recognised global benchmark so organisations, clients, and peers trust the quality of your work.
Who it's for: People new to coaching, or leaders who want stronger coaching skills in their role.
Time commitment: About 80 learning hours over approximately 24 weeks.
Certification Pathway: This program provides an upgrade to the ICF Level 2 if you have completed an ICF Level 1 Accredited or ACSTH Program, and this meets the requirement for the PCC Credential.
This is where you stop guessing why conversations stall, loop in circles, or suddenly go flat. You learn to read the inner logic behind what people say and do in real time. You begin to see the beliefs, values, tensions, and unspoken commitments that quietly organise their reactions.
Drawing on research into how adults make sense of their world, you turn that awareness into a precise coaching skill. You learn to name what is really at stake, focus the conversation where it matters most, and invite clients into clearer, braver choices that fit who they are and what they care about.
In this module, you learn to listen at the level of sense-making. You begin to notice how a person is constructing their reality in the moment: what they highlight, what they leave out, and what their words reveal about what is at stake for them. We name this stance "I See You" because your listening goes beyond the story to the person trying to make sense of their world. You study how attention, interpretation, and emotion work together as a system, and you practise using this understanding in live dialogue. As your listening becomes more precise, you frame what the client is really working through, reflect the essence of their experience, and create the felt impact of being accurately seen.
Key Insights You Will Explore
Some experiences are hard to put into words. In this module, you learn how to work with those moments. You explore how Clean & Metaphorical Language can open thinking when ordinary questions reach their limit.
Clean Language gives you a disciplined way to stay inside the client's own words while directing attention to the places their mind has not yet gone. You pair this with a practical understanding of how inquiry shapes attention and thinking, so your questions genuinely evoke awareness rather than lead or interpret. These advanced tools add a new dimension to your practice and significantly strengthen your capacity to Evoke Awareness at a PCC level.
Key Insights You Will Explore
This is where you build the confidence to use and adapt it in your real-life context.
Practical Lab: Applying the Approach in Real Conversations
In the Practical Lab, you put the approach into practice through real conversations and structured case studies. You see how the method actually unfolds in practice, build confidence using it in your own context, and receive guidance from an experienced coach supervisor. This helps you link the concepts to live coaching moments and notice the subtleties in coach — client interactions.
Enrichment Lab: Witnessing Mastery in Action
In the Enrichment Lab, you have the rare opportunity to watch mastery in action. You observe the same approach applied at a highly skilled level in a real conversation, with space to reflect on what you are seeing. This gives you a clear picture of how the method works when executed well, and a concrete sense of what to aim for as your own practice grows.
In the Mentoring Lab, you receive focused feedback on your coaching conversations. Your mentor helps you notice what you did well, what you missed, and how your way of thinking shapes your questions and responses. This kind of guided reflection strengthens your awareness and supports progress that is hard to achieve on your own.
You learn to hold coaching as a series of connected conversations rather than isolated sessions. You design how an engagement begins, how each conversation builds on the last, and how it concludes with clarity. You work with simple structures that help leaders, internal coaches, and practitioners start, sustain, and grow a coaching practice with confidence.