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A Beginner’s Essay to the Coaching Landscape

After months of studying coaching without enough doing, I'm clearing my mind by compiling what I've collected—certifications, training programs, master coaches, business models, and communities. If you're just starting your coaching journey, hope this saves you time surfing the web.

James Tien

• 11 min read
A Beginner’s Essay to the Coaching Landscape

The dazzling white emitting from my laptop’s screen projected a shadow on my face; the screen reflected a perfect rectangle on my glasses. It was another day I spent on my coaching package design document, getting myself from staring at it to … staring at it.

It’s been 4 months since I joined CTI fundamentals. I aspired to be a part-time coach to further hone my leadership & people skills without a job and supporting those software projects I’d like to explore.

Well, the whole plan doesn’t work. Why it doesn’t work is probably worth another post. For now, let’s just say I have studied a lot. Probably too much study, not enough doing.

It’s like calories. Calories are important, but you need to burn them. So here, I’d like to compile what I’ve collected to clear my mind, with some hope that it could be a useful collection of resources for someone else.

Certification

“Do I need a certification?” I believe this is the question that many newcomers would wonder, including myself.

The short answer is: No.

A certification definitely helps. However, it’s not a requirement. Becoming a coach can be as easy as self-acclaimed; just that the bar to succeed is sky high. Plus, almost all certifications that I know of require paid coaching hours, so it’s impossible to be accredited without jumping into the business first.

I feel this is quite different from how certifications work in many other fields, where a certification is the entry ticket. In the coaching world, a certification is like an objective factual check for your proficiency. That also means it can be extra: there are many stellar coaches who are not certified.

The most well-known certification is probably ICF certification, from ACC(Associate Certified Coach), PCC(Professional Certified Coach), to MCC(Master Certified Coach). There are other training institutes providing their own certification like CPCC(Certified Professional Co-Active Coach) from Co-Active Training Institute.

Given the authoritative position of ICF, those institutes tend to design their certification to be ICF-certification compatible to some level. e.g. CPCC above will make you qualify for joining ACC credentialing exam.

Types of Coaches

One definition of coaching I particularly like is “getting someone from being good to being great”. Given such a general statement, it’s not easy to categorize coaches. It’s also why positioning yourself and defining your niche is probably the single hardest act of the beginning — that’s also where I’m still stuck.

Still, there are some common categories with common impressions. I’m emphasizing “common” here, since even coaches under the same category would be drastically different from one another because of their niches and their unique approaches.

Career coach

They help their clients achieve certain key milestones of their career so that they can get closer to their vision. Those “key milestones” tend to be promotions, lateral movement, improving quality of work/life, or landing a new job.

Business/Executive coach

They help their clients overcome organizational challenges of running a business so their business can thrive in their core mission. “Business coaches” and “executive coaches” are often used interchangeably. However, the former often emphasizes more on the business running side, so coaches who focus more on the start-ups or small to medium-sized businesses tend to position themselves as business coaches. Those who collaborate more with C-level staff in a bigger organization tend to be referred to as executive coaches.

Leadership coach

They help their clients hone their leadership skills so the group they lead can collectively achieve more than individually combined. It’s broader than business/executive coaches since leadership can happen in many different levels at work and in life, not necessarily at C-level or as business owners.

Life coach

One of my coaches once joked: “when it’s too hard to say what we do, we just say that we are life coaches, ha!” I didn’t really get it, but now I do. In a broad sense, a life coach helps their clients grow over whatever obstacles they are facing in their life so that they can achieve what they want.

However, “what do you want?” is such a hard question to answer for adults. Find it easy? Try to amplify it by stacking “really”, from “What do you really want?” to “What do you really, really want?”. Still not quite a challenge? Try “Who are you becoming?” and “Who do you want to become?”. You are a blessed soul if you already have clear answers in mind.

The result is that “life coach” becomes quite a polarized term. It can refer to coaches who just don’t know what they are doing, and the true grand masters who can change people’s lives forever. Thus you’d hear people say “don’t be a life coach” and make fun of this title while seeing the stories of master life coaches at the same time.

There are some subcategories of this that are much more tangible like a habit coach, a health coach, a relationship coach, or a communication coach. I once even met a coach who specialized in helping people clarify their purposes during the transition phase of freshly graduating from school. And yes, it can be that specific.

Training Institutes & Courses

Yeah, there are many. I have only joined CTI’s program, and have experienced some flavors of Reboot in my previous role. The rest are what I plan to join in the near future or just something caught my attention.

  • Co-Active Training Institute: The program that I joined is now called the legacy training: Fundamentals($1100), Build($6900), and Excellence($6500). For some reason I can’t access the latest program at the moment of writing this.
  • Steve Chandler’s Coaching Prosperity School: I first knew this program from the classic book, the Prosperous Coach. It now only offers the self-paced, online format. It’s likely not as powerful as the in-person one, but $490 is much more affordable.
  • Mindvalley: In terms of coaching, they offer a life coaching training program and a business coaching training program. I first noticed them through their live coaching demonstration videos. Highly recommended.
  • Presence-Based Coaching: It looks an intense ICF-compatible program that can get you through ACC or PCC efficiently.
  • Reboot Coach Supervision: Coach supervision is specifically for honing coaching skills from in-depth examination into their coaching practices, so it’s not for people who don’t have clients like me (see the ICF definition). Given my past leadership training experience with Reboot, they will be my top pick when I need supervision.

Where to Run the Business

It can get very creative, but in general there are 4 categories: joining a service matching platform, joining a firm, being hired as an internal coach, and soloing.

Joining a service matching platform

It’s basically like a market place. I didn’t reach the point of being able to enlist myself there. However, according to someone who experienced it, the obvious benefit is, of course, that the client-finding part is taken care of. The downside is that you don’t get to pick, and these platforms tend to be quite result-driven (i.e. $$$), which could impact the way you want to coach. Also, almost all service matching platforms require certification.

e.g.,

Finally, as its name suggests, MentorCruise is not really a coaching service matching platform, but there are coaches for sure.

Joining a firm

Being part of a firm like Reboot or a)plan coaching or The Conscious Leadership Group. It works like any service-providing firms: the firm gets the work, and then the work is done by its employees/contractors.

My impression is that it tends to require certain level of professional coaching experience to get into this route.

Being hired as an internal coach

As a powerful venue towards professional development, there seems to be more and more companies willing to build their own internal coaching team. e.g.,

Like the above, my impression is that it also needs relevant experience; just that it can be lateral sometimes, such as from HR, team leaders, or any other people ops.

Soloing

Unlike any other job, this looks like the most prominent way to start. i.e. building your own business. Oh my!

From there, there is a common trajectory of offering development:

1-1 private coaching

The classic form of coaching. Whether it’s virtual or in-person, it’s where coaches start as the only way and grow into their premium services.

At this stage, coaches have designed their packages, and iterate on it from real client experience. e.g., The Lifestyle Engineering Blueprint from OACO. That’s likely how the masters above grow their core philosophy into being.

Notably, some coaches would claim that they don’t have a set framework because their coaching is tailored for individual needs — this is also a polarized statement. There are true masters who really can design packages according to individuals' needs, and those who just don’t know what to do.

Group coaching

Once they reach capacity, one common strategy is to raise the fee of 1-1 and start moving into group coaching. It’s more affordable, with extra benefits of having a community formed.

Some programs use a longer format: a group of people meet periodically; some use a shorter format which is sometimes called “intensive": a group of people meet and stay together for several days.

The logistics start getting challenging at this point, so it’s also when their business grows out of a one-person business.

Self-paced courses

With mature experience of working with groups, to further release their capacity, many coaches start extracting the repeating patterns and their accumulated materials into a self-paced course that people can just sign up and study without direct guidance from the coach.

Marketing, hosting, creating and iterating on the materials, customer service, running a community … definitely not a one-person thing anymore. The coach has become a brand. They hire a team to run all the operational stuff so they can focus on content creation (SNS materials, articles, books, etc.) and offering their premium services.

Learning from Masters

Here are some master coaches I’ve been following. There are many more for sure, but I only list people whose materials I’ve engaged with.

Except for a description, I also annotate them with their “core method” that is like a guiding philosophy of what they do. I’m using this term since they have already extracted the essence of their art into an idea. They then approach their work with this core idea and let everything unfold, resulting in something truly tailored for individual’s needs. So it’s not an iconic package, not a framework, just a core idea.

Jerry Colonna

Jerry is widely known for this powerful question attributed to him:

How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

In my previous role, I once had the privilege of joining his group coaching session. His coaching style was like a hot sun holding your hand, melting the thick ice that had been protecting you for ages. “It’s okay. It’s okay”, seeing how you were uncomfortable about shedding all the protection, he wouldn’t let go of your hand and would stare into your eyes promising you that everything would be just fine.

Exploring deeply into love, safety and belonging through radical self-inquiry sits at the very core of his coaching.

His book, Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing up is a must-read for anyone who is keen on exploring the inner work of leadership. Or, in his words, growing up.

Rich Litvin

Rich is best known for how he helps coaches leap over the income barrier, becoming “prosperous” with few premium clients through referral-and-invitation-only practice.

In terms of his coaching style, from his own words, the best I can pick is high flame coaching. If Jerry Colonna is like a hot sun, Rich Litvin is like an icy scalpel cutting into the core with high precision and zero hesitation. See his live coaching demonstration here:

The book he co-authored with Steve Chandler, the Prosperous Coach, is still the classic.

His 1 Insight Podcast hosts a total of 23 seasons of content full of gold. Here are some of my personal favorites:

His recording made with Mindvalley coach on How to coach someone you don’t know is also worth watching. It’s about setting up the stage so a transformative coaching conversation can happen.

Steve Chandler

  • Core method: Fearless.
  • Official site. (hmm … doesn’t work at the moment of writing this. Maybe it will be fixed later)
  • LinkedIn

The so-called “The God Father of Coaching”. Not sure if people started tributing him this way after Will Keiper’s post or before. He never really says what his core method is, but from my perspective, that attitude of being “Fearless” is at the very center.

I’m also convinced that he doesn’t say it’s “courage” or “brave" on purpose, since the state he refers to sits right at the border between fear and courage. It’s not about showing up like a hero, not about taming the fear. It’s just … “fearless”.

His book, Fearless: Creating the Courage to Change the Things You Can, manifests that attitude with plenty of real world scenarios.

His talk, Expectation vs Agreement, is something I’d recommend everyone to spend some time tinkering on.

Where to Find More Coaches to Study?

No, not ICF directory. Somehow it is the top answer I’d get whenever I ask about it, but it’s really a mess. Yes, the data is surely valuable, but there is no adequate user interface to tap into.

In my opinion, the most useful approach is to just search like you would if you were to find a coach for yourself. Asking AI agents also helps.

For example, I originally aspired to focus on coaching developers, and here are some case studies I found:

Outside of that, looking into some high quality coach directories also helps. e.g.,

I’d also like to mention some of the great coaches I had the privilege to work with in the past:

Tools

Here are some candidate tools I originally planned to study further if I ever grow over the free Calendly + Google docs + Google Meet combination:

Communities

  • The #coaching channel in Rands Leadership Slack: Highly recommended. There is regular coaching exchange, and plenty of high-quality conversation.
  • ReciproCoach: Technically speaking it’s not a community, but I still list it here since the whole point is to connect with other coaches through bartering and supervision. I haven’t done it, but I’ve heard positive experiences from other coaches.
  • Coaching Corner: a paid community that looks quite promising.

There is actually a CTI coaches group that I visit frequently, but it is for people who have joined CTI programs only, so I didn’t link it here.

Misc. Materials

Concluding Thoughts

Coaching is such a vibrant space. I wrote this essay as someone holding a telescope tracing its silhouette from a distance, not as an insider. “You can do it whatever way you want.” seems to be both the beauty and the unique challenge.

As aforementioned, I first aspired to become a coach for honing my leadership & people skills without a job. Looking back deeper, it’s simpler than that: I like the version of me after coaching. The deeply connected conversation works like an emotion catch-and-throw that amplifies me and the other party like an unlimited upper spiral. It brings out the best of me facing any other life situations afterward.

In Prosperous Coach, Steve Chandler categorizes coaches as pro coaches, part-time coaches, and Personal Growth coaches, emphasizing that anyone who doesn’t have a clear position will struggle. He is right. Maybe a Personal Growth coach is where I'll eventually settle?

Whoever reads this far, I’m sincerely grateful. Whichever route you take, hopefully this post could save you some time surfing on the web.