ICF is the International Coaching Federation which is the leading global organization for coaching. ICF is dedicated to advancing the coaching profession by setting high standards, providing independent certification and building a worldwide network of trained coaching professionals.

In order to become ICF ACC Certified, a coach needs to complete extensive training, 100+ coaching hours, and commit to follow the strict regulation standards and practices. To maintain ICF ACC certification, coaches need continuing education credits in addition to periodic mentor coaching.

Executive coaching leads to bottom line improvements, professionally and personally. Coaching enables clients to perform at their peak performance and evolve into their best selves. Everyone can benefit from continual learning, growth, and development. Just as a sports professional has a personal coach to refine and improve their athletic skills, clients benefit from having a personal coach to improve their overall capabilities and performance.

Clients come into a coaching session with a topic in mind – an idea, thought, problem, goal, or something specific they want to discuss and explore further. Through active listening, appreciative inquiry, and insightful conversation clients leave the session with achievable action steps to make positive progress.

Coaching is a discovery-based process where the client is led to create the solution within themselves. Through coaching, clients are empowered and accountable for their own success. Coaching enables the client to make decisions based on their individual values, insights, and goals. Skilled coaches trust their clients to find out what internally drives them and discover their own aspirations.

Mentoring is when a more experienced person guides a less experienced person based on their own lived experiences. A mentor offers advice, their personal perspective, and guidance.

Consultants are hired because of their specific expertise. Often consultants assess a company’s practices and offer recommended solutions for improvement.

Hogan Personality assessments increase self awareness which leads to improved performance. You can think about personality in two ways: identity and reputation. Most assessments on the market measure identity—a self-assessment of who you think you are. While this can be useful for introspection and self-reflection, we are generally poor judges of ourselves. For example, everyone likes to think of themselves as being good drivers. However, a trip during rush hour traffic will tell you that this is not true. In other words, we like to think of ourselves as the hero or heroine of our own story, but sadly that often doesn’t line up with reality.

In contrast, Hogan measures personality in terms of reputation—who others think you are. Reputation is far more consequential in the world of work because your career trajectory is based upon how others evaluate you. Moreover, reputation is a superior way to measure personality for a few reasons. First, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Therefore, your reputation is the best way to predict how you will behave in the future. Secondly, reputation is easy to study—we simply ask other people to describe you. Lastly, a wealth of research exists that links reputation to occupational performance. Therefore, focusing on reputation, rather than identity, allows us to predict job performance.

Based on ICF Global Coaching Client Studies, coaching improves work performance, time management, team effectiveness and business management. In addition, the studies also show coaching improves self-confidence, relationships, communication skills and work/life balance. Coaching is an investment in yourself.

Heidi has over 25+ years of experience as a corporate leader and more than 200+ hours of coaching experience. With her warm demeanor and instinctive curiosity, Heidi’s supportive style enables her clients to uncover new insights, ideas, and strategies to take actions to succeed.