Coaching Practice - ICF Outgoing President - Steve Mitten Describes his Year As "Good but Not Easy."

Posted by Margaret Stead.

Public Categorized as Public.

Tagged with accrediting, chapters, core competencies, credentialing, ethics, icf, making a living, peer review, professional coach, professional coaching and regulatory.

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Challenges

"As a young profession, we still face many significant challenges. Too many of our members still struggle to make a good living at coaching. Too many potential customers still don’t know how to choose a good coach. Too few potential clients appreciate the great life, career and business changing benefits of working with a well trained, credentialed, professional coach. Our rate of growth as an emerging profession will require us to continue to evolve and examine how we can better support coaches in their own culture and communities around the world. And yet as we move forward to meet these challenges, we do so in an association that is better equipped than at any time in our history.

It has taken us 10 years and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours to put in place the foundation (core competencies, credentialing, accrediting, ethics, peer review, chapters, etc.) of a new profession. With the great work of our chapter leaders we have more chapters in more countries than ever before, with new ones forming all the time. With the hard work of our credentialing volunteers we have more people signing up for their ICF credential than ever before. ICF researchers are doing great work to better understand the impact of coaching. ICF regulatory volunteers stand ready to help educate legislators that we have the means to manage our own industry.

Through the good work of our staff, executive committee members, treasurer and board, we are in a stronger financial position than ever before. And through the efforts of our conference committee we have just completed the largest conference in our history.

As we end the first decade of our existence, we have much to be grateful for, and we are well poised to continue our efforts to take professional coaching out into the world with greater impact. ICF members have an important role to play in making this a much better world. I believe that, together, we are up to that challenge."