Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe how psychological life is actively constructed by core psychological ingredients that are managed by intrinsic brain networks, rather than produced by fixed mental faculties.
• Explain how traditional interventions target outputs (e.g., behavior, thought, or emotion), whereas lasting transformation requires revising the brain’s generative model: the predictive architecture that constructs meaning, experience, sense of self, and view of the world.
• Understand how prior learning shapes perception, action, and identity, and guide coachees to construct new ways of being that expand their range of effective actions.
• Use the principles of psychological construction and predictive processing to support deep, system-wide change across emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the self as an active construction: a predictive self-model that forecasts who the coachee is, what they can do, and what is possible for them, rather than a fixed identity waiting to be discovered.
• Revisit the Ideal Self and Ought Self through a neuroconstructionist lens, distinguishing self-authored aspirations from inherited “shoulds” and recognizing how each shapes motivation, emotion, and action.
• Recognize how identity priors (long-held beliefs about who one is) limit a coachee’s range of effective action, and why goals that conflict with the self-model tend to stall.
• Help coachees construct an Ideal Self that is vivid and coherent enough to act as a new prediction: one they can rehearse, test, and gather evidence for in daily life.
• Work with the gap between current and ideal self without triggering threat, using small identity-consistent actions that update the self-model one experience at a time.
• Use the Self Band to locate where a coachee’s self-construction is generating stuckness, and choose the lightest intervention that resolves it.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand meaning-making as an active, predictive process that constructs personal reality through language and prior experience.
• Recognize how language both reflects and shapes a coachee’s conceptual scaffolding, including identity, values, and perceived possibilities.
• Gain insight into your own linguistic patterns and how they generate psychological experiences, emotions, and actions.
• Identify and work with the structure of meaning-making—including categories and concepts—to help coachees loosen rigid interpretations and construct more adaptive realities.
• Use the Change Cycle to loosen automatic meaning patterns, surface underlying rigid conceptual structures, and open space for new interpretations and shifts in self-perception.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe the role of somatic awareness in shaping experience, and how attending to bodily signals can support self-awareness, relationships, and performance.
• Distinguish between interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness, and guide coachees in shifting flexibly between internal states and external cues to construct a more useful, adaptive map of their experience.
• Explain how core affect—arising from bodily signals—underpins all psychological states, including perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior.
• Facilitate somatic and embodied shifts that allow coachees to move from reactive states to more grounded, coherent ways of being.
• Help coachees notice postures and physiological habits that accompany unhelpful patterns, and use somatic cues to support shifts in meaning.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Distinguish between a virtue or strength as a trait a coachee has and a Principle they choose to stand for, and why only the second changes how they act.
• Work with virtues and character strengths to help coachees identify the strengths that already serve them and the ones a situation calls for.
• Help coachees embody a strength as a way of being: clarifying what it means to them, recalling a time they lived it, and feeling how they stand, speak and act from it.
• Apply an embodied strength to a specific task or goal, and test it in action through a single real-world experiment.
• Help coachees identify a guiding philosophy, such as stoicism, existentialism or one of their own, and draw on it deliberately as a stable anchor in a current challenge.
• Recognize when a coachee’s stuckness is a Core Motives bottleneck: the meaning supports the move and the body is settled, but the action still conflicts with what matters to them.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Recognize the signs of a values conflict: “I know I should, but…”, ambivalence that persists after the meaning is clear, and follow-through that collapses into delay, over-preparation or appeasement.
• Distinguish stable Principles from situational Priorities, and understand why a move fails when the priority a coachee is protecting isn’t the one their goal needs.
• Tell a genuine priority clash (two values both held, such as candor and the relationship) from a moralized polarity (one value fused to a loaded axis, such as rest read as laziness), and route each to the right kind of work.
• Use the Protected-Value Move to name the value that must not be sacrificed, foreground the priority that should lead, and design one small action that honors both.
• Help coachees resolve recurring conflicts, such as perfection vs. momentum, honesty vs. kindness, or ambition vs. rest, without abandoning either value.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Integrate conceptual, somatic, and affective coaching moves to support second-order change.
• Facilitate deeper shifts by working with concept relations and category expansion across multiple domains of experience.
• Recognize when and how to combine interventions across the conceptual, affective, and motivational domains of the NCC model.
• Support coachees in reorganizing predictive scaffolding that maintains rigid identity and behavior patterns.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Identify and work with deeper-level conceptual polarities, such as identity, moral meaning, and unspoken life rules.
• Facilitate conceptual polarity shifts at the level of self-concept, life philosophy, and existential concern.
• Help coachees revise limiting identity narratives and integrate new self-concepts that allow for greater emotional range and behavioral flexibility.
• Apply linguistic tools to loosen rigid language patterns and open space for new meaning-making pathways.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain how emotions are not fixed responses but constructed experiences, shaped by interoception and conceptual knowledge, in context.
• Distinguish between affect, mood, and emotion, and describe how each contributes to a coachee’s psychological experience and way of being.
• Help coachees identify and reconstruct the conceptual scaffolding that gives emotional states their meaning, revealing greater agency over how they feel and respond.
• Recognize emotional patterns that arise from rigid or outdated predictions, and guide coachees toward more adaptive interpretations.
• Facilitate embodied emotional shifts that integrate both somatic and cognitive insight, promoting coherence across thought, feeling, and action.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the PsychASSETS^® model and its relevance to motivation, behavior, and emotional experience.
• Identify unmet psychological needs that underpin coachees’ recurring challenges.
• Use the needs framework to support prediction revision, motivation realignment, and deeper emotional coherence.
• Help coachees meet their needs in more adaptive, value-aligned, and self-authored ways.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Build on Reconstructing Emotional Meaning to distinguish different levels of emotional construction, from core affect to complex constructed emotions.
• Identify the motivational drivers and conceptual scaffolding underlying recurring emotional states.
• Link persistent emotional themes to the unmet needs identified in Working With Psychological Needs.
• Guide emotional transformation by reconstructing emotional interpretations at the level of both body and meaning.
• Apply the NCC model to increase emotional awareness, uncover the origin of emotional states, and support values-aligned, adaptive responses.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand attention as a key modulator in the brain’s construction of experience—amplifying, filtering, and shaping what becomes psychologically real in any moment.
• Develop the capacity to capture, hold, and skillfully redirect a coachee’s attention to facilitate real-time shifts in perception, meaning, and behavior.
• Apply Neuroconstructionist Alchemy™—a specific class of language patterns that disrupt rigid interpretations and invite new constructs, concept relations, and ways of being.
• Use advanced linguistic techniques to dissolve cognitive and emotional rigidity, deepen presence, and create space for transformational insight.
• Recognize and intervene when attentional patterns reinforce maladaptive constructs, helping coachees experience new options for seeing, feeling, and acting.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe what coaching is and give examples of different coaching approaches.
• Articulate your own coaching philosophy.
• Recognize and understand the ICF Competency Standards.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe what distinguishes coaching from other support professions.
• Define client-centered coaching and explain the importance of the coaching relationship.
• Explain the link between the ICF performance indicators for Cultivates Trust & Safety and Maintains Presence and unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathic understanding.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain three of the foundation principles of solution-focused coaching.
• See clients as competent, resilient and resourceful, and build on those resources to create change.
• Help clients take action and grow without first needing to explain their problems.
• Help clients focus on positive outcomes, not the eradication of a problem.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Define ‘be’ goals and ‘do’ goals and give examples.
• Explain what is meant by ‘goals as incentives’.
• Explain what determines the choice and pursuit of goals that clients set for themselves.
• Give examples of what will assist clients to think about goals from different perspectives.
• Demonstrate how to work with a client to set & pursue goals based on expectations and free fantasies.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Apply the 7 Step Coaching Format to the Initial Session.
• Provide examples of solution-focused coaching (SFC) Signature Questions for the Initial Session for each step in the 7 Step Coaching Format.
• Summarize the minimum skill requirements for the ICF Competencies Listens Actively and Evokes Awareness.
• List the SFC signature questions for the Initial Session - goal setting.
• List the SFC signature questions for Second & Subsequent Sessions - committed action.
• Demonstrate how the SFC signature questions for Second & Subsequent Sessions can be utilized in an observed coaching session.
• Apply the SFC signature questions for Ending the Work - recognition of and reflection on achievement.
• Explain the temporal map of coaching model.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• List SFC signature questions for decision-making and coaching in challenging situations.
• Explain the Choice Point Model (Acceptance and Commitment).
• Apply the Choice Point Model as a SFC approach to procrastination.