Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain why it’s important to work with the client’s subjective, constructed experience, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all coaching approach.
• Explain how the brain creates psychological states and our personal reality, and why this matters for coaching.
• Take a neuroconstructionist approach when working with first-order change (behavior change).
• Describe why a constructionist, neuroscience-informed approach changes what coaching works on.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the Ideal Self as a key driver of purposeful change and sustained motivation.
• Explore the contrast between the Ideal Self and the Ought Self, and how each shapes emotional and cognitive states.
• Understand how envisioning a desired future self supports openness to new ideas, future-oriented thinking, and long-term goal orientation.
• Use evidence-based coaching strategies to help clients articulate a clear, emotionally resonant vision of who they want to become.
• Integrate the Ideal Self into coaching sessions, helping clients develop identity-based goals that align who they want to become with their daily actions.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explain the importance of personal vision and purpose in giving direction and meaning to change.
• Understand the role of positive and negative emotional attractors in opening clients up to change or narrowing them into defensiveness.
• Help clients articulate a personal vision that captures what they want their life and work to be about.
• Help clients clarify their core values, and distinguish them from preferences, habits, and inherited expectations.
• Use a neuroscience-informed approach to understand how values guide what clients notice, prioritize, and find rewarding.
• Coach with curiosity to connect a client’s vision and values to the goals and decisions in front of them.
• Help clients recognize when their actions are out of step with their values, and identify small, values-aligned steps forward.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Explore how the brain constructs meaning from language and experience, and why this matters in coaching conversations.
• Learn how to identify and unpack the subjective meaning behind the words clients use to avoid assumptions and misinterpretations.
• Practice “slowing down” to surface the deeper cognitive and emotional frames driving client behavior.
• Understand how meaning is actively constructed by each person’s brain, shaped by prior experiences, values, and identity.
• Apply neuroscience-informed strategies to co-create new perspectives and meaning structures that support desired change.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Understand the neuroscience of how habits are formed, so you can help clients to start taking charge of the habits that impact their life.
• Identify the specific behaviors and habits that need to change to unlock potential.
• Leverage the brain's valuation system to "tip" into a new behavior and reinforce it for long-term change.
• Know when to use motivation, immediate action, or micro celebration to establish and reinforce new behaviors.
• Examine the neuroscience of motivation: how the brain assigns subjective value and how this shapes goals, decision-making, and behavior.
• Draw from the neuroscience-based habit formation map, so you know exactly what part of the habit process to focus on for rapid and lasting change.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Use evidence-based behavior change strategies to help clients define their ideal future and recognize their obstacles to success.
• Identify when to shift from visioning and future-oriented questioning to problem solving and planning (timing this correctly accelerates results).
• Help clients gain insight into the barriers preventing them from changing their behavior.
• Create an action plan so that clients know exactly what to work on, and can start taking action immediately (an invaluable but often overlooked step in behavior change).

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Help clients work with the brain’s affective and emotional “systems.”
• Describe to clients how the brain makes emotions, so they understand they have more influence over their experience than they think.
• Use affect awareness and values-based action to manage emotional states during goal pursuit.
• Help clients develop an acceptance-based way of being, so they’re less derailed by unhelpful emotions as they meet obstacles and challenges in pursuing their goals.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe the how, why and when of insight and analytical thinking as thought-modalities for problem solving and decision making.
• Highlight why the biggest issue when faced with a problem or decision is not the problem or decision itself, but the brain's response, and how to address it.
• Utilize a neuroscience-based coaching process to facilitate insight-solutions to problems.

Upon completion of this unit you will be able to:

• Describe the differences between permanent and personal domains of human concern.
• Design the domains of concern that clients will observe and assess their lives with.
• Bring clients' awareness to the unavoidable concerns of life, so they can act to take care of them.
• Develop a life concerns map for each client, to help guide them toward a new way of being.

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:

• 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.