The farewell dinner was on a dhow on Dubai Creek, and before dessert three different people told Tomasz the same thing. You should coach.
He'd spent twenty-two years in construction, the last six as chief operating officer of a contractor with sites across the Gulf. He'd rescued two failing projects, sat through one painful merger and promoted more people than he could count. Mentoring them had always been the part of the job he liked best.
Two weeks later, a former site manager asks him for coffee in Al Seef. She's been offered a regional role and isn't sure she wants it. Tomasz listens for about four minutes. Then he tells her about the regional role he took in 2011, what he got wrong, and what she should negotiate before she says yes. She thanks him warmly and leaves with a plan.
Driving home along the creek, he realises it was his plan. He never found out why she wasn't sure.
He has the career. What he doesn't have yet is the rest of the route.
How do you become an executive coach in Dubai?
You build three things and let them carry each other: a leadership track record that tells senior clients you know their world, coach-specific training that leads to an ICF credential, and a method for the moments a session drops below the role. If you've led for years, you may already have the first. The other two are built.
Executive coaching usually means coaching senior leaders, often with their organisation as the sponsor. We've set out how it differs from leadership coaching, and which of the two a new coach can offer first, in executive coaching vs leadership coaching. This guide is about the route for someone who has already led.
What does a leadership career count for, and what doesn't it?
More than you might fear, and less than you might hope.
It counts for three things.
Fluency. You know what a board pack is, what quarter-end feels like and what it costs to let a good person go. A senior client won't have to explain their world from scratch.
Credibility with sponsors. When an organisation pays, someone has to trust you with a senior person's time. A career they recognise helps.
Pattern recognition. You've watched leaders struggle under pressure, often up close and sometimes in the mirror.
It doesn't count for three others.
Coaching hours. ICF counts coaching experience completed after you begin your coach education or training (coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026). Twenty years of mentoring before that start date don't go in the log, however good they were.
Coaching skill. Mentoring and coaching overlap, but they're different seats. A mentor shares what worked for them. A coach helps a client find what's true for the client, which is exactly the step Tomasz skipped at the café.
Restraint. The more you've lived, the more stories you have that fit someone else's situation. A senior client may not need another senior person's war story. Many of them have a drawer full already.
If you'd like to look at your own career with someone who knows this route well, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, offers a free Zoom of twenty to forty minutes. Bring the CV, and expect her to be more curious about the person who wrote it. You can book it through our apply page. Or read on.
Which ICF credential should a future executive coach aim for?
In our experience, most new coaches reach the Associate Certified Coach (ACC) first and work toward the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) as their hours grow. The ICF's experience rules for both, including how many hours must be paid and why coaching your own direct reports never counts, are set out in our guides to ICF ACC requirements and ICF PCC in Dubai.
Which credential an executive buyer looks for varies. Our ACC vs PCC page sets out where each tends to be expected, and in our experience PCC comes up more often the more senior the people being coached. Ask each organisation what it looks for rather than guessing.
The education level is the choice you make up front. ICF describes Level 2 programmes as the education path to the PCC, with 125 to 175 hours of coach-specific education (coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026), and Level 2 doesn't oblige you to wait for PCC hours before you apply for anything. In the words of our life coach training page: "If you first meet the requirements for ACC, you may pursue ACC and later progress to PCC as your professional coaching experience accumulates."
Why isn't a strong career enough on its own?
Go back to the café. Tomasz knows dozens of good questions, and what happened at minute four had nothing to do with questions. His former site manager said "I'm not sure", and something in him moved to close the gap before he'd decided anything.
That move didn't start in construction. Somewhere much earlier, being the one with the answer became how he stayed wanted. Every promotion since has paid him for it, and it now looks like decisiveness.
Every pattern, in the RS Method's language, is a thought fused to a charge. Tomasz's thought could be put in a few words: not knowing makes me surplus to requirements. Over coffee with a friend, he'd laugh at it. In a session he doesn't get the chance, because the charge, the weight his body attached to that sentence a long time ago, moves faster than his judgement. Our work goes after the weight, not the sentence. Once the weight has gone, he can still remember where the reflex came from. It simply stops making his decisions, and a client's "I'm not sure" becomes somewhere he can stay.
At RSCI that sequence is the foundation: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Your relationship with being the one who knows is looked at in you, in the cohort and under supervision, before you're asked to sit opposite someone who runs a company. In our experience, senior clients test that relationship early, usually without meaning to.
If you recognise the café, a free conversation with Sara is a sensible next step. She'll ask what you want to do with the career you've had, and what you'd want a client to find in you that a CV can't show. Book your conversation here.
How do you turn a leadership career into coaching material?
Try this heat test before you write a coaching bio. It takes about an hour and a pen.
- List the five hardest situations you led through. A turnaround, a merger, a dismissal you still think about. One line each.
- Under each, write what it taught you about people. Not about the business. About what people do when they're frightened, proud or out of their depth.
- Cross out every line that reads as advice. "Always negotiate before you accept" is a lesson for you. A client has to find their own.
- Tell each story out loud, alone, in two minutes. Notice which ones still carry heat: a tight jaw, a need to justify, an urge to explain who was wrong.
- Circle the hot ones. They're the stories you'll be most tempted to tell a client, and the places where your own material sits closest to the surface.
- Write one sentence a sponsor could repeat. Who you coach and what changes for them, with no mention of your old title.
What survives step 3 is the part of your career a client can use. What you circled in step 5 is where your own work starts.
Which programme suits someone who has already led?
Look for these three properties in any programme you consider. Here's how each one reads at RSCI.
- A credential route matched to where you are now. RS Method Coach includes ICF Level 1 education toward the ACC. RS Method Complete includes ICF Level 2 education, and a graduate whose experience meets the ACC requirements may pursue the ACC first and progress toward the PCC as their hours accumulate.
- Live practice in which someone corrects you. Our training page describes the live work plainly: "Work directly with Robert and the RS Method Master Coach team. Watch demonstrations. Practise. Get corrected. Do it again." For someone used to being the most senior person in the room, that's often the hardest part.
- Your own career as material, not only as credentials. The pull Tomasz felt at the café is found and worked on in you, with supervision, before you're trusted with a client's.
With ICF education included, RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 and RS Method Complete is AED 35,000. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF. Our students' passing rate on the ICF ACC exam so far is 100%. That's a fact of record, not a promise.
Underneath the letters is one razor. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Some of what this work reaches has no job title attached. Marko Mladenovic, three years on, put his own words to it: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?" That's Marko speaking about Marko, and it forecasts nothing for you or for anyone you'll coach.
The full route, from choosing your education level to applying to the ICF, is laid out step by step in our guide to ICF certification in Dubai.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If this is one of the evenings when the old job feels further away than the new one, spend ten minutes with the step-by-step route on our ICF certification in Dubai page. It shows what the months ahead would actually involve.