Maricel reads her new About line aloud to her sister on a video call, and hears how it sounds halfway through.
"I'm a positive psychology coach with a neuroscience-based, NLP-informed, transformational approach."
Her sister, who teaches maths in Manila, waits a moment. "That's four things," she says. "Which one are you?"
Maricel finished her coach training eight months ago. Since then she's done a weekend course in one approach, two webinars on another and a free module in a third. Each of the four words is true of something she's studied, and each looked right on someone else's website. Read out together, they sound like a menu.
After the call she opens her notes from last Tuesday's session and looks for the place where any of the four changed what she actually did. She finds one, possibly.
Maricel is a composite. Her About line isn't unusual.
What are the main coaching approaches?
The four approaches a new coach is most likely to meet are positive psychology coaching, neuroscience-based coaching, NLP and transformational coaching. Each is a lens: it shapes what a coach pays attention to and which tools they reach for. None of them is a credential, and none replaces the basic skills of coaching underneath.
They aren't rivals, either. Plenty of good coaches draw on more than one. The questions worth asking of each are what it adds, what it claims, and whether a course in it will change what you do with a client in the room.
What does each approach add, and what does it claim?
Each of them, at its best, gives a coach something real. Here's what to look for in each.
Positive psychology coaching. It draws on positive psychology, a field of research into wellbeing and what helps people do well, rather than only into what goes wrong. In coaching it usually shows up as attention to a client's strengths, values and what's already working. What it adds is a habit of looking at the whole person, not just the problem they walked in with. Where a course says research stands behind a tool, ask which research, and how the course teaches you to use that tool with care.
Neuroscience-based coaching. Courses under this name use ideas from brain research to explain things clients meet every day, such as habits, stress, attention and change. At its best it gives coach and client a shared, blame-free way of talking about why change can feel hard. Claims in this area vary a great deal from one course to the next, and we make none of our own here. A good course says where each idea comes from, and keeps the coaching and the science clearly apart.
NLP. Neuro-linguistic programming is a set of models about how people think, speak and respond, which many coaches use inside their sessions. What it adds is precision: an ear for the exact words a client chooses, and for how a reaction builds. We've set out where it fits in NLP coaching vs life coaching.
Transformational coaching. This works on who the client is being, not only on what they do next: the identity and patterns underneath the goals. It adds depth for the client who reaches every target and still feels the same. Our guide to what transformational coaching is covers it in full.
All four are ways of directing a coach's attention. None of them, on its own, tells you how to stay with a client when a session goes somewhere you didn't expect.
If you're weighing which training to choose, and which approach it should rest on, you can put that question to an RS Method Master Practitioner on a free call on Google Meet. It's a conversation about whether our programmes suit what you want to do, and by the apply page's own estimate it takes "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes". Make a booking. Or read on.
How can you tell a method from a marketing label?
By what it changes in the second minute of a session.
A label describes a coach. A method describes what the coach does. Any of the four approaches above can be either, depending on the course behind it. "Neuroscience-based" on a page can mean months of careful, supervised training, or a short introduction. "Transformational" can mean a coherent way of working with identity, or a broad description of the work. The name alone won't tell you which.
In our experience, four questions separate the two.
- Can it be described in steps? A method can tell you what the coach does first, what comes next and when to stop. A label can only tell you what the coach is called.
- Will you practise it, with someone watching? A method is trained in real sessions, with feedback. A label can be picked up in an afternoon.
- Does it say what it doesn't do? Every serious approach has limits, and says when a client needs a different kind of help.
- Does it change you, or only your vocabulary? After the course, would a client notice anything different about you in the room?
Our guide to the ICF core competencies walks through what ICF asks of every coach.
The same four questions apply when a school describes its own method. Put them to RSCI as readily as to anyone.
Why do new coaches collect labels?
Because a label can feel like protection, and protection is scarce in a new practice.
Maricel's last job was as an HR business partner at an airline. In her fourth year there was a restructuring. She sat in a meeting room while a director read out which roles would continue, and she noticed that the roles nobody could sum up in one line went first. Hers survived. That afternoon she rewrote her own job description three times.
She walked out of that meeting room twelve years ago, and part of her never did. Somewhere along the way it hardened into a quiet rule: be easy to name, or be next. The About line isn't really marketing. It's four name badges on one lanyard, worn against the fear that someone in the room is deciding who stays.
In sessions, the badges cost her. When a client goes quiet, her shoulders tighten and she reaches for whichever approach feels most defensible, so that if anyone asked, she could say exactly what she was doing. The client doesn't need a defensible coach. The client needs one who stays.
That fear can leave her where it began, in the meeting room with the list being read aloud, and take the tightening in her shoulders with it. Once that fear goes, she can choose an approach for what it gives a client.
That order runs through everything RSCI trains: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
A lanyard like Maricel's is worth taking to the free call as it is, badges and all. Ask there whether RSCI's training would work on it with you. Arrange it here.
How do you find out which approach you actually use?
Run a session replay. It takes about half an hour, with your notes from one recent session.
- Pick a session that mattered. One where something shifted, or one where nothing did and you wish it had.
- Write down the three moments you remember most. A question, a silence, a turn in the conversation. Keep each one to a line.
- Beside each moment, write what you did. The question you asked, the tool you used, or the pause you left.
- Name where it came from. Which training, which approach, or none you can name. "None" is a perfectly good answer.
- Ask whether you chose it or reached for it. Choosing tends to be for the client. Reaching tends to be for you.
- Circle the moment the client went furthest. Note which approach was running then, if any was.
- Write one line about what you'd want more of. That line, rather than a label, is the best guide to what you train in next.
In our experience, coaches who try this find fewer approaches at work than their website lists, and often one moment where none of them was running and the session went deepest anyway.
Where does the RS Method sit, and what does training in it involve?
The RS Method is Robert Simic's method, founded in 2007, and it's the method RSCI trains. It isn't positive psychology coaching or neuroscience-based coaching, and we don't present it as brain science. It's its own method, and it works on identity, not only on goals. Three things describe how it's trained.
- It works by removal, then recognition. Our method page names two movements, Unbecome and Remember, and says of the second: "The second movement is recognition." What a client has been carrying comes away first, and what's left is recognised rather than taught.
- Trainees go through it before they use it. In the method page's words, "Every RSCI pathway sequences inner work before outer practice." Your own material is the first thing worked on in training, long before anyone else's is in your care.
- The ICF side, stated as it is. Each programme has ICF-accredited education built in, at Level 1 for RS Method Coach and Level 2 for RS Method Complete. 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.
Whichever approach a coach trains in, the job in the room is the one we train to. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Erin Kurt, about the business she runs: "My business literally tripled within 6 months."
The method behind both our programmes is set out on The Method.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Maricel's sister asked a fair question, and four words couldn't answer it. If you'd like to see how RSCI describes its own way of working, read The Method.