The banker has her palm flat on the table, the way she must once have chaired meetings.
"Can I just say what I'd do?" she asks, and doesn't wait for an answer.
Across from her, the architect stops halfway through a sentence about going back to work full time. Her coffee cup turns a slow quarter turn in her fingers. The banker's advice is sensible. It's also the third piece she's given this evening, and the architect hasn't asked for any of them.
This is week three of a six-week circle for women returning to work after years at home, in a meeting room Solveig books by the hour at a hotel in Al Garhoud. Five chairs, a jug of water, and a flip chart with three questions on it that nobody has looked at since the first round.
Solveig, who runs the circle, has coached people one to one for a year, and she's good at it. With a single client, she'd have heard the architect's half sentence and gone back for it. Tonight four other people's half sentences are in the air, and her eyes have followed the loudest voice round the table.
At the far end, the youngest woman hasn't said a word since week one. She's folding a paper napkin into smaller and smaller squares.
Solveig's pen is lying on the table. She set it down when the banker started talking, and she hasn't noticed.
Solveig and the women in her circle are composites, drawn for this guide.
What's the difference between group coaching and one-on-one coaching?
One-on-one coaching is one coach and one client, with the whole session built around that client's agenda. Group coaching brings several people with separate goals into one session, often around a situation they share. Each person still sets their own agenda, so the coach holds several at once, plus everything that passes between the people in the room.
If the people in the room share one goal and work side by side, that's team coaching, which has its own guide: team coaching in Dubai.
Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, looks at routes into training in the light of your craft, your market and the credentials you already hold. Her free Zoom takes twenty to forty minutes, and you can reserve one through the apply page. Or read on.
When should a new coach offer one to one, and when a group?
In our experience, most new coaches do better starting one to one. It's where you find out what your own sessions actually do, with only one person's reactions to read, and your own. It also suits the client whose subject is private, or who needs the whole hour.
A group suits people who share a moment rather than a goal. Going back to work after years at home. The first year as a manager. The first year in the UAE. In a circle like Solveig's, a woman can hear her own question in someone else's mouth, and sometimes that does what no question from a coach could.
What a group asks of the coach is different in kind. Watching five faces while listening to one. Making room for the quiet person without putting her on the spot. Stopping someone who's taking over, kindly, without the room going cold. Keeping each person's agenda theirs when peers start handing out answers.
In our experience, a good sequence is single clients first, then a group co-run beside a more experienced coach, then one of your own.
How do one-to-one and group sessions count toward ICF hours?
Start with one to one, since that's where most first hours come from. ICF's experience requirements page (checked on coachingfederation.org on 20 October 2026) defines the hour as "A full 60-minute session with a client who has hired you specifically as their coach". It adds: "If your session is shorter than 60 minutes, you can still count it, but as partial hours." Each one-to-one client is one client, and each full hour is one hour.
Groups follow their own rule. "Each participant in the team or group coaching sessions counts as an individual client." "However, the time spent coaching the team/group is not multiplied by the number of participants." And there's a limit: "Only groups of 15 or fewer will count, unless a co-coach is present." Where a co-coach is present, ICF says "the coaching time will be split between the coaches."
Two conditions decide whether a group session is coaching at all, in ICF's terms. For group and team clients, ICF says "the participants must set the agenda", with real-time interaction between coach and participants. It also says: "Training, teaching, mentor coaching, and facilitating workshops do not count as client coaching hours." A circle where each woman brings her own question counts. A talk you give to the same five women doesn't.
For a first credential, that matters. On the same page, ICF's ACC asks for 100 hours of coaching with at least eight clients (including at least 75 paid hours). Six one-hour sessions with a circle of five add five clients to your count and six hours to your total. A group adds to your client count faster than to your hours.
ICF also asks you to record group hours separately from individual ones, and practice circles inside your own coach training don't count. Our guide to keeping an ICF coaching log sets out what each row needs.
Why is holding a group a different skill from holding one person?
Because a group brings moments a single client never does, and the one new coaches tend to find hardest, in our experience, is the moment one person takes over.
In a one-to-one session, attention has one place to rest. The deeper kinds of listening we describe in levels of listening in coaching ask enough with one person. In a circle, the coach rests attention on the whole room and still has to catch the half sentence.
Solveig grew up the youngest of three sisters in Trondheim. Whenever an aunt or a neighbour turned to the girls with a question, the eldest answered for all three, and Solveig went back to her plate. She remembers liking it. Nobody needed anything from her.
She still lives by what those gatherings taught her, without ever having looked at it: when someone louder has the floor, you can rest. It lives in her hands. Whenever someone else takes over the talking, her hands put down whatever they're holding, a fork then, a pen now.
So when the banker took over, Solveig rested, and the circle carried on without its coach. The architect's half sentence and the youngest woman's silence were what that rest cost.
That rule is Solveig's own material, not her circle's. In our training, a trainee's version of it, wherever it was learned, is worked on inside the cohort and under supervision before any circle relies on them. That work is removal.
A circle finds a coach's unexamined habits quickly, and that's one reason RSCI is built on a single principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
Spotting your own version of that rest can come later. If you'd like to talk about training with someone who has supervised practitioners herself, Sara's free Zoom is the place: it's a conversation about whether one of our programmes fits you. Ask Sara about the programmes.
How do you decide which clients belong in a group?
Run a sort on the next people who ask you about coaching. It takes half an hour and a sheet of paper.
- List the next six people who've asked about working with you. Initials are enough.
- Beside each, write what they want in their own words. The words they used, not a category.
- Mark anyone whose subject sounds private. A family matter, a decision about leaving a job, something they haven't told anyone at work. Those are one-to-one conversations.
- Look for a moment several of them share. Coming back to work, a first year in a new role, a first year in the country. Three or four people at the same crossing could become a circle.
- Test the possible circle against ICF's conditions. Each person sets their own agenda, fifteen or fewer people or a co-coach beside you, and coaching in real time. If what you're planning is teaching, it's a workshop.
- Write the one opening question you'd ask everyone in it. The same question for each person, and one that hands each of them their own agenda.
- Ask each person which they'd prefer, and go with the answer. Some people find a circle easier to speak in. Others find it harder, and they know which they are.
What does RSCI's training give a coach who starts one to one?
Group coaching isn't on the list of what either of our programmes includes, so we won't claim to teach it. What the programmes do include is training for the single chair this article recommends starting in, and three things about it are true.
- A method for the single chair. RS Method Coach lists "Core RS Method methodology" among what's included. RS Method Complete lists "The complete RS Method framework".
- Your own development treated as part of the job. Our training page names one person the programmes may not suit, anyone who'd say: "You believe the practitioner's own development is irrelevant to the quality of their work."
- ICF education inside, stated exactly. In the page's words: "RS Method Coach includes ICF Level 1 education. RS Method Complete includes ICF Level 2 education." 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.
RS Method Coach, mostly online and self-paced with live training days, is AED 18,000 with ICF education included. RS Method Complete is AED 35,000 with ICF education included.
Our razor doesn't say how many chairs are in the room. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Here's a sentence nobody else could have said for him. Marko Mladenovic, three years on: "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?" It speaks for Marko only.
Read what each programme includes, bullet by bullet, on our life coach training page, and notice what's there and what isn't.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If someone has already asked you to run a group, tell them you'll answer next week, and spend part of that week on our life coach training page.