The bio is ninety words long, and the first eleven are a job title.
Constanza has pasted it into a message to Lachlan, who trained alongside her, with one question underneath: "Does this sound like a coach?"
It opens: "Former regional procurement director with fifteen years in consumer goods." It closes: "ICF Certified Coach."
Lachlan's reply comes back in two parts. The first is a question mark beside the last line, because Constanza finished her ICF-accredited education in the spring and hasn't applied to ICF for anything yet. The second is a sentence she once said during a practice session, which he has typed out from memory: "I spent fifteen years getting the best price out of people, and I'd like to spend the next fifteen finding out what they actually want."
"That one," he writes. "Where's that one?"
Constanza and Lachlan are made up. The two problems in her draft are common ones.
What should a coaching bio say?
A coaching bio should say who you coach, what tends to change for them, how you work, and which credentials you hold, each one worded exactly. In our experience, the line that persuades most readers comes from your own story, the reason you do this work, more often than from the job title you left behind.
Everything else is supporting detail: where you trained, the settings you work in, languages, whether you work online or in person. A bio for a coaching directory, a company proposal and a workshop flyer will each need a different length, and the core stays the same.
If you haven't yet picked a training, and so what your bio will one day be able to say, start by booking RSCI's free call with an RS Method Master Coach. It runs "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes", according to the apply page. Reserve your call. Or read on.
Who do you coach, and what changes for them?
These are the first two sentences, and most readers decide on them.
Who. Name a person, not a market. "I coach people" includes everyone and reaches nobody. "I coach mid-career professionals who are good at their jobs and no longer sure the jobs are theirs" lets the right reader recognise themselves. If you can't name the who yet, that's useful information, and worth settling before any bio.
What changes. Describe the change your clients come for, in words a client would use about their own life. "Clients often come to me when they've stopped trusting their own decisions" is a description. "I'll double your confidence in ninety days" is a promise, and no coach can keep a promise about another person's inner life. Leave out guarantees about a future client and anything about what they'll earn.
How. One sentence on how you work is enough: one to one or in groups, over how many weeks, in person or online. Readers want to picture the first session, not study your methodology.
A useful test for all three: would a client who read only this paragraph know whether to get in touch?
How do you word your credentials exactly?
This is where Constanza's question mark comes in, and it's the part of a bio that carries a real risk.
There are three different things a new coach might hold, and they're often blurred: a school's own certificate, ICF-accredited education, and an ICF credential such as the ACC or PCC. The difference is set out in detail in the three meanings of certified. For a bio, the rule is short. Write only what you hold, name who issued it, and never let the education stand in for the credential.
Our own pages say this directly. The FAQ on our ICF certification page asks "Does completing a training programme make me ICF certified?" and answers "No, and this catches people out." The same page puts it in four words: "ICF awards the credential." (Both read on robertsimiccoachinginstitute.com, checked on 2 November 2026.)
In practice, that gives a few safe patterns:
- Still in training. Name the programme and say you're in it: "currently training in RS Method Coach".
- Training finished, no ICF credential yet. Name the programme and the education level: "completed RS Method Coach (RSCI), with ICF-accredited Level 1 education designed, delivered and certified by IICM, the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring". Not "ICF certified", and not "ICF coach".
- An ICF credential awarded. Name it and its awarding body, for example "ACC, awarded by the International Coaching Federation", and keep it current.
- Other certificates. Name each one with the organisation that issued it, so a reader can check.
For RSCI's programmes, the wording to keep in mind is ours too. 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.
Constanza's last line, then, would read something like "Completed RS Method Coach (RSCI), with ICF-accredited Level 1 education designed, delivered and certified by IICM, the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring." Each name sits beside the thing it issued, and no ICF credential is claimed. It's longer than "ICF Certified Coach", and it's true.
Why does your own story make a stronger line than your old title?
Because a title tells a reader what you used to do, and a story tells them why you're here.
Constanza's title isn't wrong, and it belongs in the bio. It tells a procurement team she speaks their language. What it can't say is why someone who was good at that job would leave it, and that's the question a prospective client is quietly asking about any coach: what have you lived that makes you safe to sit with?
So why did eleven words of title go first? Constanza would say habit. It goes back further than that.
She can name the meeting where it set: a supplier negotiation, years back, where she was the youngest person in the room. Before she'd sat down, the supplier's managing director looked past her and asked, "And who are you?" She gave her title, with the company's name in front of it, and the room changed. He sat up. He used her name. From then on, whenever someone asked who she was, something in her reached for the title the way you reach for a coat when a room turns cold. It worked for fifteen years, in rooms where it was exactly the right coat to wear.
A bio is a cold room of its own: strangers reading, deciding who you are. So the coat comes out first, and the sentence Lachlan remembered stays in the drawer.
When that chill no longer lives in her, the title can sit where it's useful, as one fact among others, lower down, and the first line can be the one she actually believes. Nothing about that rewrite is clever. It just needs nothing in her to be cold any more.
At RSCI the coat comes before the copy, every time: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. A coat noticed in training seldom makes it onto the page.
Plenty of new coaches reach for a coat like Constanza's without noticing it. The free call is the place to find out whether RSCI suits you for finding yours. Speak with a Master Coach.
How do you write a coaching bio, step by step?
Give it one evening and three drafts. The steps take about an hour and a half.
- Write tonight's version without stopping. Don't edit. Put it away for a day.
- Underline every phrase that names a job you no longer do. Move them all to a single sentence near the end. Keep them, just lower down.
- Answer one question aloud before you write it: "Why this work, and why now?" Say it to someone you trust, or to your phone's voice recorder, then write down the sentence you'd least want to cut.
- Name who you coach in the words a client would use about themselves. Not "leaders in transition". Try "people who've been promoted past the work they loved".
- Describe what changes, as a client would describe it. No guarantee about a future client, and no claim about income.
- Check every credential word against a short list. What it is, who issued it, and whether you hold it today. Delete "certified" anywhere you can't name the body that certified you.
- Read the first two sentences on their own. If they don't tell a stranger who you coach and why you do it, start the draft from your answer to step 3.
- Date it, and read it again after your next ten sessions. Bios go stale faster than people expect, usually in the "who" line.
Quoting a client needs their permission in writing, for the precise sentence you'll use, and with nothing that points to who they are unless they've agreed to that as well. Where that consent should live, alongside a client's other records, is part of setting up a coaching practice.
Step 3 can bring up more than a sentence. This is a writing exercise, and it isn't therapy or medical care. Treatment you're already having continues alongside it, and recovery comes first: your programme and your people stay.
What does an RSCI trainee's bio rest on?
Three things, each of them part of how our programmes are built.
- A credential line you can write without hedging. RS Method Coach contains Level 1 ICF-accredited education, and RS Method Complete contains Level 2, so the level is always nameable. The training page's list of who RSCI may not be for includes anyone who wants "letters after your name without the responsibility that should come with them".
- An RSCI certificate with its issuer on it. Both programmes list "Assessment and certification". Our accreditation page states: "RSCI awards its own RS Method certifications." That's the certificate a graduate can name, with RSCI as the issuer.
- A story that's been worked on before it's written up. Every RSCI pathway puts the trainee's own work before outer practice, so the reason you coach is something you've looked at, not only something you say.
On a page, a coach is one short paragraph. In a session, the work is always this. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
One lawyer, the RS Method's result for an identity conflict: years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift.
When you're ready to talk about training, set up the free call.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Lachlan's question works on any bio, yours included: where's that one? To talk about training first, the free call starts on our apply page.