The invitation is printed on thick cream card, and it's been on Rehana's desk in Business Bay since Thursday. A wedding on Saturday night. The bride is the founder's niece.
For four months Rehana has coached the founder's eldest son, who's being readied to run the family's trading business. His father pays the invoices, and every couple of weeks he rings, warmly, to ask how the coaching is going. Since June she's also run a monthly workshop for the company's branch managers, booked through an HR team that reports to the son.
She has eaten at the family's table twice, and she likes them.
On Saturday, somewhere between the starters and the speeches, the founder will put a hand on her shoulder in front of his brothers and ask whether his son is ready.
Rehana has read the ICF Code of Ethics more than once. She still doesn't know what she'll say. (Rehana is a composite, as is the family.)
What is the ICF Code of Ethics?
The ICF Code of Ethics is the International Coaching Federation's set of core values, ethical principles, commitments and standards for everyone within its ecosystem, from credentialed coaches to coaches in training. Its standards sit in five sections, including agreements with clients and sponsors, confidentiality, and professional conduct and conflicts of interest.
The current version is the 2025 ICF Code of Ethics. The PDF on coachingfederation.org says it was board approved in October 2024 and revised in May 2026, and ICF's resource page for the Code gives a revision date of 8 June 2026. Quotes below are from that edition, checked on coachingfederation.org on 19 October 2026. Exam candidates are the exception: the same page asks anyone studying for the ACC, PCC or MCC exams to use the 2020 Code, which our ICF credentialing exam guide covers.
It applies to ICF professionals, "individuals who represent themselves as an ICF member and/or ICF credential-holder", in roles that include "coach in training". Meeting its standards is also the first of the ICF Core Competencies.
If dilemmas like Rehana's are part of why you want proper training, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, can talk you through how our programmes would fit you. The call is free, on Zoom, and takes twenty to forty minutes. Choose a time with Sara. Or read on.
What do confidentiality, conflicts of interest and dual roles mean in the Code?
In plain language, three commitments.
Confidentiality: what's said goes only where everyone agreed it would. Standard 2.1 asks you to "Maintain the strictest level of confidentiality with all parties involved, regardless of the role I am fulfilling." Standard 2.2 asks for "a clear agreement about what information is exchanged and how it is exchanged among all parties involved during all coaching engagements." A sponsor who pays doesn't automatically receive the content, only what all of you agreed. Standard 2.3 lists when confidential information may need to be disclosed. Agree those from the Code's own list.
Conflicts of interest: raise them before they surface on their own. The Code defines one as "a situation in which an ICF professional is involved in multiple interests where serving one interest could work against or conflict with another." Standard 3.1 asks you to discuss "the implications of having multiple agreements and relationships" with all involved parties. Standard 3.3 offers three ways through: "working through the issue with relevant parties, seeking professional assistance, or suspending or ending the professional relationship."
Dual roles: say which hat you're wearing. Standard 3.7 recognises that coaches "often serve in multiple professional roles based on prior training and/or experience (i.e. mentor, therapist, HR specialist, assessor)", and makes it "my responsibility to disclose to the client when I am acting in a capacity other than the role of an ICF professional." A former HR director can still switch hats. The Code asks them to say so when they do.
Two more matter in the Gulf. Standard 3.4 asks for "clear, appropriate, and culturally sensitive boundaries that govern professional interactions, physical or otherwise." Standard 4.1 asks you to manage, with your client, "any power or status differential between us that may be caused by cultural, relational, psychological, or contextual issues."
How does the Code apply to family businesses and sponsors in the GCC?
In a family business, the sponsor, the client and the client's colleagues may share one dinner table. Take Rehana's three questions in turn.
The founder's question. He's a sponsor, and a loving one. Standard 2.2's agreement about what information flows was best made at the first meeting, with father and son together. It wasn't, so nothing about the son's coaching is hers to pass on yet, not even a kind verdict. At the wedding, a warm sentence that gives nothing away is enough: "That's his to answer. Could the three of us sit down this week and agree what I share with you?" On Monday she can ask the son what he'd like his father to hear, before that meeting.
The workshop for managers who report to the son. Two agreements inside one family system, exactly what standard 3.1 asks her to discuss. The day a manager complains about the son in her workshop, Rehana holds something her client might want and can't have. So she tells the son and HR now that she holds both roles, agrees how she'll keep them apart, and stays ready to hand one engagement to a colleague.
The table and the warmth. In many Gulf families hospitality runs deep, and turning it down can wound. Standard 3.4 asks for boundaries that are "culturally sensitive", which isn't the same as cold. Going to the wedding can be fine, as long as the founder's standing, the differential standard 4.1 asks her to notice, hasn't quietly made him the client.
Then write it down. Our coaching agreement template has a section for who else is in the room and who the client is when someone else pays.
Why can a coach know the Code and still freeze?
Because the freeze isn't about the Code.
Rehana could recite standard 2.2 tonight. Reciting isn't what Saturday will test. When a man with the founder's standing asks her something directly, in front of his family, her shoulders rise and her voice goes bright and obliging. She has caught herself doing it in boardrooms for years.
At thirteen, as class monitor at a girls' school in Karachi, she was asked by the headmistress to name the girls who'd been talking. She said she didn't know. The next morning she stood at the front of assembly while the headmistress spoke about loyalty.
That morning gave her a conclusion: keep something back from a person in charge, and you'll be stood up in front of everyone. It gave her shoulders their habit in the same moment, and the conclusion still has them on a string.
The work we train goes back to a morning like that one and cuts the string where it was tied, which no amount of fresh thinking about a headmistress manages.
Ethics, in our training, starts in the same place as everything else: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. So a trainee's urge to please whoever's in charge is part of their own work in the cohort, with a supervisor in the room.
If you recognise that habit in yourself, it's worth knowing before you choose where to train. A free call with Sara is where that choice can begin: she'll ask what kind of practice you're building, and you'll both look at which RSCI route matches it. Book that conversation.
How can you map an engagement before it gets complicated?
Draw a role map. You need twenty minutes, a sheet of paper and one engagement.
- Write the client's first name in the middle of the page. Initials, if anyone else might see it.
- Around it, write everyone who pays for, arranges or asks about the coaching. Sponsor, manager, HR contact, parent, a sibling in the business.
- Draw a line from yourself to each person, and label every role you hold with them. Coach, facilitator, former colleague, friend, guest at their table. Two labels on one line is your first flag.
- On each line, write the question that person is most likely to ask you about the client. In their words.
- Under each question, write the answer the Code allows. Check it against standards 2.2, 3.1 and 3.7. If the true answer is "we never agreed that", you've found an agreement to make.
- Mark the line where writing the answer made you uneasy. That one is about you, not the Code. Take it to coaching supervision or your own inner work.
- Take the map, without names, into your next session with the client. Agree together what goes to whom, and add it to your agreement.
How would you know RSCI suits the way you want to practise?
It's likely a good fit if three things matter to you.
- You want ICF education built into your training. Level 1 ICF education comes inside RS Method Coach, and Level 2 inside RS Method Complete.
- You want to learn where coaching stops. In its overview of RS Method Complete, our training page speaks of "understanding the boundaries of professional coaching practice".
- You'd rather be worked on before you work on anyone else. Our method page states the order in five words: "We transform the practitioner first."
The fees are public: AED 18,000 for RS Method Coach and AED 35,000 for RS Method Complete, with ICF education included in both. 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.
A code keeps a coach inside the lines. Our razor says what the coach is there to do once inside them. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Confidentiality, clear agreements and named roles all protect a client's freedom to bring what's really there. Here's a lawyer's result, in the RS Method's words: years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift. It belongs to that one client and nobody else.
Our ICF certification in Dubai page walks through the steps from ICF education to the ACC or PCC.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If your week holds a sponsor's call or a family dinner, you now have the Code's own words for it. When you want the road from training to an ICF credential, it's on our ICF certification in Dubai page.