The ICF performance evaluation: choosing, recording and preparing the session you submit

There are eleven files in the "Deleted" folder on Mireille's phone, and every one of them is a coaching session.

She records on Thursday evenings at the dining table of her flat in Al Barsha, the phone propped against a jar of lentils. Each week she plays the first few minutes back, hears herself, and presses delete.

Tonight is number twelve. Twenty minutes in, her client says something real, and Mireille notices a strange thing. She isn't thinking about the client. She's thinking about the person who'll hear this. She's choosing her next question for a stranger with a scoring sheet, and her client, who is right there on the screen, can feel the difference.

That's the trap at the centre of the ICF performance evaluation. The harder you try to coach for the assessor, the less you're coaching.

What is the ICF performance evaluation?

The ICF performance evaluation is an assessment of one real coaching session, recorded as audio with a word-for-word transcript, and reviewed by a trained ICF assessor who holds a PCC or MCC credential. It checks your coaching against the Minimum Skills Requirements for your credential level. On some application paths, your accredited programme handles it.

Every ICF detail here comes from coachingfederation.org, checked on 19 October 2026.

Who submits a recording, and what changes in 2027?

ICF says all ACC, PCC and MCC candidates must pass a performance evaluation. Where you pass it depends on your path.

On the Level 1 or Level 2 path, ICF says that if your accredited programme included a performance evaluation in its curriculum, "you've already fulfilled this requirement". You don't send ICF a separate recording.

On the Portfolio path, you submit it yourself: one recording with a transcript for the ACC, two for the PCC.

From 1 April 2027, ICF's announcement says "the Performance Evaluation will no longer be a requirement for ACC and PCC Portfolio credentials", replaced by an enhanced mentor coaching requirement. Accredited programmes must also move away from it by that date. ICF tells Level 1 and Level 2 candidates they "won't need to do anything differently", because their programme takes on the new requirement.

The evaluation has a limited life. Being heard while you coach doesn't. Under the new Portfolio rule, mentor coaching includes three observed sessions with a mentor coach who holds ICF's Mentor Coach Specialization. Whichever route you take, someone experienced will listen to you work. Our guide to ICF mentor coaching covers that side, and the full credential checklist is in ICF ACC requirements.

If you'd like to know which path fits you before you record anything, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, offers a free conversation on Zoom. Bring the question you've been too embarrassed to ask anyone, about your hours, your path or your recordings. You can book it through our apply page. Or read on.

What does the recording have to be?

ICF's performance evaluation page is specific.

• A full, unedited session of 20 to 60 minutes. ICF says sessions longer than 60 minutes "will not be scored".
• Audio only. MP3, WMA, MP4 or M4A, in one part, at 95 MB or less. No video, no pictures.
• A real client. The session must come from an actual coaching session with a paid or pro bono client, someone who has hired you specifically for coaching. It shouldn't come from your coaching education, and it can't be scripted. Another coach can be your client, if they're a regular one.
• Written permission, before you record. ICF says that submitting a recording without the client's permission "is a violation of the ICF Code of Ethics".
• First names only during the session, to protect confidentiality.
• A verbatim transcript in Word format, with a timestamp at every change of speaker.

Two practical notes for coaches here. If you coach in Arabic, Hindi, Tagalog or another language, check whether ICF assesses in it. If it doesn't, ICF asks for a transcript in the language spoken and an English transcript too. And ICF warns that poor sound "can impact your evaluation score", so find a room where the air conditioning and the neighbour's drill won't sit on top of your client's voice.

What are assessors listening for under the 2026 ACC requirements?

ICF says that from 1 January 2026, ACC and MCC candidates are evaluated using updated Minimum Skills Requirements. The ACC document (rev. 1.26.2026) follows the eight Core Competencies, and for each one it lists key skills, behaviours consistent with ICF standards and behaviours inconsistent with them. If the competencies themselves are new to you, start with the ICF Core Competencies explained.

The inconsistent behaviours are the most useful part to read. A few of them, in ICF's words:

• "There is no conversation between the coach and client to agree on a topic for the session."
• "The coach interferes with the client's process by directing, interrupting, or by filling silence."
• "The coach does not allow sufficient space for the client to consider and respond to a question before the coach asks another question."
• "The coach chooses the timing, or method, of closing the session."

And this one, under Maintains Presence: "The coach is focused on their own performance or demonstration of knowledge, showing significant interest in their own view of the client or situation rather than curiosity about the client's perspective and agenda."

Read that with Mireille's twelfth recording in mind. The requirements describe, almost exactly, a coach coaching for the assessor. ICF's own tip says "the assessment is about you, not your client." It's about whether you can stay with the person in front of you, which is the one thing a performance can't do.

Why does a microphone change how you coach?

In our experience, for some coaches being recorded wakes up an older room.

For Mireille it's a piano stool in Beirut. Saturday exams at the music school, an examiner behind her with a pencil, and the scratch of that pencil every time she slowed down. She learned there that being assessed meant being found out, and that the safe thing was to play fast and sound sure before anyone could write otherwise. She knows all of this. And the moment the red dot appears on her phone, her questions get cleverer and her silences get shorter.

Two things are welded together in that moment. One is a sentence, "when I'm being judged, I must perform". The other is the tightness her shoulders learned every time the pencil scratched. The RS Method calls this a thought fused to a charge. Mireille has out-argued the sentence many times, at her own dining table, with good reasons. The tightness was never in the argument. It answers the red dot before any reason arrives, which is why the method works on the charge rather than the sentence. With the charge gone, the exam room is just a room she once sat in, and the phone against the lentils is just a phone.

That's why the order of training matters to us. RSCI is built on the Inner Work First Principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. Your own material is worked on first, inside the cohort and under supervision, so that by the time anyone listens to you coach, there's less in you that needs to be seen doing it well.

How do you choose the session you submit?

Don't hunt for one perfect session. Build a short run of ordinary ones and choose from the page. Here's the method we'd give Mireille.

1. Ask for written permission at the start of the coaching relationship. Not on the night. Say who may hear the recording, why, and that the client can ask you to stop at any point.
2. Record five sessions in a row, with the same set-up each time. Same room, same device, same distance. Delete none of them.
3. Leave them alone for a week. How a session felt is a poor guide to how it reads.
4. Read the first five minutes of each transcript. Look for a topic the client chose and an outcome you both said out loud. Set aside any session where you can't find them.
5. Read the last five minutes. Did the client design their own next step? Did you close the session together, or did you decide when it ended? Set aside any session where you decided.
6. In what's left, find your longest run of speech. If it's an explanation, a story or advice, set that session aside too.
7. Choose the session where the client did most of the work. ICF's tip is to look for a session that "highlights your use of a wide range of ICF Core Competencies". In our experience, that's usually the session you'd have described afterwards as quiet.
8. Then check the basics. Length between 20 and 60 minutes, clear sound, first names only, file size within the limit, and a transcript with timestamps at every change of speaker.

If none of the five survives step 6, that isn't a verdict. It's what to bring to your mentor coach next.

What should a programme give you before anyone scores your coaching?

The recording is one session, and what it shows was built long before. Three things in a programme decide what that session will sound like.

1. What's included today, stated exactly, and what's changing. Our training page currently says students on the standard ICF-inclusive pathway "complete the additional accredited education, mentor coaching, performance assessment and credential preparation associated with their ICF education level". ICF has told accredited programmes to move away from the performance evaluation by 1 April 2027, so if your training runs past that date, ask Sara how the change applies to your intake. With ICF education included, RS Method Coach is AED 18,000 (ICF Level 1) and RS Method Complete is AED 35,000 (ICF Level 2). 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.
2. Some live practice before any recording. Both programmes are mostly online and self-paced, with live training days included. Our training page describes those days in four short sentences: "Watch demonstrations. Practise. Get corrected. Do it again."
3. Your own work done first. So the room you coach from is yours, not an exam room from years ago.

The razor we train to sits under all of it. To witness. To hold. To walk them home. The first two are close to what an assessor listens for.

The requirements describe the coach's side of a session. How far a session can reach is another question. For one client of the method, a lawyer, it was years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift. That result belongs to the lawyer, and it sets no standard for your recording or for anyone you'll coach.

Both programmes, and what each includes, are set out on our life coach training page.

Robert Simic, training the next generation.

P.S. There may be a folder of deleted sessions on your phone too. Before you record the next one, read what both programmes include today on our life coach training page.