"You always know exactly where we're going," the client says at the end of their sixth session, picking up her car keys. "That's why I keep coming back."
Akosua thanks her, and means it. She has held the ACC for three years, and sessions like this one are why clients in Mirdif recommend her: a clear topic, sharp questions, three actions with a date beside each.
Three weeks later she plays ten minutes of that same session to her mentor coach, with the client's written permission, as part of her mentor coaching toward the PCC.
The mentor listens to the end without a word. Then she asks, "Who decided where you were going?"
Akosua starts to answer and stops. Every new direction in those ten minutes came from her. So did every summary. So, she realises, did the moment the session ended, at the point where her own plan ran out.
Akosua, her client and her mentor coach are composites.
What are the PCC Markers?
The PCC Markers are the indicators ICF uses to assess a recorded coaching session at PCC level. In our reading, where the ACC asks whether a coach can run a sound session, the Markers listen for something harder to fake: a client who shapes the session alongside the coach, from the opening topic to the closing step.
Our ACC vs PCC page, checked on 2 November 2026, lists the PCC's performance evaluation "at PCC standard". Our guide to ICF PCC in Dubai set out, after checking coachingfederation.org on 3 October 2026, that this evaluation is recorded coaching assessed against ICF's PCC Markers. The competency names and definitions quoted below are ICF's 2025 Core Competencies, as our competencies guide quoted them after checking coachingfederation.org on 4 October 2026. We don't quote the Markers themselves. ICF publishes them, and its current document is the one to record against.
If you're still deciding where your ICF education should come from, an RS Method Master Practitioner can talk it through with you on a free call. It runs "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes", by the apply page's own reckoning, and its purpose is fit, for you and for us. Reserve a conversation. Or read on.
Why, in our experience, do confident ACC coaches often stall at PCC?
In our experience, the habits that make a coach safe at ACC level are the very habits a PCC assessor hears as leading.
A new coach learns to keep a session on track: agree a topic, ask open questions, summarise, close with actions. But a coach can do all of it while holding the session the whole way through, choosing which thread to pull and steering toward a tidy close. On a transcript, that sounds competent. It also sounds like one person's session.
In our experience, the jump to PCC level is less about new techniques than about letting go of the steering. The client decides what the session is for and how they'll know it worked. The coach's questions grow out of the client's own words. The coach notices what's happening in the room, including in the client's voice, and says so, then lets the client decide what to do with it. And the client, not the coach, says when the work for today is done.
Partnership can't be added afterwards. It's either in the hour or it isn't, and an experienced listener tends to hear which within minutes.
What does an assessor listen for, competency by competency?
ICF groups its eight Core Competencies into four domains: Foundation, Co-Creating the Relationship, Communicating Effectively, and Cultivating Learning and Growth. Here's how each tends to show up in a recording, in our experience. Treat it as a listening guide, not as ICF's wording.
1. Demonstrates Ethical Practice. ICF's definition begins: "Understands and consistently applies coaching ethics and standards of coaching". In a session it's often quiet: the coach doesn't drift into consulting when the client asks what they'd do.
2. Embodies a Coaching Mindset. Our competencies guide quotes ICF describing a coach who is "open, curious, flexible and client-centered". On a transcript, curiosity shows as questions the coach couldn't have written before the session.
3. Establishes and Maintains Agreements. ICF: "Partners with the client and relevant stakeholders to create clear agreements". The led version: "So today it's the promotion?" The shared version asks what the client wants from this hour, how they'll know they've got it, and what makes it matter now, then checks back later whether that's still the aim.
4. Cultivates Trust and Safety. ICF: "Partners with the client to create a safe, supportive environment that allows the client to share freely." Listen for the coach acknowledging the client's own strengths and way of seeing, rather than praising the plan.
5. Maintains Presence. ICF's wording includes "fully conscious and present with the client" and "Is comfortable working in a space of not knowing". The moment to listen for is a silence the coach doesn't end.
6. Listens Actively. ICF: "Focuses on what the client is and is not saying to fully understand what is being communicated". At PCC level the coach's questions are built from the client's words, and the coach reflects back a shift in tone as well as content.
7. Evokes Awareness. ICF names "powerful questioning, silence, metaphor or analogy". The difference you can hear: questions about who the client is in this, not only about the task, and observations offered for the client to use or set down.
8. Facilitates Client Growth. ICF: "Partners with the client to transform learning and insight into action." The client designs the step and names what might get in the way. The coach asks how the client wants to end, and lets them.
Read the list again and count how often the word "partners" appears. In our reading, that's the thread an assessor is following. It runs past the PCC too: the master certified coach credential asks for a PCC first.
What happens in Akosua just before she takes the lead?
Ask her, and she can describe the second exactly. The client slows down, unsure which way to go. A pause opens. And something tightens across Akosua's shoulders, with a sense that a slow minute is about to cost somebody something. Her next question is already forming before the client has looked up.
It's a good question, usually. Sharp, useful, easy to follow, and the client follows it, gratefully. Each session is safer that way, and a little less the client's. The tightening isn't a technique she chose. It simply arrives.
What needs to happen is for that grip to go, at whatever root it has in her, so that a slow minute in a session is only a slow minute and a client can pick the way through a hard patch. Whether her next recording would sound different is something only her next recording can show.
A training can't hand a coach that minute. What it can do is decide what comes first, and ours always puts the trainee first: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. In a practice round, a coach who grabs the lead costs no one more than a classmate's raised eyebrow, and a supervisor is there to notice it.
A free call with an RS Method Master Practitioner is where to ask whether training like ours fits what you want from coaching. Choose your hour.
How can you hear partnership in your own recording?
Try a borrowed-words count. It takes an evening, one recording and a couple of coloured pens.
- Choose a recent session you recorded with your client's written permission. Any session will do. The ordinary ones teach more than the proud ones.
- Transcribe ten minutes from the middle, word for word. Beginnings and endings get their own turn later.
- Underline every word in your questions that the client said first. Use one colour. Their phrases, their images, their names for things.
- Circle every word in your questions that came from you. Use the other colour. Your frames, your summaries, your labels.
- At each turning point, write who decided it. A new topic, a deeper question, a move toward action. Put a C for client or an M for you.
- Now read the first five minutes and the last five. Who said what the session was for? Who said when it was finished?
- Pick one turn where you'd like the client to have decided, and take it to your mentor coach. One, not five. Ask what they hear in it.
This is a listening exercise for your coaching, not therapy or medical care, so if you're working with a doctor or therapist, that care carries on unchanged. It never asks you to set aside treatment, medication or support, and anyone in recovery carries on with their programme, and with the people who back them in it.
Akosua's first try found eleven circles and four underlines in ten minutes.
Which parts of RSCI's training prepare a coach for PCC-level work?
Three parts of our programmes bear on it directly.
- Your own reflexes, worked on before a client relies on them. Our Method page says: "Every RSCI pathway sequences inner work before outer practice." Whatever puts you in the lead car gets attention in training, not first in an assessor's headphones.
- Supervised practice, then more of it. Both programmes include supervised practice, and RS Method Complete lists "Advanced supervised practice". Partnership is learned by being heard, again and again, by someone who can tell you where you took the lead.
- An ICF route toward PCC, stated exactly. RS Method Complete includes ICF Level 2 education, the level our ACC vs PCC page pairs with the PCC. Education isn't a credential, as our guide to coaching certification sets out. Asked whether a coach can take Level 2 but apply for ACC first, that page answers: "Yes, and it is often the smartest route."
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.
Under every competency on the list sits the same work, and it's the work we train for. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
A lawyer, among the RS Method's transformation stories: years of internal conflict resolved in minutes through a deep identity shift.
The education level under your credential is the decision that shapes the rest, and our ACC vs PCC page sets out the two credentials side by side, from hours to performance evaluation.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. "You always know exactly where we're going" is one of the kindest things a client can say, and at PCC level it's also a question about who held the wheel. Our ACC vs PCC page shows what the PCC asks for, line by line.