The photo comes in on a Thursday: a pot on a hob in Abu Dhabi, three cobs of corn standing up in it like oars. It's ajiaco, the chicken and potato soup Joaquín's mother made on Sundays in Bogotá. Under it, his caption: "Week three. The kids had seconds."
Joaquín is forty-six and runs operations for a hotel group. He came to personal development coaching with a list short enough for one card: a walk after dinner, reading to his son three nights a week, and learning the six dishes his mother cooks, before she comes to stay. One dish at a time, and a photo every time he tries one.
His coach, Tamsin, sees the caption between two other clients. Her breath stops for a moment, high in her chest. She types: "Lovely. Which of the six is the hardest one left?"
By week six the photos still arrive, but the captions have gone. In their seventh session Joaquín says, lightly, that he'll send the next one "when it's worth sending".
Tamsin writes the phrase down. Every reply she's sent him since week one has been about the next dish. (Tamsin and Joaquín are composites.)
What does a personal development coach do?
A personal development coach helps a client build something they've chosen for their own life: a skill, a habit, a routine, a better way of handling one part of it. The coach doesn't hand over a plan. Together they set goals, design small steps, and learn from what happens between sessions, one week at a time.
Joaquín's soup is that work in miniature. He chose the goal and the order of the dishes, and every attempt, good or bad, gives the next session something real to look at.
If coaching like this is where you're headed and you're weighing where to train, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, offers a free Zoom of twenty to forty minutes. It's about fit and pathway: whether RSCI suits you, and which of our two programmes would. See when Sara is free. Or read on.
What does the work look like from week to week?
In our experience, most personal development engagements settle into a rhythm, though every client uses it differently.
The first sessions set the terms. What the client wants from the whole engagement, and how you'll both know it's working. ICF's 2025 Core Competencies (checked on coachingfederation.org on 20 October 2026) ask the coach to partner with the client "to establish an overall coaching plan and goals" (3.04) and "to define or reconfirm measures of success" (3.08).
Each week holds a small experiment. One or two actions the client designs, sized for a real week, with a way of noticing what happened. For Joaquín, one dish and one photo.
Between sessions, the client does the work. Some send updates, some keep a log, some say nothing until the next session. Agree which, put it in your coaching agreement, and keep to it.
Every month or so, you both look back. What's moved, what hasn't, and whether the goals still fit the person. People change during an engagement, and their goals can change with them.
Near the end, the client needs you less. The aim is a client who can design next month's experiment without you.
Which skills does that weekly work ask of a coach?
More than it looks from outside, and ICF names most of them.
Designing with the client, not for them. Behaviour 8.02 is "Partners with the client to design goals, actions and accountability measures that integrate and expand new learning", and 8.03 asks the coach to support "client autonomy in the design of goals, actions and methods of accountability". In our experience, the plan that holds is the one the client wrote.
Noticing what's working. Behaviour 7.06 reads: "Notices what is working to enhance client progress". It's tempting to spend a session on the misses. The wins show you how this particular person changes.
Noticing patterns. This one belongs to every coach, whatever they specialise in. Behaviour 7.08 asks the coach to help "the client identify factors that influence current and future patterns of behavior, thinking or emotion". Sometimes a pattern turns out to be older than the goal, and the client wants to look at where it began. That's the ground of transformational coaching. A personal development coach can train for it, or agree with the client to bring in a colleague who has.
Acknowledging progress. Behaviour 8.08 asks the coach to acknowledge the client's "progress and successes". It sounds like the easiest item here. In our experience it's one of the hardest to do well, because it asks the coach to stop and let a win land before moving on.
Staying steady yourself. Under competency 5, Maintains Presence, ICF lists managing one's emotions "to stay present with the client" (5.04). We go through all eight competencies in the ICF Core Competencies explained.
What stops a coach from letting a client's win land?
Before a supervision session, Tamsin read back over seven weeks of her notes. Every dish Joaquín had struggled with was there, in detail. Not one of his wins was.
At nine, in Leeds, she was a Brownie. Every badge she brought home, her mother sewed onto the sash that same evening, and before the thread was cut she'd opened the badge book at the next page. "Which one next?" It was meant kindly, and it worked: Tamsin collected badges by the dozen.
Out of those evenings came a rule, a badge is only worth the next one, and a habit of breath to go with it. Whenever a win is in the room, hers or anyone's, her breath waits at the top of her chest until the next page is open, and only then lets go. Joaquín's soup was a badge. Her breath held, and "Which of the six is the hardest one left?" opened the next page.
Joaquín never mentioned it. He stopped putting his wins into words.
None of this means Tamsin coaches badly. It means she has a badge book, and in our experience most coaches carry something like it into the room. Our method page opens the first movement this way: "The first movement is subtractive." It then says what the coach does there: "You make the patterns visible, and you let the client feel what is underneath." RSCI trainees go through that work themselves first, badge books and all, inside the cohort and under supervision. Only then do they take it to clients. That sequence is our first principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
Both of our programmes put the trainee's own work first. On Sara's free Zoom you can look at whether either of them fits the coaching you want to do, and which one. Reserve a Zoom with Sara.
What does a good weekly check-in look like?
The same shape each week. It takes about half an hour, and it works as well on Zoom as in person.
- Ask for the week before you look at any record. "How was the week?" Then wait. What a client mentions first is often what mattered most.
- Find one win and give it a whole minute. Ask how they did it and what it was like. Don't use that minute to plan anything.
- Ask what made the win possible. Write the answer down in their words. It's the best brief you'll get for next week's experiment.
- Choose one miss, not all of them. Ask what was happening at the moment it didn't happen. Be curious, not corrective.
- Let the client choose the next experiment. Ask rather than suggest: "What would you like to try this week?"
- Agree how they'll report back. A photo, a line in a message, or nothing until next session. Their choice, noted down.
- Ask them to sum up what the week taught them. ICF's behaviour 8.06 describes the coach partnering "with the client to summarize learning and insight within or between sessions".
Afterwards, write one line for yourself: where in the session did you want to hurry? A month of those lines will show you your own badge book.
Where does RSCI's training fit for a personal development coach?
Three things, as our own pages described them on 20 October 2026.
- Practice in not rushing. Our method page, describing how trainees learn the first movement, ends a short list with "Without rushing the room." For a coach whose weeks are full of other people's small wins, that's a skill worth training.
- Real sessions with supervision. The same page: "You will be trained to facilitate both movements with precision, in real sessions, with real clients, under real supervision."
- Your own development as part of the course. Among the people our life coach training page says RSCI is for: "You are prepared to experience the work personally." It's where a badge book like Tamsin's tends to turn up.
Letting a client's win land is a small act of witness, and our razor begins there. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Here's a win in someone's own words, and we'll let it stand with no next page after it. Erin Kurt, about her business: "My business literally tripled within 6 months." The words and the business are Erin's, and we read nothing into them for anyone else.
RS Method Coach, mostly online and self-paced with live training days, costs AED 18,000 with ICF education included. RS Method Complete, which takes in The 5-Day RS Method Experience in Dubai, costs AED 35,000 with ICF education included. 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.
The two movements our training is built on, Unbecome and Remember, are set out in the page's own words on The Method. If personal development is the coaching you want to do, read them before you decide where to train.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Scroll back through your last few replies to clients. If more of them name a next step than a win, read the two movements on The Method before your next check-in.