The sentence has been sitting in Lujain's phone for six weeks.
She coaches a client every other Tuesday on Zoom from her flat in Al Barsha. He's a hotel group's finance manager, and he came to coaching to decide on a regional role. From session four he started joining late, camera off at first, and across sessions four to six he mentioned, in passing, that he'd stopped going to the gym, was sleeping badly and hadn't returned his brother's calls in weeks. Each time he laughed and said he was just tired. Each time they went back to the regional role.
She typed the note that evening, after session six: "I've noticed a few things over the last weeks, and I wonder whether it might help to talk to someone who specialises in this." She's edited it four times and said it to her bathroom mirror. Tonight, after session nine, she reads it again and puts the phone face down.
She isn't unsure about the signs. What she can't do is hear herself say the sentence without hearing a second one underneath it: you're too much for me.
When should a coach refer a client to therapy?
When what the client brings has lasted for weeks and is affecting their everyday life, or keeps blocking the coaching after a reasonable amount of time. Those are the tests in ICF's own referral guide, which calls daily functioning the most important. Immediate danger is different: it calls for emergency services at once.
Saying the signs is usually harder than spotting them, and that's what most of this guide is for. Two lines come first. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. And if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
If you're weighing coach training and wondering whether you'd be ready for moments like this, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, can help you judge it. Her free Zoom runs twenty to forty minutes and looks at whether you're ready to train, and for which programme. See Sara's free times. Or read on.
What does ICF's own referral guide say?
ICF publishes a guide on this exact question: Referring a Client to Therapy: A Set of Guidelines, by Alicia M. Hullinger and Joel A. DiGirolamo (2018), on coachingfederation.org (checked on 19 October 2026).
Its central test: "The most important indicator to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to refer a client to a therapist is level of daily functioning." Help from a mental health professional, it adds, "is warranted when the issue lasts for weeks and affects functioning in daily life."
It asks you to watch for a cluster rather than a single moment. Its signs of distress include marked changes in mood, a decline in performance at work, withdrawal from social relationships and activities, and disturbances in sleep. That's what Lujain has been watching: no single alarming sentence, but over sessions four to six the gym, the sleep, the brother's calls and the camera began to form a shape. ICF's 2025 Core Competencies name the skill: "Notices trends in the client's behaviors and emotions across sessions to discern themes and patterns."
The guide is plain that "a coach does not diagnose nor does a coach offer treatment." You notice, say so, and help the client reach someone who can assess it. It's candid about its own reach, too: its authors say it "may not be suitable for other cultural groups or those in countries with different health systems." In the UAE, where one coach's clients can come from a dozen countries and as many ideas about therapy, that's a reason to prepare your own words, and your own list, before you need them.
The definitions behind that line are in coaching vs therapy vs mentoring.
Why is the referral sentence so hard to say?
ICF's guide lists feelings that should send a coach to their mentor or supervisor, among them feeling "Responsible for your client", "Pressure to solve your client's problems" and "Like you have failed your client". Lujain has felt all three.
For nine years before coaching, she taught at a school in Sharjah. A pupil who needed the counsellor was sent on a yellow carbon form, and every form crossed the desk of the head of section, who would look up at her and ask the same thing: "Couldn't you manage him yourself?"
Her phone draft is the latest copy of that form. It carries the old verdict, that handing someone on means she couldn't cope, and the damp in her palm that came with every signature. That's why it has been edited four times and sent never.
In the RS Method, the work is with the old forms underneath drafts like hers, until each one is only paper.
A referral asks a coach to stay warm while something in her sounds an alarm, and RSCI's order of training was set for moments like this: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained. A coach's own yellow forms are far better met in training than in a client's session.
If a yellow form of your own sounds familiar, that's no reason to rule yourself out of training, because inner work is part of the training here. Whether RSCI suits you is the question Sara's free call exists for. Talk to Sara about fit.
How do you prepare the words before you need them?
Write them the evening before, and check them for anything that would make a client feel handed off.
- List what you've seen, with dates. Observations only, in the client's words. "Session 4: no gym for a month." "Session 6: camera off for the first ten minutes."
- Strike out every label. Depressed, burnt out, anxious, trauma. Those are a professional's words after an assessment. Yours are what you saw and heard.
- Write sentence one: what you've noticed. For Lujain: "Over the last few sessions you've mentioned sleeping badly, stopping the gym and not calling your brother back, and I didn't want to keep walking past it."
- Write sentence two: what you'd like for them, and where you'll be. "I'd like you to have someone trained for exactly this, as well as me, not instead of me." ICF's guide notes that in many cultures mental health carries a stigma, so choose words the client's world can hear: "therapist" for some, "someone who specialises in this" for others.
- Write the question you'll ask, then stop. "How does that sit with you?" ICF's guide puts the next part in three words: "Allow for silence."
- Read all three aloud and listen for the wobble. Where your voice tightens or speeds up is your own material. Take it to your supervisor or mentor coach, not into the session.
- Put a list under the sentences. Ask your own doctor or trusted colleagues for the names of licensed mental health professionals, note the languages each works in and whether they see people online, and add your local emergency number.
Say it near the start of a session, never as the client reaches to end the call. If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. ICF's guide gives the same instruction for imminent danger. If you're worried but the danger isn't immediate, the guide suggests asking a therapist on your list for a consultation about what you're seeing. And if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
How do you keep the relationship intact after you refer?
Show, in words and in what you do next, that the referral adds someone and removes no one.
Agree what happens to the coaching. ICF's guide says a client who's managing daily life but not moving in coaching "may benefit from coaching and counseling simultaneously", and that some need to work through the deeper issue first and then return. Decide together, and write it down.
Follow up, and let them choose what you hear. Ask whether they've booked, and accept it if they'd rather not say more. Speaking to their therapist is their call, made in writing.
If they say no, believe them. "Ultimately, the decision to go to counseling is up to the client." Keep the subject open, and raise it once more if the same thing keeps blocking the work. If coaching can't help until the issue is addressed, the guide suggests saying so and postponing the coaching for now.
A line about referral in your coaching agreement from day one means the conversation, when it comes, is one you both agreed could happen. If the moment comes as tears rather than as a slow pattern, start with our guide for when a client cries.
Some coaches reading this will have spent the last few minutes thinking about themselves, not a client. If that's you, a doctor or a licensed mental health professional is the right next call, and if you already have one, tell them what you noticed today. An article for coaches can't stand in for that care. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Is RSCI a good place to learn where your coaching ends?
Look for three things in any training. They're the three ours is built on.
- ICF education inside the programme, starting from ethics. ICF's competencies open with ethical practice, and referral is one of the behaviours listed under it (1.07). Our training page (Life Coach Training, read on 19 October 2026) states that "The standard professional configuration now includes ICF-accredited coach education." 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.
- Practice that ends in real sessions. The same page says where confidence comes from: "The confidence to coach does not come from another video." "It comes from coaching." Saying a referral sentence steadily is learnt the same way.
- Your own hesitation, met before your clients meet it. In the words of our Inner Work First principle: "The practitioner does their own work first, inside the cohort, under supervision, alongside the methodology they are learning to deliver."
Everything here answers to one razor: To witness. To hold. To walk them home. A good referral is still holding: you keep hold of the person while someone trained for it takes the part that sits outside coaching.
The test of this work is the ordinary day, years later. Marko Mladenovic's ordinary days, three years on, sound like this: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?" Marko was describing his own days, and no one you refer or coach inherits them.
Robert's free reading, Why 88% of Life Coaches Fail, comes as a PDF. It sets out what the 12% do differently, and what to look for in any training that promises to produce a practitioner instead of a certificate. Get the PDF sent to you.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If a sentence like Lujain's is waiting on your phone, say it at your next session. Then open the free book and see what Robert says the 12% do differently.