Starting your accreditation journey can be daunting but a certified mentor coach can guide you along the process of becoming accredited and increase your confidence and competence in your coaching skills.

If you are looking to become accredited at the Associate Certified Coach, Professional Certified Coach, and Master Certified Coach levels through the Approved Coach Specific Training Hours (ACSTH) or Portfolio Path, mentor coaching is a requirement from the International Coach Federation (ICF).

According to the ICF requirement, you are required to have been coached for a minimum of 10 hours over a minimum of 3 months by a qualified mentor coach who is at the same or higher ICF certification level than that which you are applying for. Of the required 10 hours, up to 7 hours can be group mentor coaching and at least 3 hours must be one-to-one mentor coaching.

Benefits of Investing in a Certified Mentor Coach

There are many reasons why a certified mentor coach can be valuable to you. You get the value of their expertise, knowledge, and experience. You also get a chance to advance more rapidly and create greater success in coaching than you would have been able to without their insight and advice.

Here are some benefits that you might derive from a certified mentor coach. These include:

You’ll develop a close relationship with your mentor. We can never have enough close relationships. And chances are your mentor will be someone you benefit from being around. After all, they are interested in teaching you to improve yourself as a coach, care about your learning, and are likely excited about the possibilities in your future.

You’ll be re-energized personally. Get around an enthusiastic mentor, and you naturally become more enthusiastic yourself. Being mentored is like carrying a book of matches with you. It can spark your energy. If you want to re-energize yourself to your own possibilities, get a mentor coach.

You’ll increase your commitment to your coaching career. As you get more enthused, you see new ways you can improve yourself as a coach. You see how your mentor can make a difference in your coaching career and this new vision will increase your commitment.

You’ll learn more by talking about and doing things hands-on. It is funny how our brains work. When someone explains something to us, we tend to understand it more clearly ourselves. A certified mentor coach will relive experiences, teach or share ideas. And when they do this you will learn and relearn these concepts for yourself and take their advice to your personal or professional benefit.

You’ll enhance your self-esteem. A certified mentor coach will increase your self-esteem and help you feel better about yourself and your abilities when they share their wealth of knowledge and experience with you.

You’ll increase your skills. As your mentor guides you, you will become a better coach. The skills that make you a better coach; empathy, listening, caring, building trust (to name just a few), make you more effective in many other parts of your life. This is actually great training in itself!

You’ll grow more confident. The culmination of many of these benefits is that your confidence will increase. You’ll be more confident in many sorts of interpersonal relationships and conversations. You’ll know that you can have a positive impact and make a difference.

Final Thoughts…

It must be noted that the job of the mentor coach is not to take you from Point A to Point B; instead, he or she will help you learn the tools that you will need to reach your destination on your own and provide encouragement along the way.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “ Master Coach Blueprint” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your master coach blueprint videos.

Jeannie Cotter
Editor/Writer
Writer, Coaches Training Blog community