The Uncomfortable Truth About Our Profession
In 2025, Passmore and colleagues showed that AI coaching agents already reach a similar basic competence to human coaches. By defining coaching through observable competencies, we have written our own replacement specification. Everything that can be codified can be automated.
What makes you worth choosing over a machine is how you show up as a loving human.
This Mentor Coaching Lock-in for Aspiring MCCs builds coaches whose competence is in service of something. Love is what puts it in service. And love, in the end, serves peace in our world, equality, our connection with the planet we share. That is the work. Coaching is how we do it, one human being at a time.
This is the harder, braver road, and the one that keeps you irreplaceable.
Love as strength
Love takes the thinker inwards, where a machine cannot follow. AI looks outwards, to the internet. Human coaching creates attunement, a synchronisation between two nervous systems that no AI will ever offer.
Love asks for inner work the competencies never mention: meeting your own shadows, your own relationship with conditional worth. It is ongoing work, understanding yourself, sustaining yourself, monitoring yourself through supervision, and it readies you to coach from a loving heartset.
Love responds to suffering. It is being willing to tell a sponsor: you don’t need a coach for this person; you need to stop expecting them to tolerate the intolerable. It asks what the organisation might look at in itself, rather than accepting a brief that someone simply needs to be more resilient.
And love reclaims a word the profession has sanitised. We say rapport, unconditional positive regard, psychological safety. Love has more spine, and you get to claim it as part of your work.
This is the difference the assessors want to see when they hold the bar high: a coach whose competence is in service of something other than performance and profit.
Who is the Aspiring MCC Mentor Coaching Lock-in for?
This is for coaches who want mentor coaching to mean more than compliance. Who are hungry to go deeper into and beyond the competencies, laying their own strengths over them. Who sense there is more to master than the markers can capture, and who long to coach from a place of love.
It takes courage to coach this way. The corporate world still runs on a harder, more masculine script, and choosing love within it, naming it, working from it, is a brave act. This Lock-in is for coaches ready to be that brave.
You will already hold your PCC and be working towards your MCC. The best time to start is once you have around 1,000 hours of coaching behind you. Begin the mastery work now, and by the time you reach 2,500 hours, you will have been coaching at MCC level for years. The evaluation becomes a confirmation of what’s in your bones, rather than a wall to climb.
Your history as a coach is like no other coach’s. This Lock-in works with that. I am as committed to your distinctiveness as I am to the rigour of the process: what we are building together is a coaching practice that is unmistakably yours, and unmistakably masterful.
How the Aspiring MCC Mentor Coaching Lock-in works
For three months and beyond, you work inside a small circle of up to ten experienced coaches who come to know each other’s practice closely. You bring real coaching recordings. You receive rigorous, caring feedback. You watch others work and learn from that too. Over time, the group becomes something rarer than a training cohort: people who genuinely hold each other’s growth.
The programme includes:
- Seven hours of group mentor coaching, where you practise one-to-one coaching with real-time feedback, and learn by observing others’ practice sessions and the feedback they receive.
- Three one-to-one, one-hour virtual mentor coaching sessions with me, bringing your total mentor coaching hours to the ten required for a credential. You share a recording of your coaching, and we stop and start it together to reflect on your use of the competencies, integrating the feedback into your practice over at least three months.
- Deep engagement with the ICF core competencies through practical application and discussion, always in service of the human connection that sits underneath them.
What’s included
Alongside the core programme, you receive:
- A copy of my book The Transformational Coach, which walks you through the mindset shifts that allow skill set shifts to stick.
- A copy of my book Reclaiming Love in Coaching, which brings love to the fore as a professional practice.
- Ten hours of exploration of the core competencies, including real MCC coaching demonstrations
- A specialist video on accessing multiple intelligences in your coaching practice.
- A welcome care package to support your learning.
A total of 17 CCEs are available, 7 for mentor coaching and 10 for competency masterclasses.
What you can expect from me
I know the ICF competencies and the MCC assessment markers in detail, and I know what assessors are looking for. I will tell you honestly if I think a recording carries risk as a submission, though the final pass or fail rests with the assessor. What I will do is work with you rigorously until your coaching reflects both the competencies and something that is distinctly yours.
I treat this as a growth experience, which means I will take you further than the minimum requirement and hold the bar high throughout.
I commit to mentor coaching for myself every year, and to therapy to keep my own heart open. The standard I hold for you is the same standard I hold for myself.
One thing before you decide
When a person is truly seen and held, they begin to see and hold others. That is how one coaching conversation ripples out from the room it happens in, towards a more peaceful, more equal, more connected world.
Your competence earns you the credential. Love is what makes your competence matter in our fearful, divided, indifferent world. This Lock-in builds both, at once and on purpose. Come and do the work a machine cannot do, for a reason bigger than any of us.
The MCC candidate guide lays out everything you need to know. The ICF website gives you the small print, and once you sign up for the Lock-in, I will help you through the path.
