8 ICF Core Competencies guide

This is a guide to all things ICF competency related, updated in 2026 to account for the ICF credential path and accreditation changes. Whether you’re on the ICF credentialing road to ACC, PCC and MCC, you love improving your coaching skills, or you’re preparing for an assessment, you’ll find useful tips, “aha” insights and suggested skills to meet these global professional coaching benchmarks. This is a behind-the-curtain sharing, where you can learn exactly what we, as ACC, PCC and MCC marker assessors, look for in a coaching assessment and why.

Who are the ICF?

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the world’s largest organisation leading the global advancement of the coaching profession. Founded in 1995, its 60,000-plus members and credential-holders in more than 160 countries and territories work toward common goals: enhancing awareness of coaching and upholding the integrity of the profession through lifelong learning and the highest ethical standards. It accredits training programs and credentials professional coaches at three levels: Associate (ACC), Professional (PCC), and Master (MCC).

Even though I appreciate the value of the ICF, I also feel it’s important that each coach frees their unique style and voice in the coaching space. Like passing a driver’s test to prove we can safely drive a car, the ICF has given us benchmarks for ethical and professional coaching standards that we can stand on and not be trapped under.

Every coach is unique. We all walk our own career paths, learning how best to serve the clients called to us. I suggest that you use the ICF guidelines and standards to establish a baseline, then find and free your unique expression. Otherwise there’s a risk of dulling your free creative spirit. Let your inner wisdom guide you in your ability to meet your clients at their place of need and serve at the highest.

Knowledge empowers, wisdom enlightens. Let’s lead, coach and guide with wisdom together.

My name is Colleen-Joy. I’m MCC certified with the ICF and the author of the InnerLifeSkills Master Coach, Level 1 and Level 2 accredited training program. Being accredited since 2012 means my team and I have had the privilege of guiding many natural coaches to build successful careers, changing lives one coached conversation at a time. Two of our corporate clients, where we’ve trained managers and consultants with coaching skills, were shortlisted for the ICF Prism Award top 5 and top 10. We’ve guided many coaches to successfully achieve their ACC, PCC and MCC.

I’m sure you’ve realised the ICF competencies can be confusing. The ICF made significant changes to its competencies and accreditation paths in the last few years. After marking many assessments and listening to common questions and confusion, I’ve compiled this guide to help. Let’s declutter, demystify, and give you critical skills and methods to strengthen several competencies. Although each ICF competency has specific markers, you’ll find that some skill sets strengthen several competencies at once. One solid skill or method can help you demonstrate several core competencies, and I’ll highlight which ones can help you reach professional and master levels.

What’s in this guide

• What are the 8 ICF Core Competencies?
• The 5 guiding principles we use to assess your coaching
• Competency 1: Demonstrates Ethical Practice
• Competency 2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset
• Competency 3: Establishes and Maintains Agreements
• Competency 4: Cultivates Trust and Safety
• Competency 5: Maintains Presence
• Competency 6: Listens Actively
• Competency 7: Evokes Awareness
• Competency 8: Facilitates Client Growth

What are the latest 8 ICF Core Competencies?

There are four categories of ICF competency: A, Foundation; B, Co-creating the relationship; C, Communicating effectively; and D, Cultivating learning and growth. Here are the eight core competencies.

1. Demonstrates Ethical Practice
2. Embodies a Coaching Mindset
3. Establishes and Maintains Agreements
4. Cultivates Trust and Safety
5. Maintains Presence
6. Listens Actively
7. Evokes Awareness
8. Facilitates Client Growth

After extensive research, surveys and dialogue with in-house and independent professional coaches across the globe, the ICF offers these 8 core competencies to set the gold standard of professional coaching. These competencies are used to assess and credential professional coaches.

The ICF Core Competencies were developed to support a greater understanding of the skills and approaches used within today’s coaching profession as defined by ICF. These competencies and the ICF definition of coaching serve as the foundation of the credential process, including the ICF Credentialing Exam.

International Coaching Federation

How have the Core Competencies changed?

The original ICF competencies were created in 1998 and had 11 core competencies. With the industry evolving and growing fast, it was time for an update. The leadership team felt it was time to articulate more clearly what on-the-ground coaches had been doing for 20 years and more.

In the ICF official interview with Pamela Richarde, MCC, she explains that the updated core competencies aren’t “new”. They’re articulated slightly differently and organised more logically in relationship to what working coaches actually do. Along with updating the competencies, the ICF also revamped its brand and launched several new website services for its growing community.

5 guiding principles we use to assess your coaching

When my InnerLifeSkills faculty team and I mark assessments, we listen to Level 1 and Level 2 performance evaluations for ACC and PCC, which are submitted recorded coaching sessions. As we listen, we’re guided by five principles that align with ICF marking standards. These five guiding principles, plus the eight core competencies, can help you know exactly what’s looked for in your coaching.

1. Opportunity: can you spot coaching opportunities?

The first guiding principle is opportunity. When we mark performance evaluations, we ask ourselves, “Is the coach noticing the opportunities to coach in a client conversation?” Listen to your client’s sharing to identify and spot opportunities for further exploration or inquiry.

Here are a few reasons you might miss vital opportunities. You’re:

• Too focused on the process (beginner coaches suffer from this).
• Too mechanical (if you haven’t learned flexible skills).
• Not listening deeply enough (if you’re listening to your own thoughts, or aren’t fully engaged).
• Not feeling fully equipped to meet that opportunity (a lack of training, methods and skills).

These can count against you and lower your overall skillset as a coach. Once you’ve heard an opportunity, your client says something that will help move the session forward, and you’ve spotted it, it’s all about how you respond.

What is a coaching opportunity? A coaching opportunity could be something the client has said, or not said, or the way they’ve said it. That’s why we need to be listening to the whole client, not only the literal words they’re using.

2. Response: can you respond at professional levels?

How you respond is what you say, and how and when you say it. As assessors, we’re asking ourselves:

• Are you responding at an ACC Associate entry level, a PCC Professional level, or an MCC Master coach level?
• Are you responding as a coach, or more as a consultant, a trainer, a counsellor, or a mentor?
• Are your responses fully customised to who your client is: their identity, values, beliefs and ideas, as well as to what your client wants, their goals, solutions and the meaningful change they seek?

For example, a contract, the agreed session focus outcome, could be that your client wants to make an action plan, change a mindset, overcome an inner obstacle, brainstorm solutions, have some kind of emotional state change, or make a decision. There are many different kinds of contract outcomes, and they can be done in the timeframe of a session. This matters because we should customise our coaching in alignment with the contract. I often use the metaphor of an archer hitting a target for contracting. The client needs to select and determine the session contract, not the coach.

One of the things we listen for is the balance between productivity, helping a client achieve something in their session, and the wonderful gift of just holding space for someone to share openly. It’s the balance between what the ICF calls the “Who” and the “What”, so that the session isn’t only surface, to-do-list style coaching. We also consider the context: why they’re there for coaching, whether they were sent to you or volunteered, and whether there’s a theme behind the coaching. These are all kept in mind as you customise.

3. Customised: can you customise your response?

To customise, you need flexibility in your skills, and that starts at high professional and master coaching levels. Building a comprehensive toolbox, with many different frameworks and processes to adapt and draw from, gives you freedom. A poorly trained coach struggles to adapt and customise, so their coaching is rigid and mechanical. Think of a chef who can only cook a few recipes, versus a master chef who has so many recipes and skills that they can be creative and intuitive. That’s what we want for your coaching.

If you have one-dimensional, limited coaching skills, or you can only offer what we call to-do-list coaching, you’re going to find it difficult to customise, and you might struggle to reach the professional and master levels where customised flexibility counts the most.

4. Evidence, not judgment: are you showing enough quality evidence?

When marking performance evaluations, we’re listening for evidence. We’re not deciding wrong or right, or good or bad. We’re gathering evidence that you’re meeting the ICF core competencies. Some competencies require just a touch of evidence. Some are implied, and you don’t have to provide evidence in the session itself. But there are many competencies where you do need to show substantial evidence.

We’re also listening for contra evidence.

Contra evidence, in assessing an ICF core competency, refers to information or behaviours that contradict or challenge the expected or demonstrated proficiency in that competency.

Contra evidence is those deal-breaker moments where you step outside the realm of coaching, and there’s evidence that moves against your capacity to offer professional coaching. So we’re gathering evidence and noting contra evidence. We’re not judging you as a person. We’re evaluating the session, looking for proof that you’ve demonstrated the ICF competencies.

5. Inquiry vs exploration

This is an important point. There’s a difference between inquiry and exploration as defined by the ICF.

1. An inquiry is when you ask a single question.
2. Exploration is what I like to call taking out a picnic basket, where the opportunity you’re responding to deserves far more than a quick question.

This is particularly important when your client discovers “aha” epiphanies, those growth moments when they shift from “I don’t know” to “I have clarity, and I know.” When your client has an important transformation, or an inner obstacle is suddenly resolved through accessing their inner wisdom, they’re finding their own best solutions. That deserves deep exploration rather than light inquiry.

If you’re sitting at a dinner table with a loved one, and you share something important, and they say, “please pass the salt”, you feel the break in rapport and might shut down. Our clients always give us opportunities to respond, and to respond well. They don’t want mechanical, scripted questions that weren’t customised to them, to the context, and to the reason they came for coaching in the first place. When those gems show up in a session, and you intuitively sense this is something important, they deserve full exploration.

Take a little side road for a moment. Invest a few minutes, take out a picnic basket with your clients, and hang out there to discover and dig a little deeper.

How the ICF exams work

Alongside your training and performance evaluations, you’ll write an ICF exam. The format depends on the credential you’re going for.

• ACC (Associate): the ICF ACC Exam. 60 multiple-choice questions on your knowledge of coaching essentials, scored from 200 to 600, with 460 to pass. There’s no penalty for a wrong answer, so answer every question.
• PCC and MCC: the ICF Credentialing Exam. This one is scenario based. You’re given coaching situations and asked to choose the best and the worst coach response, and you need both right to score the item. It has 78 situational-judgment items and you have 180 minutes.

Summary

When you’re preparing for an ICF performance evaluation and exam, focus on demonstrating evidence for the core competencies, avoiding contra evidence, and knowing when to explore deeply rather than ask a single lighter question. Read our articles on each competency, and download our ICF competency infographic, to gain insight, demystify the process, and learn methods that strengthen a few competencies at the same time. With these five guiding principles in place, let’s add an understanding of the first core competency next.