Mentor Coaching, Coaching Mastery, and the Path to MCC Credential (ft. Juliann Wiese & Karyn Edwards)
Two MCC-level coaches, among the rarest credential holders in the world, join Noelle Cordeaux to talk about what it really takes to reach coaching mastery.
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The path from newly certified coach to Master Certified Coach (MCC) isn't about accumulating hours or passing exams. It's a transformative journey that fundamentally changes how you show up in the world.
Karyn Edwards and Juliann Wiese have both made this journey. As MCC-level coaches with decades of combined experience in corporate coaching, organizational development, and coach training, they've mentored hundreds of aspiring coaches while building thriving practices of their own. Karyn brings a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology and deep expertise in evidence-based approaches to coaching. Juliann holds a certificate in applied neuroscience and over a decade of experience navigating the business side of coaching.
In a recent conversation, these two longtime colleagues shared hard-won insights about what it really takes to move from practicing coaching skills to embodying the work itself. Their wisdom illuminates the path to mastery... bumps and all.
Moving from Performance to Presence
Early in their coaching careers, both women found themselves caught in what many new coaches experience: the tyranny of the internal checklist. Am I asking the right questions? Am I demonstrating the competencies correctly? What's the most powerful question I could ask next?
This performance anxiety creates a paradox. The more focused you become on executing coaching "correctly," the less present you are with your client. One coach described her breakthrough moment as finally noticing the client instead of monitoring her own performance. Another spoke of letting go of ego and the need to show up in a certain way, which allowed her coaching to become truly fluid.
The transition happens gradually. You stop switching coaching on and off like a skill set. The deep listening, the powerful questions, the ability to hold silence... these become integrated into who you are as a coach. You're no longer practicing coaching, you're embodying it and it shows up in your relationships, your daily interactions, your way of moving through the world.
The Reality of Building a Coaching Business
While coach training programs excel at teaching the craft of coaching, they often gloss over a sobering reality: building a sustainable coaching practice requires becoming proficient at things that have nothing to do with coaching sessions.
The business of coaching demands mastery in several distinct areas. You need to understand contracting... both the legal agreements that protect your practice and the psychological contracts that set clear expectations with clients and stakeholders. You need to develop business acumen around pricing, accounting, and professional sustainability. You need to cultivate your unique voice and philosophy in the marketplace.
Perhaps most surprising to many new coaches is learning that the majority of successful coaches expand beyond one-on-one coaching to sustain and grow their businesses. This might mean group programs, workshops, consulting, training, or other modalities that leverage your expertise in different ways.
The Corporate Coaching Landscape
For coaches interested in corporate work, the complexity multiplies. You're rarely working with only one client. There's the individual you're coaching, their direct supervisor, the stakeholder who authorized the coaching, and often an HR buyer who contracted your services. Each has different expectations, different goals, and different measures of success.
Effective corporate coaches become skilled at navigating these dynamics through meticulous contracting. This means taking time upfront to align everyone's expectations, establishing clear feedback loops, and being willing to have difficult conversations when misalignment appears. Sometimes it even means declining engagements when the setup predicts future problems.
One common challenge arises when a stakeholder assigns coaching to someone who doesn't believe they need it—or who believes their boss needs it more. Another occurs when what the paying stakeholder wants differs dramatically from what the client actually needs. Seasoned coaches address these dynamics head-on during the contracting phase, bringing all parties together to create clarity before the coaching begins.
The Credentialing Journey: Bumps and All
The path to higher-level ICF credentials isn't always smooth. Both coaches candidly shared their experiences of failing their first attempts at oral exams—moments that felt devastating at the time but ultimately yielded invaluable learning.
These setbacks illuminate an important truth about mastery: it's not linear. You can have years of experience, thousands of coaching hours, deep expertise, and still discover gaps in your practice when measured against the ICF's competency standards. The feedback from these evaluations, once the initial ego bruise heals, becomes a roadmap for growth.
The credentialing process also reveals why surrounding yourself with coaches operating at the level you aspire to reach makes such a difference. When you train and practice with MCC-level coaches, you're exposed to demonstrations of mastery that raise your own bar. You hear feedback calibrated to higher standards. You begin to internalize what excellence looks like in practice.
What Really Builds a Coaching Practice
New coaches often fixate on the wrong things. They pour energy into perfecting their website, agonizing over their logo, or investing in marketing funnels and lead generation. Meanwhile, their most valuable asset sits untapped: their existing network.
The truth is that successful coaches build their practices through relationships, not marketing campaigns. Your current network—colleagues, friends, acquaintances, community connections—represents fertile ground for your coaching business. These are people who already know and trust you, who can become early clients or connectors to clients.
This doesn't mean you'll never need a website or any marketing presence. But it does mean recognizing these as business cards, not business generators. Your credibility comes from your competence, your unique perspective, and the results you create with clients—not from your tech stack.
The Value of Mentorship
The ICF's requirement for ongoing mentor coaching every three years isn't arbitrary. Mentorship provides something you can't get anywhere else: a space to workshop your practice with experienced guides who've navigated the terrain you're exploring.
In group mentoring sessions capped at ten participants, coaches bring real challenges they're facing. Maybe they're struggling to articulate their niche. Perhaps they're stuck on a complex client situation involving multiple stakeholders. They might be grappling with the performative anxiety that's blocking their presence.
The magic happens when one coach's vulnerability opens the door for others to admit they're experiencing the same challenges. Everyone benefits from hearing diverse perspectives and learning from each other's experiences, all while receiving guidance from mentors who've successfully navigated these exact situations.
Strong mentoring programs blend two critical elements: helping coaches develop their mastery of the competencies while also building the business acumen to create sustainable practices. The goal is becoming the kind of coach who can serve clients powerfully while building a thriving professional life.
The Corporate Coach's Toolkit
Coaches working in organizational settings benefit enormously from mentors who've spent years in corporate environments. Understanding how talent departments operate, what pressures stakeholders face, and how organizational dynamics play out gives coaches crucial context for their work.
Additionally, backgrounds in fields like organizational psychology or applied neuroscience provide frameworks that enhance coaching effectiveness. When you can explain to a client why changing habits is neurologically challenging, or how evidence supports coaching's impact, you bring additional credibility to the work.
This doesn't mean coaches need advanced degrees to be effective. But it does mean understanding how to leverage whatever unique background and expertise you bring to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. Your specific combination of experiences, training, and perspective creates value that's irreplaceable.
Moving Beyond the Bright Shiny Objects
One of the most common traps for new coaches is chasing bright shiny objects—the latest marketing strategy, the perfect branding system, the automated funnel that promises easy clients. These distractions pull attention away from the real work: developing mastery and building genuine relationships.
The coaches who thrive are those who resist these distractions and instead focus on depth. They invest in understanding their clients deeply. They work on their own development continuously. They build authentic connections within their networks. They get clear about what makes their approach unique and learn to articulate it with confidence.
The Question of Non-Directive Coaching
Many coaches, especially those coming from consulting or advising backgrounds, struggle with the ICF's emphasis on non-directive coaching. The impulse to share expertise, give advice, or tell someone what they need to do can feel overwhelming, particularly when you genuinely know a solution that could help.
Learning to resist this impulse is essential... not because giving advice is inherently wrong, but because you can't access the power of coaching if you've never mastered the non-directive approach. Think of it as a light switch: you can't turn off advice-giving if you've never learned to turn it on.
Once you've developed the skill of purely facilitative coaching, you can consciously choose when to shift into consulting mode. But that choice requires first building the muscle of staying in inquiry, trusting the client's wisdom, and partnering rather than directing.
What to Look for in a Mentor
As you consider mentoring options, several factors distinguish truly developmental programs from those simply checking boxes for credentialing requirements.
First, examine your mentors' credentials and experience. Are they at least PCC level, ideally MCC? How much real-world coaching experience do they have? Do they work in the environment you aspire to serve?
Second, consider the program's focus. Is it purely evaluation-focused, helping you pass exams? Or does it prioritize your development as a coach, with exam success as a natural outcome?
Third, look at breadth of experience. Mentors who've taught hundreds or thousands of coaches have likely encountered every question and challenge you'll face. They've developed wisdom about common sticking points and effective pathways forward.
Finally, assess the cohort model. Small group mentoring with no more than ten participants allows for personalized attention while creating community. You learn from others' questions and challenges while building relationships with fellow coaches on similar journeys.
The Long View
Building a masterful coaching practice isn't a sprint. It's a decades-long journey of continuous development, learning, and growth. The coaches who thrive are those who commit to the long game... investing in their own development, building authentic relationships, and staying true to their unique perspective and values.
The industry is at an inflection point. Post-2020, awareness and demand for coaching has skyrocketed. Organizations increasingly recognize coaching as essential for leadership development, culture change, and employee wellbeing. The opportunities for well-trained, competent coaches have never been greater.
But with opportunity comes responsibility. As coaching proliferates, the need for well-mentored, ethically grounded, competent practitioners becomes even more critical. This is why mentorship matters both for individual coaches' success and for the integrity of the profession itself.
Your Next Step
If you're early in your coaching journey, consider this: the decisions you make now about your development will shape your practice for years to come. Seeking out mentorship from experienced practitioners, especially those operating at the level you aspire to reach, accelerates your growth immeasurably.
If you're further along but feeling stuck, mentorship offers a space to break through plateaus, gain fresh perspectives, and reconnect with what called you to this work in the first place.
The path to mastery is nonlinear, challenging, and deeply rewarding. With the right guides and a commitment to your own development, you can build a coaching practice and a professional life that allows you to create the impact you're truly meant to make.
Connect with the Mentors
Ready to take the next step in your coaching journey?
Karyn Edwards, PhD, MCC
Juliann Wiese, MCC
Join the Next Mentor Coaching Cohort
Karyn and Juliann's next group mentoring program begins April 2nd, 2026, with early bird pricing available through March 2nd. Limited to 10 participants. Register Here
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