The 2025 ICF Core Competency Updates: What Coaches Need to Know

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) has released an update to its Core Competencies—refining language, adding new behavioral indicators, and responding to an increasingly global, digital, and complex coaching landscape.

While the eight competencies remain the same, the 2025 update includes new sub-competencies, revised indicators, and expanded descriptions that clarify what effective, ethical, and human-centered coaching looks like today.

Below is a competency-by-competency breakdown of what's new, what changed, and what it means for your coaching practice.

Competency 1: Demonstrates Ethical Practice

What’s New or Updated

• Updated wording to emphasize upholding the ICF Core Values, not simply “core values.”
  
• ICF Core Values, as cited in the ICF Code of Ethics, are “Professionalism, Collaboration, Humanity, and Equity.”
  
• The interpretation of this shift is a reinforced alignment among ethics, cultural sensitivity, and the responsible use of technology.
  

Why It Matters

The language shift here clarifies that the “core values” previously referenced are those of the ICF Code of Ethics and all ICF Professionals. The update reinforces that ethics are not rules, they are daily practices that govern how we show up. Coaches should keep the ICF’s core values of  “Professionalism, Collaboration, Humanity, and Equity,” at the forefront of every step of the coaching engagement - with a special emphasis on sensing when and where inequality and systemic injustice creates real barriers for clients.

Click here to watch the ICF’s YouTube video on the 2025 interpretation of this competency.

Competency 2: Embodies a Coaching Mindset

 What’s New or Updated

• Expanded definition to emphasize:
  
  
  • Ongoing personal and professional development
    
  • Coach self-care and well-being
    
  • Reflective practice and supervision
    
  • Bias awareness and cultural influence + cultural humility
    
  • Awareness of how the coach’s internal state affects the coaching process
    
    
• Explicit encouragement for coaches to nurture curiosity, openness, and inner awareness.
  

Why It Matters

This is one of the biggest shifts in the 2025 competency updates. Coaching is now seen not only as what you do, but as who you are while doing it. The ICF is highlighting the importance of the coach’s inner work—because it directly shapes the client experience. This is especially true in noticing and addressing our own biases and lenses, and how this might impact our understanding of what the client is communicating.  Lumia’s classes on mindfulness in coaching, Unconscious Bias, and Intersectionality are great resources for addressing this updated competency. The ICF calls on coaches to not only work on themselves but to deepen their awareness and knowledge of the evolution of advances in coaching, including technology and best practices. 

This competency also addresses the need for coaches to maintain their emotional, physical, and mental well-being so that coaches can move beyond emotional regulation to emotional management.  Emotional management represents the coach's ability to show up in session, no matter what is going on in their lives. The ICF has put forth emphasis on the importance of mentorship and supervision to help coaches process both emotions and personal biases that may come up during the coaching process. This is part of nurturing openness and curiosity about the self as a coach, alongside curiosity about the client and the coaching process itself.

In everyday coaching ,this competency update looks like taking a personal inventory of how curious we are about the client, the environments and cultures that have influenced them as well as how cultures and environments have shaped the filters and judgment of the coach.  All of this leads into the coach’s ability to engage in building trust and safety with the client.

Click here to watch the ICF’s YouTube video on this updated competency.

Competency 3: Establishes and Maintains Agreements

What’s New or Updated

• At the start of a coaching engagement, before the session begins, coaches must be able to clearly articulate:
  
  • Their coaching philosophy
  • Client commitment to goals. (Asking the client to clearly articulate what are you committing to through the work of this coaching engagement.)
  • What coaching is—and isn’t
    
    
• Stronger emphasis on:
  
  • Revisiting the agreement throughout the engagement
    
  • Ensuring the process still meets client needs
    
  • Ethical and intentional closure (updated language from “end” to “close”)
    

 Why It Matters

Clear agreements create psychological safety. With the rise of hybrid coaching, complex organizational coaching, and niche practices, coaches must articulate scope, expectations, and boundaries with more precision and revisit them regularly—not just at the start of an engagement.  Setting the stage clearly for the scope and what to expect during a coaching engagement is important for the success of the working relationship. With this update, the ICF is asking the coach to update what is communicated to the client in two aspects of the coaching relationship: the beginning and the end.  This update includes an expectation that the coach articulates their coaching philosophy, style, and way of working up front before the coaching engagement begins.  Additionally, the ICF is calling on coaches to push a new client to declare their own commitment to a goal or set of goals up front in the coaching relationship.  Lumia’s Essentials curriculum on personal branding and entrepreneurship, as well as the new niche building workshops, support coaches in being able to articulate their philosophy and style.  Stuck? Come to office hours and work through your blockers with Noelle!

In looking at the end of the coaching engagement, the ICF has changed their language from “end” to “closure” to represent the partnership that is implicit between the coach and client.  Doubling down on the concept of partnership,the ICF has also made slight adjustments to the way that agreements are set and calls for the coach to revisit the coaching agreement throughout the engagement and have real conversations in partnership with the client to make sure that the coaching relationship is still meeting the client’s needs. 

In practice, the coaching agreement becomes a living thread that runs through the entire coaching experience. 

Fun fact: the new ICF glossary has in-depth definitions of many of the terms in this competency update!

Click here to view the ICF YouTube explanation of this competency update.

Competency 4: Cultivates Trust and Safety

What’s New or Updated

• No structural changes.
  
• Reinforcement of the importance of a culturally aware, judgment-free, client-centered relationship.
  

Why It Matters

Even without formal updates, this competency anchors the entire model—especially as coaching grows globally. The ability to cultivate trust and safety with a client is the foundation of the coaching relationship. Building a relationship founded on trust and safety requires the coach to sit in a position of empathy with the client, where the coach is naturally curious and willing to feel with the client to embody a true state of mutual understanding about what the client is communicating.

Trust and safety now implicitly include identity awareness, inclusion, and contextual sensitivity.

Click here to watch the ICF’s YouTube video on the topic!

Competency 5: Maintains Presence

 What’s New or Updated

• New indicator emphasizing the coach’s ability to:
  
  • Remain aware of what is emerging for both the self and the client
    
  • Track internal sensations, emotions, and shifts in the moment
    

Why It Matters

Presence is no longer just “showing up”—it’s somatic awareness, emotional attunement, and responsiveness. The update to this competency is slight but incredibly important as the ICF has added that the coach must remain aware of what is happening for both the client and the self as the session is progressing.  This is in line with the general theme of the 2025 updates, wherein the ICF is calling for greater internal awareness on the part of the coach, especially around the cultivation of curiosity and awareness of bias. In a complex, distracted, digital world, presence becomes both a skill and an ethical commitment to the client. 

Click here to watch the ICF’s YouTube video on this competency's update.

Competency 6: Listens Actively

 What’s New or Updated

• Subtle but meaningful language changes regarding the tense of one word:
  
  • Reflects, summarizes and integrates the client's language based on  what the client is communicating (present, dynamic) vs past language which stated: “Reflects or summarizes and integrates the language of what the client communicated to ensure clarity and understanding.”
    
  • Emphasis on ongoing meaning-making
    
    
• Strengthened awareness of tone, energy, values, patterns, and worldview.
  

 Why It Matters

The goal of this competency rests on the ICF’s deire for coaches to gain competency around listening for that which is unsaid. This requires listening to become an active, ongoing practice. The shift from past tense (“communicated”) to present (“is communicating”) signals an emphasis on moment-by-moment attunement. Coaches must listen with all senses, in real time—not just interpret content.

To review the ICF’s YouTube video on this slight but important shift click here.

Competency 7: Evokes Awareness

 What’s New or Updated

• Indicator expanded to include:
  
  • Sharing observations, knowledge, and feelings
    
  • Offering them without attachment
    
  • Supporting client-generated insights
    
    
• Clearer distinction between:
  
  • Coaching
    
  • Consulting
    
  • Teaching
    
  • Mentoring
    

 Why It Matters

One of the most important things about this competency is the coach’s ability to facilitate learning and awareness throughout the entire coaching process.  There are some very slight but most welcome changes to this competency. The first change centers around the role of knowledge sharing within the coaching process.  Many of us come to the table of coaching with niche knowledge, and/or lived experience that can be valuable for the client in enhancing either learning or awareness. The update to this competency highlights the way that we have long taught at Lumia: coaches can share knowledge with the client but as an offering, preferable with permission, and without attachment. The ICF has now specified that coaches can bring knowledge into the conversation—but only in service of the client’s own awareness. This helps coaches responsibly integrate models, frameworks, and tools without slipping into advice-giving.

A second update is a refinement of the differences between consulting, teaching, and mentoring in order to support coaches in understanding how sharing knowledge and/or observation in session differs from other modalities. When we have a coaching hat on we are sitting in the seat of facilitator.  What we are facilitating is an authentic and engaged conversation.  When we share knowledge or observation as a coach it will emerge from the conversation itself rather than a plan or premeditated intent to share specific information. We will naturally find appropriate moments to ask permission to share things with our clients - without attachment. With this update the ICF specifies that asking permission is step one, step two is to clearly articulate that the coach is sharing from a perspective of offering information that the client can integrate into their awareness or discard it. The coach does not have emotional attachment to how information is received. Pausing and reflecting to co-create new meaning is appropriate in mastery of this competency.

To view the ICF’s YouTube video on this topic click here.

Competency 8: Facilitates Client Growth

What’s New or Updated

• New indicator emphasizing:
  
  • Supporting clients to integrate learning and sustain progress throughout the engagement.
  • New language added: Partners with the client to integrate learning and sustain progress throughout the coaching engagement.
• Updated wording shifting from “celebrate” to “acknowledge” client progress (more neutral and client-led).
  
  • Sub competency “Celebrates the client’s progress and successes,” has been changed to, “Acknowledges the client’s progress and successes.”
    

 Why It Matters

Facilitating growth is all about partnering with the client to foster transformation in both learning and insight. The updates represent a shift in linguistic focus that has moved from achieving goals to sustaining transformation and honoring the clients autonomy in this process. The new additions also represent a shift from the coach holding a focus on fostering change in each individual session to the coach holding a broader view of sustaining change over time, perhaps over multiple sessions. Coaching is not just about insight—it’s about helping clients apply learning in real life, long after sessions end.

In looking at the shift from the word “celebrate,” to "acknowledge," the ICF has said that the word “acknowledge,” represents a more globally inclusive approach to coach/client partnership.

To view the ICF’s YouTube video on these updates, click here.

To take a look at the ICF’s side by side comparison of these updates click here.

To review the ICF’s updated core competencies and glossary in full click here.

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What This Update Signals for the Future of Coaching

Across all eight competencies, themes emerge:

1. Coaching is increasingly holistic.

It’s not just about the client’s goals; it’s about mindset, identity, emotion, and whole-person development.

2. The coach’s inner world matters.

ICF is signaling that great coaching requires great self-awareness, regulation, ethics, and personal responsibility.

3. Cultural intelligence and context are essential.

Coaches must understand how identity, culture, and systems shape client experience... and their own.

4. Modern coaching requires technological and contextual nuance.

Virtual coaching, privacy, and digital ethics are now part of the professional standard.

What Coaches Should Do Now

• Review your coaching agreements and update your philosophy language.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni, join Office Hours with Noelle to talk this through.
• Integrate reflective practice and consider mentorship and/or supervision when there is a need to process bias or difficult emotions.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni can visit student portal to book discounted sessions with mentor coaches and coaching supervisors as needed.
• Build your somatic, emotional, and present-moment awareness skills.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni, use a class pass to revisit coursework on mindfulness in coaching and coaching presence.
• Revisit how you handle virtual coaching ethics and confidentiality.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni, use a class pass to revisit coursework on ethics and setting the agreement.
• Deepen your cultural awareness and bias-awareness training.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni, use a class pass to revisit coursework on Intersectionality and unconscious bias.
• Update your understanding of how to share observations or knowledge without attachment.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni, come to office hours to work this through with Noelle.
• Review your client-growth processes to support long-term integration.
  
  • Lumia students and alumni, join the quarterly business building workshops to talk this through with our experts.

*All Lumia alumni are given a “class pass,” to come back and revisit up to five classes per year, see their favorite instructors and network with new colleagues!