Living in the Grey: A Coach's PCC Journey

Cycling back from a hike one morning recently, I stopped at the lights near the Pearson centre in Taipei. It is a nondescript building to most that pass by, but it means something more to the test candidates who, like me, have sat in one of its small, stuffy exam rooms. That room held my ICF PCC exam, and my ACC before it. I will admit I still sometimes feel a bit nervous just riding past it.

The ICF PCC (and the previous ACC) exam, certainly in its current scenario-based format, is not something you walk into lightly. Credit to the ICF for recognising how much pressure the exam put many of us under, and for updating the ACC exam in 2024. Even so, passing it is still a real challenge for any coach who wants that credential, and I wanted it; not because I thought it would suddenly make me a better coach - it almost certainly doesn’t do that for anybody, not overnight and in itself at least, but it does give you a certain legitimacy, and it is a requirement for coaching positions in many organisations and coaching platforms. Our industry, though no longer considered a frontier one, is still largely unregulated and it can feel, even (especially?) to coaches with a passion for how transformative it can be, a bit like the Wild West: the ICF credentialing matters.

So how to pass the ICF PCC exam? You have already covered a lot of hard miles, hours of theory, more hours of coaching practice, and now this. The ICF publishes a handful of sample questions, but the same few seem to have been doing the rounds for years. We study them for patterns and shortcuts, anything that might help us crack the code. It helps, but it never quite feels like enough. Maybe it never will. And there is nothing wrong with going into an exam a little nervous. We are nervous because we care. So what is left?

You need a real grasp of the materials: the markers and the ethics. Know them, and know them well. Full disclosure: I find the ICF ethics, and especially the guidelines around them, dense and demanding. That may say as much about my wanting to understand every last detail effortlessly as it does about the documents themselves. Either way, there are not many shortcuts to this exam.

Beyond knowing the ethics and the markers, and I mean absorbing them, really understanding the essence of them, you practice answering the questions, and in the form you know you’ll be tested in the exam. Is this like real coaching? Maybe not. But it is close to the sort of uncertainty you will and do have to live in as a coach. You work through scenarios and make a judgement call on the best answer.

For practice, I found the mock tests at ExpertCoach.Co platform the best resource. I won’t say it was easy, and there was some comfort in that - I felt like I was being legitimately tested. I found the explanations of options especially useful to hone my understanding of how to interpret the scenarios. I didn’t get it right every time. By their nature, and by coaching’s nature, the answers are not black and white.

There is often no single right thing to do, just a “best way” (and worst, if you’re also being tested at the PCC level) in the circumstances. Isn’t that life?

From time to time the ICF will update the markers and the ethics, not because the underlying principles will change much, but because our understanding and interpretation of them will shift a little with time. Trying to get everything right all the time is impossible, as it is bound to be in a human-centred discipline. In that is the power of coaching: not everyone sees things the same. That lives and must live in this.

Learn to live in the grey, the way you already do as a coach out in the world. Get as comfortable as you can in the “not knowing”. Know your markers, know your ethics (yes, those dense guidelines too), and practice exam-like scenarios from a trusted source until you feel as ready as you reasonably can. The exam is an odd, slightly unnatural way of drawing on your coaching instincts, and familiarity takes the edge off. Then trust your preparation and breathe. You’ve got this.