The only coach training program accredited by the Center for Credentialing and Education that awards 30 to 50 continuing education hours for licensed mental health professionals.
If you have been:
It is time to level up. It is time to do work that energizes you, with clients who value it, without risking your license. The Growing Self Institute Coaching Certification for Therapists gives licensed mental health professionals everything they need to transform their careers, their private practices, and the lives of their clients, ethically and with excellence.
You have a graduate degree in psychology. You are a licensed therapist. Why would you need a coaching credential?
It is the right question to ask, and you deserve a straight answer. This is not remedial training. You already know how to help people. Here is what this specialized training and credential actually gives a clinician of your caliber.
True coaching is a distinct method
It is not directive therapy without a diagnosis. Coaching is a separate, evidence-based process with a different purpose: facilitating personal development, performance, and tangible outcomes on values-based goals for people who do not need treatment. It is a modality almost no therapist was trained in, no matter how many letters follow your name.
It protects the license you earned
Coaching is unregulated, so anyone can call their work "coaching," whether or not it aligns with coaching psychology. That is the risk. Scope-of-practice missteps, inadequate due diligence, fuzzy boundaries, and even licensing-board grievances in states where you are not licensed are all problems therapists in this space must navigate. Unregulated coaches do not. You do.
It is a rare market advantage
A recognized coaching credential sets you apart in a field where almost no one holds one. It signals to discerning clients that you are both a clinician and a coach, and that you can prove it. It also lifts your market value in a crowded field where rate caps and commodification otherwise cap what you can charge, no matter how good you are.
I didn't think coaching was a "real thing" either. I had completed a master's degree and a doctorate in counseling psychology, and I was astounded to learn that coaching psychology was not only real, it was a more effective approach for the majority of my non-clinical clients. The problem? I had not been taught the first thing about it in training that prepared me to be a behavioral healthcare provider.
My post-graduate training and credentialing transformed the way I work, the outcomes I create for clients, and the success of my practice. I would like to help you do the same.
See exactly what the credential requires.
Before you decide anything, get the full prerequisites, application process, and credentialing details, drawn straight from the Center for Credentialing and Education, so you can evaluate this on your own terms.
- The eligibility criteria, and whether your license qualifies
- The full application and examination process
- How our program maps to every requirement
Get the requirements
We will send the complete details to your inbox.
No pressure and no sales sequence. Just the information you need.
The Board Certified Coach credential is not just for therapists. That is exactly why the program you choose matters.
Like the International Coaching Federation credential, the Board Certified Coach credential is open to people from many backgrounds, and most programs that prepare people for it are built for the general public. You are not the general public. You are a dual practitioner with a license to protect and ethical obligations no layperson coach carries. A generic program will prepare you for the same exam, and leave you completely unequipped for the part that is actually hard for a clinician.
Coaching, in the abstract
- Basic counseling and coaching competencies
- General ethics for coaches
- Sales and marketing strategies to build a coaching business
Coaching as a dual practitioner
- Where the legal line between therapy and coaching sits
- Evidence-based coaching models and frameworks
- Self-of-therapist versus self-of-coach awareness
- How to apply your transferable skills and build entirely new ones
- How to launch and hold a profoundly different helping relationship
- Identifying clinical needs in a coaching context, and how to coach into treatment
- Practice protocols, paperwork, and systems that protect against licensing-board exposure
of licensed therapists also hold a recognized coaching credential.
Rarity is leverage in a crowded field.
Therapy has never been more available, and its perceived value is being driven down by corporate commodification, app-based platforms, and artificial intelligence tools all competing on price. Full coach credentialing is one of the few things that meaningfully sets a clinician apart.
That rarity matters to a particular kind of client: the discerning person who has often spent years in therapy, understands both its value and its limits, and is now looking for a more direct, outcomes-focused approach.
Your ideal clients have already done therapy. They are looking for someone with your clinical depth who also has specialized training in transformational coaching, and can prove it.
Serve the clients you most want to work with, in the way they actually need.
Research suggests roughly half of the people who seek out therapists are not looking for treatment at all. They want growth, structure, and momentum. Coaching is what they were looking for the whole time.
More effective
When there is no treatment goal, therapists tend to process and explore. Coaching gives you a framework to deliver the forward movement your growth-oriented clients actually hired you for.
Sustainable income
Therapy fees are effectively capped by what insurance will pay, even when you do not take it. Coaching is not health care, which lets you work with motivated self-pay clients at rates the therapy market does not allow.
Less depletion
Sitting with crisis and trauma all day takes a toll. Coaching lets you spend more of your week with energizing, forward-moving clients, so you can do good work without running yourself into the ground.
A portable practice
Because coaching is not licensed care, you can work with clients across state lines and build a practice with room to grow beyond the one-to-one hour.
Druss, B. G., Wang, P. S., Sampson, N. A., Olfson, M., Pincus, H. A., Wells, K. B., & Kessler, R. C. (2007). Understanding mental health treatment in persons without mental diagnoses: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Archives of General Psychiatry, 64(10), 1196–1203. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.64.10.1196
Kessler, R. C., Chiu, W. T., Demler, O., Merikangas, K. R., & Walters, E. E. (2005). Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Archives of General Psychiatry, 62(6), 617–627. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.62.6.617
- 1
Accredited Education
Licensed mental health professionals, NCCs, or individuals with advanced degrees in psychology must complete a 30-hour accredited coaching certification program approved by the NBCC and CCE.
- 2
Supervised Experience
Upon coursework completion, candidates must obtain 30 hours of applied coaching experience and secure professional recommendations from coaching supervisors.
- 3
National Examination
Candidates will sit for the national BCC examination, administered by the CCE, which assesses knowledge of core coaching competencies, ethics, and methodologies.
- 4
Continuing Education
To maintain the BCC credential, certified professionals must complete 70 coaching-specific CE hours every five years, ensuring continued professional growth and alignment with evolving standards.
How a licensed therapist becomes a Board Certified Coach.
- Complete accredited coach trainingBecause you already hold an advanced clinical degree, you qualify for the 30-hour pathway, rather than the 60 or 120 hours required of laypeople seeking a coaching credential.
- Earn 30 coaching experience hoursOur supervised practicum supplies real clients, so you complete this requirement without having to find your own.
- Gain three to five paying clients right awayThe practicum links you with coaching clients eager to keep working with you. The net result is that the program can pay for itself.
- Secure your endorsement and applyWe sign off on your paperwork and endorse your application to the Center for Credentialing and Education.
- Pass the Board Certified Coach examOur exam study group prepares you and walks you through the application portal step by step.
- Keep your credential currentMaintaining the credential requires 70 coaching continuing education hours every five years. Our Growth Collective offers continuing education that pulls double duty, counting toward both your license renewal and your coach recredentialing.
- Grow with ongoing supportTherapists who coach have unique needs for case consultation, mentorship, practice coaching, and expert-level niches such as relationship, career, and emotional-intelligence coaching. The Growing Self Institute gives our alumni a vibrant professional community to keep learning and growing in.
Choose the path that fits your practice.
Most of our students choose the Expert Experience, even though it asks more of them, because they want genuine competence and a running start, not just a credential to collect.
Expert Experience
- Everything in the Coaching Academy coursework
- Eight weeks of live group coaching with Dr. Lisa and co-instructors
- An 8-week supervised practicum that supplies your 30 required coaching hours
- Those practicum clients become yours, so you finish with paying clients
- Small-group case consultation and one-to-one mentorship
- Board Certified Coach exam study group and application support
- 50 continuing education hours
The first step is to attend an information session, so we can both make sure it is the right fit.
Interested? Register for an information sessionCoaching Academy
- The full 30-hour accredited coursework
- Instant access, fully self-paced, with lifetime access
- Video lessons, handouts, and applied assignments
- Meets the 30-hour educational requirement for the credential
- 30 continuing education hours toward license renewal
- Best for self-directed clinicians who already have clients and mentorship
The next step
Is this the right fit? Let us both find out.
Join our program director, Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, for a casual information session in an intimate small-group format. You will meet her and a handful of other therapists on the same path to talk through your professional hopes and goals, learn what coaching is and is not, and understand the opportunities and risks for therapists working as dual practitioners. You will leave with more clarity about your next step, and if it is a good fit on both sides, an invitation to enroll.
Meet with Dr. LisaI built this because I needed it, and it did not exist.
When I became a therapist, I had a big vision and, before long, a bad case of burnout. I was buried in vicarious trauma, worn down by insurance, and watching the growth-oriented clients I most wanted to help drift away, because therapy was not what they were actually looking for.
Then I found coaching, and the Board Certified Coach credential, and everything changed. Not because I collected another certificate, but because it changed how I worked. I stopped being one of thousands of interchangeable therapists. I became a therapist who coaches, with a better way of helping people get what they came for.
I built this program so that responsible, licensed clinicians could make that same shift without the risk, and with the training, protection, and support that no generic coach program was ever going to give them. If that is the chapter you are ready to write, I would be honored to guide you.
The credential is the beginning, not the finish line.
Certification answers the question of how to become a coach. Our graduate community answers the harder one: how to build a thriving, self-pay practice, and never do it alone.