Growth Beyond Time & Habit

The International Coaching Federation counts only coaching hours completed after the start of an accredited credential program. At first glance, that can seem arbitrary. Why should ten years of coaching not count as ten years of coaching?

The answer has less to do with time than with development.

What Practice Produces

We've all heard the saying that practice makes perfect. It doesn't; practice makes habits. Good habits, bad habits, or indifferent habits. Repetition reinforces whatever is repeated. Without a mechanism for feedback and correction, experience tends to compound itself in whatever direction it started.

Compare a CISO with ten years in the role to one with five years shaped by structured feedback, challenges to their assumptions, and learning outside cybersecurity. The first has more experience. Time alone does not tell us who developed further, only who has been in the role longer.

The same applies to coaching. Ten years built on instinct and repetition do not necessarily represent more development than five years shaped by structured learning, supervision, feedback, and reflection.

Practice records repetition. Development requires that repetition to be examined, corrected, and changed.

What Turns Experience Into Development

Success can protect poor judgment. Failure can punish sound judgment. Development begins when the decision is examined separately from the outcome and the assumptions behind it are made visible.

That requires a source of correction outside the habit itself. Otherwise, experience becomes evidence for whatever the practitioner already believes.

What the Credential Recognizes

The ICF does not discount prior experience. It separates hours accumulated before structured development from hours completed within it.

A credential cannot prove effectiveness. It can show that part of the coach’s practice was exposed to training, supervision, feedback, and standards designed to make experience developmental rather than merely cumulative.

CISOs have seen the same pattern in security: tenure alone does not distinguish someone who has grown in judgment from someone who has simply repeated the same work for longer.

That is what the ICF cutoff is intended to recognize.

What Time Can Tell Us

Years of experience tell us how long someone has been exposed to the work. They do not tell us whether that experience was examined, corrected, or allowed to harden into habit.

The difference is not time served. It is what changed during it.