Beyond the Checklist Competencies, Presence and Professional Coaching
- May 14
- 4 min read
Award-winning coach and multi-certified professional coach Catherine Finger contributes to the well-being of others by offering transformational coaching for leadership, health, and life.
For years, I resisted calling myself a coach. Not within educational leadership circles, where coaching carried a clear and respected meaning tied to preparation, accountability, and professional standards. In those environments, coaching implied articulated competencies, ethical responsibility, and ongoing development. It was a role connected to trust, and I respected that deeply.
Throughout my career in public education, I served as a classroom teacher, instructional coach, building and district leader, mentor, doctoral supervisor, and leadership developer at the county, state, and national levels. I studied leadership, taught leadership, and helped design systems intended to strengthen both leaders and the communities they served. At the heart of those systems was a shared understanding that competencies matter. Standards do not diminish creativity, they provide the foundation from which excellence can grow.
Ironically, my invitation into professional coaching emerged through an entirely different area of my life: writing. As an author of a faith-based thriller series, I spent years participating in writers’ conferences and creative communities. Over time, fellow authors increasingly sought my input not only on writing craft but on clarity, direction, discipline, and purpose. I found myself listening deeply, asking thoughtful questions, helping others untangle their thinking, and supporting them as they moved forward in meaningful work.
Without naming it as such, I was coaching. Several trusted friends encouraged me to pursue formal coach training. “You’re already doing this,” they would say. “Why not become a certified coach?”
I resisted. Not because I doubted the value of what I was offering, but because at that time I struggled with how loosely the word “coach” was often used outside established professional systems. After decades of working within environments where titles were earned and competencies clearly defined, I found it difficult to embrace a professional identity that, in my perception, lacked rigor and accountability. At that time, it seemed almost anyone could call themselves a coach.
So I said no. More than once. Yet, the writers kept coming. Then, somewhere around 2014 or 2015, I found myself stalled in the middle of my third novel. The clarity that had carried me through earlier manuscripts had thinned. At a writer’s conference, I met a man who introduced himself as an author coach. Under different circumstances, I might have dismissed the title altogether. Instead, I hired him.
What unfolded in those weekly sessions quietly reshaped my assumptions about coaching itself. He didn’t advise me on plot, edit my sentences, or rescue me from creative frustration. Instead, he partnered with me through thoughtful questions, disciplined listening, accountability, and steady presence. He created the kind of reflective space in which clarity could emerge organically rather than be forced.
The manuscript began singing again. So did my thinking. For the first time, I experienced coaching not as vague encouragement or performative motivation, but as a disciplined relational process capable of helping people access greater clarity, responsibility, creativity, and forward movement. I realized something important: I had not been resisting coaching itself. I had been resisting coaching without competencies.
When I later entered formal coach training and encountered established competency frameworks for the first time, I felt something unexpected: relief. There were ethical codes. There were articulated competencies. There were distinctions between coaching, consulting, mentoring, supervision, therapy, and advising. There was rigor beneath the relational work and discipline beneath the conversation.
I loved it immediately. Thoughtfully constructed competencies do not constrain excellence, they illuminate it. They articulate what skilled practice looks like while inviting practitioners into ongoing development. They cultivate accountability, intentionality, and reflective growth. In every serious profession, standards exist not as decoration, but as direction.
Over time, as I immersed myself in the competency frameworks of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), and the Association for Coaching (AC), I found myself doing what leaders often do: looking for patterns.
Each organization developed its own structures, language, and accreditation pathways. Yet beneath the variations, I noticed recurring commitments to ethical grounding, relational depth, reflective practice, disciplined partnership, and professional maturity. What began to emerge for me was something larger than a collection of coaching behaviors. I began to see an architecture of professional formation.
Competence, I realized, is not merely a checklist of skills to perform. It is a way of being that deepens over time. That realization changed how I understood coaching and leadership itself.
Outside the coaching room, I step into a very different arena, partnering with my horse in competitive events. A single distracted breath can disrupt the pattern. A moment of grounded clarity can steady an entire run. Presence is not something we discuss, it is something we embody. That world and my mare teach me so very much about embodied presence.
Increasingly, I believe this is the deeper invitation hidden within professional coaching competencies. Competencies don’t just inform performance, they create the structure upon which presence unfolds.
Coaching competencies, ethical frameworks, and standards matter deeply. But their greatest contribution is not simply helping coaches perform more effectively. Their deeper purpose is in helping practitioners become more reflective, intentional, grounded, disciplined, and relationally present.
Catherine Finger, Executive Coaching & Consulting
Award-winning coach and multi-certified professional coach Catherine Finger contributes to the well-being of others by offering transformational coaching for leadership, health, and life. Her passion to instill hope and celebrate beauty, goodness, and truth in the lives of leaders led her to launch her executive coaching and consulting business in 2019. Her years of successful experience as an educational leader, board member, adjunct professor, award-winning author, law enforcement chaplain and community leader equip her with unique insights and deep intuition on both organizations and individuals.
