The performance evaluation is the part of ICF credentialing that tests whether you can actually coach — not whether you can describe coaching. For ACC you submit one recorded coaching session (roughly 20–60 minutes) with a written transcript; for PCC, two — each assessed against the markers for your target level. This is a practical, pre-submission checklist: the concrete things to check in your own recording before you send it in.
This guide is the how-to companion to our ICF assessment preparation page — start there for the overview of what the evaluation is and how Coala supports it, then use this checklist to pressure-test a specific recording.
Before you record
Use a real client and a real topic
Assessors can tell when a session is staged. Choose a genuine client bringing a genuine issue with enough substance to coach for the full window. A thin topic forces you to fill space, and filling space is where coaching turns into advice.
Get clean audio and informed consent
A recording the assessor cannot hear clearly is a wasted submission. Confirm consent to record on the audio itself, and check your levels before the real session — not after.
The pre-submission checklist
Listen back to your recording with these in front of you. Each maps to behavior assessors listen for under the ICF Core Competencies.
1. Talk-time balance
The client should be doing most of the talking. There is no magic ratio, but if you are speaking more than the client across the session, that is a red flag — it usually signals advice-giving or over-explaining. Spot-check the stretches where you talk the most and ask what you were doing there.
2. Open versus closed questions
Open questions ("What matters most about this?") invite exploration; closed questions ("Did that work?") tend to confirm or lead. You do not need to eliminate closed questions, but the spine of the session should be open, client-directed inquiry. Count how often you stack two or three questions into one breath — that habit muddies the client's thinking and reads as nervousness.
3. Advice-giving in disguise
The most common reason recordings fall short is advice wearing a question costume: "Have you thought about just talking to your manager?" is a suggestion, not a coaching question. Flag every moment where you nudge the client toward your solution. Replace them with genuine, open exploration.
4. Presence and silence
Notice what you do when the client goes quiet. Do you let the silence work, or do you jump in to rescue it? Presence shows up as comfort with pauses, responding to what the client actually said, and not racing to your next planned question. Mark the spots where you interrupted or filled a silence.
5. Session agreement and structure
Early on, did you partner with the client to define what they wanted from the session and how they would know it was useful? Then check whether you returned to that agreement as things evolved, and whether the close tied back to it. A session that wanders with no contracted outcome is hard to score well, however warm the conversation felt.
6. The client's own awareness and action
By the end, did the client discover something they name as new, and did they design their own next steps? If the insights and the action plan are mostly yours, the recording demonstrates a consultant, not a coach. Ownership has to stay with the client.
Reviewing the transcript
The written transcript is part of the submission, so read it as the assessor will. Patterns invisible in the moment jump off the page: repeated filler, leading phrasing, places where your questions answer themselves. Mark them and decide whether this is the recording to submit — or whether to coach another session and compare.
The most common reasons recordings fall short
Across performance evaluations that do not pass, a few patterns repeat:
- •Too much coach talk-time — advice and over-explaining crowd out the client.
- •Questions that lead or stack, instead of open, singular inquiry.
- •Advice disguised as questions.
- •A missing or vague session agreement, so there is nothing to coach toward.
- •The coach, not the client, owning the insights and the action plan.
If you catch these in your own recording before you submit, you have caught what an assessor would.
What happens after you submit
Once submitted, your recording and transcript are reviewed against the markers for your level. If it does not pass, that is not the end — you can typically address the feedback and resubmit. The faster route, though, is to get it right the first time by reviewing honestly before submission, which is exactly what this checklist is for. A failed submission costs weeks; an extra hour of self-review costs an hour.
Make the review faster and more honest
Doing this checklist by hand on every candidate recording is slow, and it is hard to be objective about your own habits. This is the work Coala is built for: it analyzes your session against the ICF Core Competencies and surfaces the exact signals above — talk-time balance, open versus closed questions, advice-giving, presence cues, and session structure — with real numbers you can compare across sessions. You see whether a recording is genuinely ready, and you practice smarter, not just more.
Coala is a structured preparation tool, not an official ICF evaluation tool, and it does not replace mentor coaching — bring your prepared recordings into mentor coaching for the final word. For the full picture of how it supports your evaluation, see ICF assessment preparation, and review pricing when you are ready to analyze a session.