Program Design · Draft v0.1 · The Compass Institute
Authentic360 Coach Certification
A twelve-week certification for coaches and mentors who want to practice formation-oriented coaching in personal life, leadership, and enterprise, using the Authentic360 assessment and report as the operating instrument of their work.
The Program
A certification in a specific formation method, not another coaching credential.
Most coach training teaches coaching itself: listening skills, contracting, session structure, ethics. This program assumes you already have those. What it teaches is a specific formation methodology, the Authentic360 model of human motivation and its associated instruments, and how to deliver it at three levels of engagement: the person, the leader, and the enterprise.
By the end of twelve weeks a certified coach has read at least eight full Authentic360 reports, delivered a complete pilot engagement to a live client under supervision, passed a competency check on each foundational construct, and chosen at least one of three practice tracks. They walk out with an operating toolkit that includes the assessment, the Integration Report, the Driver Coach AI companion, and a repeatable engagement structure they can price and sell the following week.
This program produces coaches who can read a person the way a physician reads an X-ray: not to diagnose pathology, but to see structure, and from structure name the specific formation invitation the person's next season is asking them to walk.
Program thesis
The Three Tracks
One foundation. Three fields of practice.
Every certified coach completes the same foundation curriculum. Specialization happens by track. A coach may certify in one track to begin and add tracks over time, or complete all three to earn the master credential. The three tracks describe where the framework is applied, not different frameworks.
Track · PF
Personal Formation
The one-to-one engagement with an individual in a season of formation.
Coaches on this track serve individuals working through life transitions, identity questions, relational patterns, meaning crises, marriage and family concerns, midlife recalibration, and vocational discernment. The client is the individual; the arc is a six to twelve session engagement across three to six months.
Typical clients
- Adults in career or life transition
- Individuals in identity or meaning work
- Marriage-and-family coaching pairs
- Young professionals in vocational discernment
Track · LF
Leadership Formation
The mentorship of a leader on how they lead while governing their own drivers.
Coaches on this track serve leaders: executives, founders, pastors, non-profit directors, senior operators. The work sits at the seam between the leader's own driver configuration and the way it plays out in the people they lead. Engagements typically run twelve months and include a hybrid of one-to-one, stakeholder feedback, and situational coaching.
Typical clients
- Founders and CEOs of small to mid-sized firms
- Pastors and senior ministry leaders
- Executive team members in high-stakes roles
- Newly promoted leaders under first-year stress
Track · EF
Enterprise Formation
Consulting to a leadership team or organization on the formation of its culture.
Coaches on this track work not with an individual but with a team, a company, or an institution. They read composite driver signatures across a leadership team, diagnose cultural patterns, and advise on formation-oriented interventions: hiring, succession, executive team building, values integration. Engagements are typically project-based and cross-functional.
Typical clients
- Executive teams working on cohesion or succession
- Founder-led companies scaling past 50 people
- Church staff teams and elder boards
- Family enterprises navigating generational transition
The Path
Application to credential in twelve weeks.
Every certified coach walks the same six-step path. Foundation runs weeks one through six. Track work runs weeks seven through ten. Practicum runs weeks eleven and twelve, in parallel with a live pilot client engagement that begins in week seven.
Step 01
Apply
Application, references, interview.
Step 02
Foundation
Eight modules over six weeks.
Step 03
Choose track
Personal, Leadership, or Enterprise.
Step 04
Track modules
Three modules over four weeks.
Step 05
Practicum
Live pilot client under supervision.
Step 06
Certification
Competency review and credential grant.
Credential Tier 1
Certified Coach
The base credential. Foundation plus one specialization track plus a completed pilot engagement.
Requirements: Foundation modules F01 through F08, one track, one pilot.
Credential Tier 2
Certified Practitioner
The working-coach credential. Two tracks completed, a portfolio of five client engagements over twelve months, and a case review before a supervising coach.
Requirements: Tier 1 plus a second track and five documented engagements.
Credential Tier 3
Certified Formation Consultant
The senior credential. All three tracks, a demonstrated body of work across personal, leadership, and enterprise, and endorsement by a Compass Institute supervisor.
Requirements: Tier 2 plus the third track and supervisor endorsement.
Foundation Curriculum
Eight modules. The framework, the instruments, the toolkit.
Foundation is the common language every certified coach shares. Each module includes roughly ninety minutes of teaching, a written reference chapter, an integration exercise applied to a real or de-identified sample report, a peer-cohort case discussion, and a short competency check the coach must pass to advance.
F01
The Ethos Model of Human Motivation
The Three Life Drivers (Ambition, Appetite, Approval), why every serious civilization named them, and the difference between a driver governed and a driver governing.
Coach walks out able to
Explain the model to a first-time client in ten minutes without notes, and identify the three-driver signature in a live conversation.
F02
Reading the Report: The Six Archetypes
The six configurations of the three drivers, the Pull and Turn dynamics, and how to read the archetype layer of an Authentic360 report without collapsing it into personality typing.
Coach walks out able to
Interpret a client's archetype page from a real report, name the Pull, and describe the Turn dynamic in the client's own language.
F03
Governance and the Plumb Line
The three governance domains (Leadership, Relationship, Enterprise), what a low band means and what it does not, and the plumb line question every client must eventually answer.
Coach walks out able to
Diagnose where a client's drivers are ungoverned, name the client's primary plumb-line source, and hold the plumb-line question without imposing an answer.
F04
The Sixteen Settled Truths as Formation Curriculum
The character standards every wisdom tradition converged on, arranged as an eight-point compass. The load-bearing three-to-five per client, and how to use them as an intervention menu without moralizing.
Coach walks out able to
Locate the three-to-five settled truths most load-bearing for a specific client and design one formation practice per truth.
F05
Leadership Facets and the Vocational Reading
The five leadership facets and their governance rings; the Holland RIASEC vocational typology; the cross-reading between archetype, facets, and vocational code.
Coach walks out able to
Translate a client's leadership and vocational data into a plain-language reading of what kind of work fits, what environments to avoid, and where they will hit ceilings.
F06
The AC Formation Arc
The four stages of formation (Aligned, Anchored, Active, Authentic), the recalibration loop, and the diagnostic questions that locate a client's current center of gravity on the arc.
Coach walks out able to
Locate a client on the arc, name the specific formation invitation the client's next season is asking, and design a season of work around that invitation.
F07
The Integration Reading
For faith-integrated coaches, the Integration Report layer: the sixteen New Testament gifts, the carried-versus-situational distinction, and the vessel-and-gift reading (how a client's archetype amplifies and endangers each of their carried gifts). For secular coaches, the equivalent character-strengths and vocation cross-read.
Coach walks out able to
Deliver an integration reading to the appropriate client audience without stepping outside the coach's scope of practice.
F08
The Coach's Toolkit and Engagement Structure
The full working toolkit: the assessment, the report, the Integration Report, the Driver Coach AI companion, session templates, and a repeatable arc for a first engagement. Contracting, pricing, session cadence, closure.
Coach walks out able to
Run a complete Authentic360 engagement from first intake through closing session, using the full toolkit, without improvising the structure.
F09
Driver-Aware Communication
How people speak from and hear through their primary driver, why this drives most interpersonal conflict, and how the coach names the mismatch and translates a message across drivers in real time. See the Communication Tool section below.
Coach walks out able to
Identify a client's primary driver from unstructured speech, name a driver mismatch inside a described conflict, and coach the client to translate a message into the listener's driver without losing its meaning.
A Signature Coaching Tool
Driver-aware communication. Naming the mismatch, in real time.
The Three Drivers are not only what people are governed by, they are how people speak and how people listen. A conversation between two people with different primary drivers is a conversation running on two different receivers. When the coach can hear that, and name it, the conflict below the words becomes visible, and the room's temperature changes inside a single sentence.
Every certified coach walks out of Foundation able to do three specific things with this frame.
01
Read the driver from the language
Identify a client's primary driver from ten minutes of unstructured speech, and confirm it against the report. The coach learns to listen for driver-specific vocabulary, image sets, and emotional register, and to distinguish a genuine driver signal from a fluent talker performing another driver's language.
02
Name the mismatch in a relationship
When a client is describing a rupture with a spouse, a colleague, a parent, or a team, the coach can often locate the miscommunication in a driver mismatch before the client can. The coach then names it back plainly: “You said that from Ambition. She heard it through Approval. She was not hearing what you meant, and you were not hearing what she was defending.” Naming defuses in ways that arguing about facts cannot.
03
Translate across drivers
When the client needs to be heard by a person on a different driver, the coach helps the client re-say the same thing in the listener's driver's vocabulary and image world. The message does not soften. The vehicle changes. This is not code-switching for approval, it is faithful communication that respects that the listener is also a whole human with a receiver of their own.
The technique first appears in Foundation module F09, is deepened in every track's engagement work, and is one of the elements the practicum supervisor pays closest attention to. The premise of the tool is set out in plain view on the Framework page.
Track PF · Personal Formation
Coaching the person through a season of formation.
The Personal Formation track equips the coach to hold a six to twelve session arc with an individual client. The emphasis is on identity, relational patterns, meaning, and the daily practice of a chosen plumb line under real conditions.
PF01
The Personal Engagement Arc
Intake and contracting for personal work, the shape of a six-session arc versus a twelve-session arc, when to extend, when to close, and how to design closure that leaves the client with a durable practice rather than a dependency.
Coach walks out able to
Contract a personal engagement, design its arc, and close it well.
PF02
Coaching Through Life Transition
The specific coaching moves for the transitions clients most often bring: career shift, marriage crisis, loss, midlife recalibration, empty nest, spiritual reawakening. How each transition surfaces a specific driver disorder and the settled truths most load-bearing in each.
Coach walks out able to
Recognize the transition pattern within the first two sessions and align the engagement to the actual formation invitation.
PF03
Marriage, Family, and the Relational Field
Coaching individuals whose primary formation work is happening inside a marriage or family system. Boundaries between coaching one spouse versus coaching the pair, when the work exceeds coaching and requires therapeutic referral, and the coach's ethical obligations in a relational engagement.
Coach walks out able to
Hold a marriage-or-family coaching engagement inside the scope of coaching without drifting into therapy.
Track LF · Leadership Formation
Mentoring the leader on the person they are becoming.
The Leadership Formation track equips the coach to serve leaders whose formation work is inseparable from the effect they have on the people they lead. Engagements are twelve months, hybrid one-to-one and situational, and often include structured stakeholder feedback.
LF01
The Leader as Governed Person
The leader's own driver signature as the first field of work. How ungoverned Ambition, ungoverned Appetite, and ungoverned Approval each degrade a leader in predictable ways. The formation practices that governed leaders eventually adopt whether their coach names them or not.
Coach walks out able to
Diagnose a leader's governance ceiling and name the specific formation practice that would raise it.
LF02
The Leader in the Team
The leader's driver-shadow on the team. How the leader's Turn dynamic under pressure creates predictable relational damage, and how a coach uses stakeholder feedback without becoming a mediator. The leader as the culture of the room they are in.
Coach walks out able to
Design and run a stakeholder-feedback loop that surfaces the leader's driver-shadow without triangulating the coach into team disputes.
LF03
The Leader in Crisis, Succession, and Public Failure
The high-stakes leadership situations coaches will inevitably face: public failure, forced succession, board conflict, moral failure, health crisis, sale or exit. What a coach does and does not do in each, and how to make an early call about referral when the situation exceeds coaching.
Coach walks out able to
Hold a leader through a real crisis without over-reaching, and recognize the moment when the coach's role is to help the leader hire someone else.
Track EF · Enterprise Formation
Consulting on the formation of a culture.
The Enterprise Formation track equips the coach to work with a team, a company, or an institution as the client. The instrument is the same, but the reading is composite: team driver signatures, cultural patterns, executive team cohesion, succession, and the design of hiring and formation practices at scale.
EF01
The Enterprise Diagnostic
Reading composite driver signatures across a leadership team and across an organization. Where the team's carried strengths compound and where its collective shadow will predictably produce the next crisis. The relationship between founder driver and culture inheritance.
Coach walks out able to
Deliver a composite reading to an executive team that names both the team's carried strengths and its predictable failure mode.
EF02
Executive Team Formation
The specific interventions that build governed executive teams: composition of the room, hiring against archetype gaps, structured decision protocols that account for driver-shadow, and the annual formation cadence a real executive team keeps.
Coach walks out able to
Design a year of executive-team formation work built around the team's specific reading.
EF03
Culture, Succession, and the Long Horizon
The enterprise questions that outlast any single engagement: succession planning built on formation criteria, values integration during acquisition, church staff transition, and the family-enterprise generational handoff. What the coach owes the client on questions the client's own tenure will not answer.
Coach walks out able to
Frame a succession or generational-transition engagement in formation terms rather than only competency terms.
Practicum
Every certified coach delivers a real engagement before the credential is granted.
Beginning in week seven, each candidate identifies one live pilot client in their chosen track and delivers a complete engagement under the supervision of a program mentor. The pilot is not a rehearsal. It is a real engagement with a real client at real stakes, structured to complete inside the certification window.
What the pilot includes
- Intake and contracting session (documented)
- Client completes an Authentic360 assessment
- Report interpretation session with the client
- Three to five working sessions across the arc
- A closing session that names the durable practice
- Written case summary submitted to supervisor
What the supervisor reviews
- The coach's written interpretation of the report
- A recorded segment from one working session
- The closing plan the coach designed
- The client's written feedback on the engagement
- The coach's reflection on where they stretched
Assessment and Competency
How a coach earns the credential.
Certification is not a completion certificate. It is a competency grant. A coach earns it by demonstrating, in observable work, the specific capacities the program teaches. The bar is deliberately set at the level of what a paying client would reasonably expect from a credentialed practitioner in their first month of practice.
Foundation competency (F01 through F08)
Each foundation module concludes with a short competency check: a written interpretation exercise, a recorded five-minute explanation of the module's central construct, or a live case discussion assessed by a supervising coach. All eight must be passed to advance to track work.
Track competency
Each of the three track modules concludes with an applied exercise appropriate to the track: a personal-engagement design (PF), a leader-diagnostic memo (LF), or a team-reading (EF). The completed pilot engagement provides the summative demonstration.
Case review
Before the credential is granted, each candidate presents their pilot case to a small review panel: two program mentors and one already-certified peer. The review is formative in tone but formal in structure. Its goal is to surface anything the coach may have missed in their own work.
Standing to certify
Any candidate whose case review raises material concern about scope, ethics, or readiness receives an extended practicum rather than a denial. The credential is not granted until the concern is resolved. The program's reputation, and the network's, depend on every certified coach being one the Institute would send a friend to.
Program Structure
Twelve weeks. Small cohort. Live and async.
Weekly cadence
Roughly two hours of teaching content, delivered async, released Monday. One 75-minute live cohort call each week for case discussion and question. One peer-triad meeting each week for practice and reflection. Total time commitment: six to eight hours per week for twelve weeks.
Cohort size
Ten to fifteen coaches per cohort. Large enough for a real peer field, small enough that every coach is known by the faculty and by every other member of their cohort. Two cohorts per year to start; more as demand supports.
Admission
Application, two professional references, and a thirty-minute interview. First-cohort admission favors coaches with existing coaching or counseling credentials, pastors and ministry leaders, therapists and HR consultants, and senior operators moving into coaching as a second career. The program does not teach coaching foundations; candidates without them will be referred to prerequisite training.
Faculty
Program faculty consists of the Compass Institute founder, one lead teaching mentor per track, and two to four supervising practitioners drawn from later cohorts. Faculty ratio is intentionally close: no candidate advances to certification without at least one faculty member who knows their work by name.
Ethics and Scope of Practice
The boundaries a certified coach agrees to hold, in writing.
Every certified coach signs a scope-of-practice covenant as a condition of the credential. The covenant is straightforward and non-negotiable. Violations are grounds for credential revocation.
The coach commits to
- Coaching within the scope of coaching, not therapy or clinical care
- Referring out when a client's needs exceed the coach's training
- Confidentiality on client material without exception
- Continuing formation of the coach's own life, including their own annual assessment
- Annual recertification and ongoing case review
- Honest representation of the credential, without inflation
The coach does not
- Diagnose or treat mental illness
- Represent the credential as a therapeutic or clinical qualification
- Coach a client in a domain the coach has not certified in
- Sell the Authentic360 assessment as a stand-alone product outside an engagement
- Modify or rebrand the framework as the coach's own
What Coaches Receive
The credential is the door. The toolkit is the reason it's worth walking through.
Instruments and platform
- Unlimited use of the Authentic360 assessment for their clients
- The Integration Report layer (for faith-integrated coaches)
- The Driver Coach AI companion, preloaded per client
- A branded coach dashboard with per-client report history
- Session templates, intake forms, and closing plans
Business assets
- Listing in the public "Find a Certified Coach" directory
- An engagement pricing framework tested by the network
- Client-facing marketing collateral the coach can co-brand
- A contractable service agreement template
- Access to the annual Compass Institute practitioner gathering
Ongoing community
- Monthly cohort of practicing coaches for case discussion
- Quarterly Institute-led continuing formation events
- Private practitioner forum for referrals and case questions
- Direct line to program faculty for tough case supervision
The credential itself
- The Authentic360 Certified Coach designation, in the coach's chosen track
- A dated, verifiable credential the Institute stands behind
- Annual recertification with continuing formation credit
- Path to higher tiers as additional tracks are completed
Pricing · Pilot Cohort
Pricing for the first cohort.
The intent is to price the certification at the level of a serious professional credential, well below the cost of a full graduate program and well above what a candidate would treat as low-commitment. Final numbers will be set with the pilot cohort.
Certification, one track
TBD
Foundation plus one track plus pilot supervision.
Additional track
TBD
Added during or after the initial certification.
Annual recertification
TBD
Includes continuing formation credit and directory listing.
First-cohort pilot rate
TBD
Founding-coach pricing for the first fifteen candidates.
Pricing to be announced. Final figures set with the pilot cohort.
What This Is Not
The boundaries of the credential, stated up front.
A serious credential is defined as much by what it does not claim as by what it does. The paragraphs below exist to protect candidate coaches, their clients, and the reputation of the Institute.
Not a therapeutic credential
The Authentic360 Certified Coach designation does not authorize the coach to diagnose, treat, or represent themselves as qualified to provide therapy, counseling, or any clinical mental-health service.
Not a coach-training program
Foundational coaching skills (listening, contracting, session structure) are prerequisites, not curriculum. Candidates without them will be referred to prerequisite training before admission.
Not an ordination or spiritual-director credential
The faith-integrated Integration Report layer equips coaches to serve Christian clients within the coaching scope. It does not authorize pastoral, sacramental, or spiritual-director work.
Not a franchise or exclusive territory
The credential does not grant geographic exclusivity, does not require the coach to operate under the Compass Institute brand, and does not restrict the coach's other work.
Not a substitute for the coach's own formation
Every certified coach is expected to be actively engaged in their own formation, including their own annual assessment and their own working relationship with a mentor or director.
Not a fixed methodology
The Authentic360 framework will evolve. Coaches are certified in the current framework and are expected to update their practice as the model develops. Continuing formation credit is designed to keep the network current.
Authentic360 Coach Certification. Program design v0.1, prepared for internal review at The Compass Institute. All figures, dates, and structural details are working assumptions subject to revision.
Franklin, TN