Are We Teaching Too Shallow?

In coaching and adult education, we often begin with the same question:

What Skills Need Development?

It’s a valid question. It’s also a limiting one. Because genuine learning doesn’t just add capability, it invites transformation.

Transformation rarely begins with content delivery. It starts in a far more complex and often uncomfortable space: the liminal zone between what we know and who we are becoming.

This space isn’t clean or easily categorized. It’s full of questions, contradictions, and tension. It’s also where real change takes root.

So, while competency is often the benchmark — “Can you do the thing?” — it doesn’t tell the whole story. Even the ICF Core Competencies, brilliantly defined and widely respected, are not ends in themselves. They are doorways intended to be lived holistically beyond demonstration with clients.

Which leads to a deeper, more catalytic question:

What Development Cultivates Mastery?

Internal coherence, an essential element for any change experience, must be addressed. Learners require both conceptual and contextual focus. Conceptual focus predominantly orients by the “know-why” building blocks for the discipline or skill explored, while contextual learning allows for strong practice-oriented, “know-how” necessary for professional tasks. Insufficient conceptual focus in the learning experience leads to insufficient contextual learning and consistent competency demonstration.

An executive leader enrolled in our level 1 education program mentioned that the experience of listening fully to receive, rather than react, finally explained why a past leadership development program did not create change for him with his leadership team members.

Until he observed a coach demonstrate the listens actively skills in a coaching conversation, he thought he was listening fully! Having witnessed awareness occurring without telling or bringing solutions, this executive was freed to focus contextually, and skill learning began.

What Mastery Actually Requires

Let’s be clear: mastery isn’t the result of simply practicing a skill longer or harder.

Mature mastery, the kind that evokes trust, clarity, and influence, requires a different type of engagement.

It invites presence. It insists on a pause. And it thrives in sovereignty versus certainty.

Sovereignty means self-rule, sov-reign. In a learning, leadership, and organizational context, expand that simple definition to incorporate outcomes and impact. When an individual accepts responsibility to listen to an inner authority and choose how to relate to a given situation or relationship, the opportunity to act with integrity to their values emerges.

This new state of being sovereign produces greater agility to respond, rather than react, to circumstances that appear, feel, or genuinely are challenging and tension-provoking.

The tension between performance and sovereignty appears invisible in only competency development, especially for adult learners. Adults expect a lot of themselves in terms of performance based on their lived experience before entering coaching education.

True mastery unfolds when learners begin to accept ownership for their becoming, beyond their daily performance. It means they no longer show up only to pass a test or meet a standard. They show up to inhabit who they are becoming as a coach, leader, or educator.

More expansive clarity about true mastery shapes more effective learning environments to align with ICF accreditation standards. While we do transfer knowledge, the sustaining impact occurs by initiating transformation.

And that means our responsibility shifts, too.

We must become architects of conditions that awaken self-leadership, rather than facilitators of instruction. Which brings us to a fundamental barrier many educators still try to avoid:

Tension: The Doorway to Identity Shift

Let’s be honest. Tension is uncomfortable. Most learning environments seek to reduce discomfort, thereby bypassing a valuable opportunity to harness it.

What if the tension your learners experience offers a signal to deepen their work, rather than a signal for you to rescue them?

When we embed Generative Wholeness™ into our coaching methodology and curriculum design, we shift the focus from resolution to relationship. As a result, here are three core shifts that are the real work for the path to mastery.

1. Helping learners “get past” discomfort by creating experiences that empower them to view discomfort as a source of insight and change.
2. Revealing that emotional intensity is only one half of the process; the other half is about choice in the presence of complexity and expanding listening internally to choose in a values-aligned fashion.
3. Replacing planned performance with strengthened learner capacity to reflect, recalibrate, and re-author identity in real-time, fostering spontaneous responsiveness.

By inviting untapped aspects of ourselves to emerge, we create the conditions for learners to evoke inner awareness and access the potential that already knows how to utilize new skills.

Want to Go Deeper?

I hope so. I will be exploring this topic further to expand views about generating mastery at ICF Converge 2025, taking place October 23-25 in San Diego, California, USA.

Join my upcoming 90-minute session, From Competency to Mastery: Integrating Transformational Development in Coaching & Education, in the Coaching Education theme on Friday, October 24 at 3 p.m. (local conference time). By attending this session, you can earn 1.5 Continuing Coaching Education Units in Core Competency.

We won’t just talk about transformation; we’ll explore how to design for it.

Together, we’ll unpack:

• Why behavior change often fails without identity alignment.

• How to design learning environments that harness generative tension.

• What it means to build for sovereignty, beyond just short-term success.

We’ll share practical models and real-world practices that move your coaching and education beyond transaction and into the domain of transformation.

Because in the end, mastery, mature mastery, isn’t just about doing more.

It’s about becoming more.

Curious? Good. That’s where change begins.