Importance of Volunteer Leadership
ICF recognizes that the strength of our coaching profession lies in the leadership of our dedicated volunteers. Like the impact of coaching, your contributions ripple outward to the individuals you serve at ICF, across the larger ICF ecosystem and into your communities and society.
ICF GLF nurtures this leadership, providing the resources, connections, and fresh thinking necessary to strengthen your influence, foster a sense of belonging, and cultivate a diverse network of empowered leaders committed to excellence.
How to Participate
GLF is an exclusive, online event for all ICF volunteer leaders. Each year, volunteer leaders receive an invitation to participate, and its recordings can be accessed throughout the year on the ICF Learning Portal. By participating, you can contribute to fostering a more diverse and inclusive culture that positively impacts ICF, the coaching profession, and beyond.
How does it benefit you? The Global Leaders Forum provides leadership skill building, access to global expertise, peer learning, and inspiration to fuel your volunteer role.
GLF 2026 Event Overview
Set the tone. Lead the conversation. Inspire collaboration. ICF GLF 2026 will explore how adaptive leadership, strategic thinking, and a focus on belonging and resilience — leading with courage in uncertainty, seeing the system to shape the future, and leading with heart and humanity — can transform the way we lead.
This event is complimentary for our volunteer leaders in support of their impactful work. It is designed to equip you with the tools, insights, and strategies to lead with confidence and purpose. By participating in GLF 2026, you’ll gain:
- Global Perspectives: Learn from thought leaders, cultural experts, and fellow volunteers to explore how adaptive leadership can transform how we lead in a rapidly changing world.
- Adaptive Leadership: Leading with courage in times of uncertainty builds trust and engagement within your teams.
- Strategic Thinking: As the ICF ecosystem develops its strategic plan for the next three years, discover how to translate it for your teams to help shape the future.
- Belonging and Resilience: When leaders focus on building belonging within their teams, they lay the foundation for greater resilience individually and collectively.
Registration opens soon!
Agenda Highlights
Step into your leadership potential with GLF 2026. Through thought-provoking content, you’ll explore:
Adaptive Leadership: Lead with Courage in Uncertainty
Challenges rarely come with clear solutions. Adaptive leaders pivot often, leaning into curiosity, courage, and collaboration to guide others through change. For volunteer leaders, this means inspiring shared ownership and learning — turning challenges into growth.
Leadership today is less about having all the answers and more about creating space for others to find them.
Strategic Thinking: See the System, Shape the Future
Strategic thinking moves leaders beyond short-term action toward purposeful alignment. It calls for systems awareness — spotting patterns, identifying leverage points, and staying responsive to evolving needs.
Strategic thinking is the bridge between vision and action, helping leaders focus energy where it matters most.
Belonging and Resilience: Lead with Heart and Humanity
Leadership is sustainable only when rooted in connection and care. Belonging builds trust, resilience fuels endurance, and both create environments where volunteers feel seen, supported, and inspired.
Leading forward means leading from wholeness — uniting purpose, people, and well-being.
Past ICF GLF Events
GLF 2025 was an exciting event that engaged our volunteer leaders in conversations around managing divergent beliefs within our teams while also laying the foundation of our leadership in wellness. ICF GLF 25 included the following sessions:
- Leading by Example.
- Power of Dialogue.
- Wellness as a Leaders Foundation.
- Building Tams and Communities that promote belonging and unity.
GLF 25 recordings are now available on demand to volunteer leaders in the ICF Learning Portal through February 2026.
Testimonials from Past ICF
GLF Attendees
“GLF 24 allowed me to meet coaching leaders from all over the world. It was an inspiring combination of learning and connecting to ICF's broader vision for a new era in coaching.”
Jen Lewi, ACC, ICF Career Coaching Community of Practice Volunteer Ambassador
Featured Events
Looking for additional ways to connect with the ICF community and learn with fellow coaches? Check out our upcoming events.
Executive and Leadership Coaching in 2026
Join us for a new webinar where we’ll explore together key trends and topics in Executive and Leadership Coaching in 2026, deepening our awareness about the current global scenario and how it’s impacting our clients. During this webinar, PCC Credential holders Diana Tedoldi, Ellen Zimmermann, and Lina El-Assaad will share insights and perspectives from their coaching practice with clients in organizations across three different regions.
We’ll reflect together on key topics that are emerging as trends across coaching conversations, as well as the most recurrent needs we observe in our clients and how they’re responding to the global scenario, marked by impactful events, crises, and opportunities.
During this interactive webinar, the three presenters will share their experience, provide space for self-reflection and sharing, harnessing the power of our community of practice to give us tools to develop our impact as coaches working with executives and leaders.
Holistic Coaching for Healthcare Providers
Join Kenzie Wilcox-Ingebrand, PCC, certified holistic life coach and presenter with ICF, for a powerful exploration into the world of holistic coaching for the healthcare community. In this session, Kenzie shares her integrative coaching method designed to support those who witness trauma routinely, often without emotional release or processing. You’ll learn how to help clients identify emotional states using tools like the Feelings Wheel, reframe limiting patterns, create self-awareness through prompted journaling, and implement restorative grounding exercises.
Kenzie will also demonstrate how to support clients in developing healthy boundaries rooted in their core values, while distinguishing them from reactive or self-protective barriers that can hinder wellbeing. Attendees will walk away with practical tools, coaching prompts, and body-based awareness practices that they can immediately use with clients.
Kenzie’s work reflects her unwavering belief that when healers receive healing, the ripple extends to the entire system — colleagues, partners, children, and communities.
Supervision for Wellbeing
Participants will observe a live supervision process with an experienced coach (with a particular focus on the realities of team coaching – complexity, multiple stakeholders, systemic pressure). A well‑held supervisory space enables coaches to slow down, name what they are carrying, and reconnect with their own judgement, boundaries and inner resources.
We’ll explore what actually shifted for the supervisee, what enabled that shift, and how this differs from mentoring, peer support or simple venting. We will explicitly link what happens in the room to core dimensions of practitioner wellbeing: emotional containment, reduced isolation, ethical robustness and sustainable engagement with clients and teams.
The session is designed for coaches and team coaches who are curious about supervision but may not yet have experienced it and want to explore its deeper, restorative function. Participants will leave with a clearer felt sense of what supervision can offer them personally and professionally.
Networking Opportunities for Volunteers
GLF only happens once a year, but you can connect with fellow volunteer leaders at any time via ICF Engage. This exclusive platform is your gateway to connect, collaborate, and network with peers, making it the largest and most dynamic coaching community in the world — all accessible right at your fingertips.