Becoming a Coach with Kirsten Dierolf: From Language Teacher to Leading a Global Coaching Academy

down to earth, gentle and playful woman, who started out with studying theology and teaching English at a German community college.

Today we also meet Kirsten, but we meet Kirsten the businesswoman, who built really an empire of a coaching academy, an online business where 6,000 coaches have been trained according to EMCC and ICF standards. Kirsten has also been the president of ICF Germany and truly is a thought leader in the industry.

Let's unpack her views on how she sees that industry. Which accreditation she believes makes sense for whom, and how she structures her online marketing funnel. This is the Making of a Coach. I'm Tobi from metaFox. Let's go.

So that's a first, and it's a very short training. And these would be managers, leaders, project managers, all sorts of people who could benefit from knowing coaching skills. The language skills, and attitudes, that are useful for a coach are also useful for managers, so they would be using those.

Then we have people who want to be more professional in their coaching, and those would be engaging in coaching fundamentals, for an ICF and EMCC practitioner level. From zero to being able to have a structured coaching conversation centered on the client within 24 weeks.

Then, for more experienced coaches who want to refine their coaching skills and attain the level of professional certified coach by the ICF, or senior practitioner by EMCC, we have coaching in organizations. We try to offer everything you might need to become a coach or use coaching skills, and we try to give good coaches an easy path to certification. Because usually coaches, or people who like coaching, people who love interacting with other human beings, are usually not the same kind of people who love paperwork and sitting down and filling in Excel sheets and all of these kinds of things.

So what we try to do is use our ability to structure a learning path, to make it easy for people to get a coaching credential. And we also have courses that help people who've been trained in other approaches, or in non-accredited schools, to hop onto the ICF or EMCC bandwagon with a recognition of prior learning.

Because we believe, in our courses, that we want to teach people additional things. We don't want to have people in our courses who already know what we have to teach.

So we want to enrich and collaborate with our participants. That's really important for us.

more than five or six hundred participants per year. Before that it was less. I think our website still says more than a thousand, but it's probably around five or six thousand at the moment.

really useful and then do the necessary steps.

How do you show up? Even at beginning level with leaders, not every leader is the same. We don't want to create one size fits all. We want to see, what are your strengths? What is the environment that you thrive in? What is the environment that you like to coach in? Which clients appreciate you as a coach?

Leaders have very different ways of being effective.

And rather than giving feedback, we try to give feed forward. So we're not saying, okay, so we got this coaching demo, competency three, this is what you did wrong, competency five, this is what you did wrong. We'll mention, competency three is setting a coaching agreement, what did we see that this person did exceptionally well?

And then, if you wanted to adapt your coaching to ICF or EMCC, but mainly ICF because they have the performance evaluation, what is it that you would need to add, and how would you do it in your way? So it's basically in the feed forward. Most of our courses have three or four individual mentoring sessions that are included.

And we are really trying, and I think we're successful.

We would just say, okay, if you want the ICF credential, you have to do this differently, because it's helping people towards their goal. We know that a lot of things can be effective for clients. So we would always mention both. Ask the client who's present, how did it land for you? And then put on the ICF glasses and say, okay, within ICF, even though this might have been very effective for the client, if you used this recording as an ICF performance evaluation, you would have to shift these things.

So it is a fine line, and of course we also have a responsibility towards ICF to teach the competencies and get people accredited in ways that are compliant with ICF. But I think this is how we do it. And I also think that this is something that does differentiate us a little bit from other coaching schools.

For us, because we have EMCC and ICF, we are really strong on deliberate and reflective practice, and on inviting our students to reflect on what it is that I'm doing in coaching sessions, and what my client's feedback is, and how I grow as a coach. Which is more the EMCC side.

And then, if you're lucky, you can get a space in kindergarten between 2 and 6:30. So it really wasn't very possible for me to work. Luckily my then husband was working and he was taking care of us, so I didn't have

a lot of financial problems. But of course I wanted to develop my career as well. So I looked at what was possible. And I started giving

English lessons at the Volkshochschule, which is free public education in Germany. It's less than a community college. The Volkshochschule delivers language classes, arts and crafts classes.

And I was giving courses in English. I had finished English literature and linguistics as a university degree, so I thought, okay, why not?

And with that I then discovered that I have a talent for teaching people languages. And I ended up doing business English courses, which was kind of strange because I wasn't a business person at that point. So I had to really learn the language of business myself, but it was fun. And then I started doing individual courses for managers of a company that had just been acquired by the US, and that's when I

discovered coaching as a possibility to help people. One of them, when I said, your English is good enough, go away, said, ah, but I enjoy our conversations, also because you ask such interesting questions, like a coach. And then I discovered that something like coaching exists. And that's when I started doing this train the trainer for inner game training and coaching.

And then Timothy Gallwey came to Switzerland and it was too expensive for me to go. I called the organizer of the first European coaching conference ever. One of the organizers was Peter Szabó in Switzerland. I said, you know what, I can't afford the course, but can I come and translate?

Because I'm also a board certified translator of the English language and I can easily do simultaneous translation. He said, no, I don't need any simultaneous translation for Tim Gallwey, but I need one for this funny Korean lady called Insoo Kim Berg, and this guy called Louis Kaufman.

Can you translate for them? There are mainly exercises. And so I did the translation for Insoo. In preparation for Insoo I was reading her book and listening. I asked, do you have something to help me prepare for how she speaks, to be able to translate?

And then I listened to the cassettes. Literal cassettes with two holes in them. I listened to those, practicing the translation. And I was like, oh wow, that's interesting. Because even before, I was very interested in clinical pastoral counseling, for example, with my theology degree. I was really interested in becoming a hospital chaplain, for example, but most of what they were doing at the time was very oriented at psychodynamic and psychoanalytical therapy.

Not as, I didn't know the word coach, but as a counselor. Why do I have to think about my, it all just didn't make sense to me. And I just didn't find it respectful. So listening to Insoo, I was like, whoa, now that's really cool. And I had also done some work on Wittgenstein and contextual linguistics in my linguistics studies, so it really fit my not very well formulated, more gut level philosophy at the time.

So that's when I started coaching.

It's one way of seeing how therapy works. It's the psychodynamic, or psychoanalytic, kind of way. And so the premise is, in order to help people you need to have dealt with your own stuff, because otherwise you never know, is it your own stuff or is it your client's stuff. And I think to a certain extent it's true, but not to the extent that it was lived in the psychodynamic community at the time.

I think they have also shifted quite a bit. And when I first started studying theology, I really wanted to become a clinical pastoral counselor. And then in came these two ladies to introduce the course of study that you would need to take in order to become that. And they were just plain weird for me at the time.

Obviously they were not weird, but at the moment I was like, what is this? Why do I have to think about my upbringing? Why do I have to tell myself all these stories of what went wrong? I just really didn't want to do that. And plus, the people who did it, my fellow students, were becoming the same kind of weird.

And I loved it. I just became a very theoretical person. I wrote my master's thesis on a Whiteheadian scholar. I dug deep into complex thinking. But when I heard Insoo speak for the first time, I was like, oh wow. There is a way that is philosophically consistent with

what I tend to think, although I didn't know it at the time because I hadn't reflected on it, that is very respectful. That doesn't require me to think I know more about the client than they know about themselves. That doesn't require me to become a blank slate and go into the depths of all of my childhood traumas, which I was really not willing and able to look at at the time.

It's a language to help people. I'm really good at learning languages. Hey ho, let's go. For me it just really dropped at the right time, and you can see how I would get hooked right away. And then, for a lot of years, I thought this was the truth.

You espouse a view where nothing is the truth, and then you think that is the truth. Over the years I mellowed and was like, okay, you have to be consistent in your own thinking. You can't say solution focus is the truth but there is no truth. That just doesn't work together.

Was that always there, also at that time, or how did that part evolve?

So I was thinking, what kind of business can I build that could be sustainable and grow what I want more of in this world? So it should make sense, and it should also be something that keeps me sustained for the rest of my life.

And I was noticing that I was doing a lot within the solution-focused community. And then, in 2015, 2016, I decided: solution focus, and this kind of worldview that is so helpful and so empowering, and at the same time so relieving for people to espouse, it doesn't help if we all just keep talking to one another in the solution-focused community.

And nobody buys solution focus. I can explain and say, please buy solution focus, because you'll have more fun, your clients will have more fun, and it'll be wonderful and rewarding. I can say this, but people don't buy it. If somebody goes looking for a coaching course, they don't say, I want solution focus.

Not a lot of them say, I want solution focus, or I want systemic, or I want this or that. What they want is an accredited coaching training. And at that point I decided, together with my friend Debbie from Singapore who's running an academy for solution-focused training in Singapore, we both decided, okay, hey ho, let's go.

Let's sell something that people actually want. My friend Jenny Clark from England always says, people are not interested in the technology of the diesel locomotive that takes them from London to Edinburgh. They want to go to Edinburgh and they don't care about the technology. So they want to be a coach.

They don't really care. I think they should care more, but we can wish that the market does many things, it never does what we want it to do. So face the facts. People want to become accredited coaches. How do we make it happen? And then I got all the credentials and got all the accreditations for my courses.

And they usually require you to have a PCC or an EMCC senior practitioner. And you look at all your documentation and see, eh, no way I can do it, I have to wait until I have four or five hundred hours. And you don't want to take a beginning coaching course. So what can you do?

Step one is, come to a meetup and check us out. See who we are. Because in learning you have to be vulnerable. So you have to like the people who you're going to be together with. Step two is maybe book an info call with Ruth or Chris, half an hour, to check your documents and see what we can do for you.

Step three: suppose we check your documents and see, aha, okay, this is something that we can recognize, and then we can recognize a third of the training hours required for PCC, and then you can come to our ICF and EMCC onboarding class.

And that happens, you click on a button on our website, we have an automatic payment system, our data ends up in our self-designed automation, you end up in our learning platform. And before the course even starts you can access the materials. And then when the course starts you have two hours every week, except for intensives.

We have four hours every week where you click on a Zoom link, join the group, practice, learn. Between sessions you have materials that you can read, peer groups where you can practice, you can engage with our WhatsApp group that has about 600 participants at the moment, heading towards 700, where you can just say, hey guys, I need someone to practice with.

And then you get someone who likes to practice. Usually you get more people wanting to be coached by you than you can actually coach. You enter this vibrant community of people who have very interesting views. Any problem you have, you go to the WhatsApp group and say, hey guys, I have this problem.

And then you will see a flurry on the WhatsApp list. That's how the course happens. Once the course is finished you do your three individual mentor coaching sessions, where you upload a recording, the recording gets automatically transcribed, and you discuss the recording with your mentor.

But maybe sometimes it's interesting to see and compare, what does the mentor say, what does the AI say. And this is also something, if you're not sure, am I on the right level before I enter a course, we can invite you to do a mini recording on Ovida, just to check, okay, what are the ICF competencies that I'm strong on?

So that's how a course happens.

And because this was the first time this happened, I zoomed in and had a conversation with everyone. It was just amazing.

And I'm wondering, what do you do to also make that happen in an online community that just meets a few hours once per week? What do you do to support this sort of personal bonding?

I've done instructional design for the last 25 years, and I started my first online training in 2006, when nobody even thought this was possible. So I think I'm a dinosaur in that world, but a dinosaur who's keeping up with what is happening. So we use all sorts of tools and lovely things that we can do to keep it engaging.

That's the technical side. But I think the human side is even more important, because as you are coaching one another in the group, of course under the umbrella of confidentiality, you are learning things about one another. We are coaching real issues. We're not doing role plays, we're doing real plays, and that way people bond. And we encourage vulnerability, and we also see ourselves as learners.

So all of our trainers would enter a teaching space with the idea of, hey, what can we discover together, rather than, okay, I know what's right and I'm going to teach you. Our teaching philosophy is really interactional, and I think that makes it possible for this experience to become more engaging and more oriented towards bonding.

And you know what, I think learning coaching is more like learning a language. Let's say you wanted to learn, I don't know, Russian, for example. Would you recommend that someone takes three weekend courses of 16 hours in order to learn Russian?

Or would you recommend that they take, I don't know, half a year, two hours every week? When we look at language we're like, duh, of course. Just this crash course over the weekend, that doesn't work. You need to have some input, and then you need to practice and do some homework, and then you need some input again, so that you can grow with your language skills.

And I think coaching is very much an activity where you have to try out phrases. You have to see, who am I, how am I when I'm with a client? And that's not something that you can change in a weekend. So that's why we decided, even though we love the idea of being in physical presence with people, to do this online. Because it's just not feasible to do it on site.

Let's say one of our trainers is in Frankfurt, and then there is a company in Frankfurt who says, hey, we want to do coaching skills for managers and leaders. We can also do this on site. But otherwise it's prohibitive. You can't fly to New York once a week to do a two hour course.

For ecological and for time reasons.

So what I hear is, you make it personal by actually making it personal. Coaching real issues, not case studies.

You keep the groups interactive, so you work a lot with breakouts, so people can actually have a good ratio of I speak versus I listen.

And then you say you also consciously decided to go for this few hours every week over a longer period, so people can really take what they learn in one session and apply it to real life, then come back to the course again and go through the cycle over a longer duration.

You could have people from China, India, Germany, the US, they can, as time zones permit, all be in one place and they could be learning from each other. Because I was doing leadership development and soft skill training, also for a provider that did this online called TMA World. Really nice people.

And I was thinking, coaching, it is so important to get different perspectives. And in the global workplace, where you are leading people on the other side of the world, it's so important to be able to build relationships with a diverse audience. If we're doing a coaching skills for managers and leaders course with all people from the same background, it's going to be an entirely different experience than if you are trying to coach people from a different culture.

So I think that's where the desire to do this originated. And from there it started with, I was giving one course in Frankfurt on site for five years or something, before I said, okay, let's take it online, let's do it. And I started with Adobe Connect.

Once Zoom became a little bit more stable we started using Zoom. And now we use Zoom or Teams or whatever is available. But the pandemic obviously gave us a huge boost, because we already knew how to do what people needed at the time.

And then, in the course of stopping doing that and thinking, how can I regroup, I founded Solutions Academy. That label already existed, but I founded Solutions Academy as a school. And I discovered, together with my friend Debbie from Singapore, we were the little support group of how to get our trainings accredited by ICF, and started understanding the whole ICF bureaucracy. And then in 2020, by that time we had already started collaborating with Christina Muto and Chris Becker as the management team. And Christina was getting on my nerves that we need to get EMCC accredited. And I was saying, no, I don't want to have to sit down and fill in forms forever.

And then she just kept bugging me until I said, okay, fine, I'll do it. So that's when that started. And it was a really organic growth. It wasn't like, I call it female growth versus male growth, it's very stereotypical and I shouldn't be doing it, but let's use the word organic.

I didn't go out and find investors to give me a gazillion dollars and then build up a huge machinery. What I actually did was, I started with one course, I got that accredited, then I looked at the biggies in the market. What are they doing that is actually giving them the reputation and the kind of brand you need in order to

create the trust that you need for people to buy your courses? Because we are one of the best deals in the market, I think. We are trying to always charge as little money as we can and stay profitable. But how can you actually grow organically, and invest in your marketing at the same time?

So it was always like, okay, one more course, profit, invest, profit, into better marketing. And slowly it grew, and the brand grew and the reputation grew. And we're always thinking, by way of marketing, that we need to give people something for their attention.

It's not like we go to ChatGPT and say, okay, ChatGPT, can you please write the right white paper on this, copy the white paper, put it as a lead magnet on our website. We literally sit down, we think we want to give people something for their attention, and then they get to know us.

They can see whether they fit with us, and then we have a good time. We're not interested in teaching people who think we don't fit. Why should we do that? If they want to go deep into the whys of their existence, they should have a psychodynamic training.

that was also a big growth factor.

I was thinking they should buy solution-focused coaching skills, because life-changing, important, fun. But they didn't want to buy it. They wanted to become a credentialed coach. So let's not sell the technology of the diesel locomotive, let's sell going to Edinburgh.

Figuring out what it is that people want to buy.

And then that meant getting accredited by ICF, as much as we did not enjoy the process. And I think that's the generalizable thing. A lot of people want to sell what they have, but what they have might not be what people want. Figuring out what it is that people want, before you engage in designing your marketing, is usually a good step.

I really appreciate their reflective practice and the deliberate practice that they allow. I think it's an accreditation that is more attuned to what a coach actually does in order to develop themselves, than this test oriented approach from ICF. It allows us to offer something to people who do not want to, quote unquote, jump through the hoops of ICF, people who maybe have a niche coaching market and wouldn't be able to

coach in an ICF way and still coach their clients that way.

EMCC is open to them, and the quality assurance is not, coach this way, but, reflect on your coaching, continue growing, continue developing your awareness, continue getting feedback from your client, continue to engage in supervision, and develop the way that fits you and your market. Rather than, demonstrate your coaching skills in a recording and take a test.

ICF is the gold standard, the market power in the coaching world. So ignoring ICF, if you don't want a business you can do that, but otherwise it's not an option.

leader, it's great. And if I want this more reflective, softer approach that is mainly focused on continuous development, then you would recommend EMCC. Can you summarize it like that?

They all have this little guru moment. And I get it. People want to get a feeling for, who is this person who did this? You wouldn't trust anyone with, I don't know, a couple of thousand bucks for a training. So in a way, although I really don't like being a guru, developing this trusted advisor presence, maybe rather than guru,

is something I think is very important. There is even a sales book called The Trusted Advisor, the person that you call when you have an issue. Oftentimes they come and say, oh, we want to buy your coaching skills for managers and leaders.

And we say, okay, three steps back. Can we have a conversation? Suppose we did that, what would. We consult with them. We make sure that they get what really gets them where they want to be. And having this persona, quote unquote, which is not a persona because it's like me,

I'm not consciously saying, okay, I have to be like this in order to. Because I just could never remember, if I started projecting something that's not me, I could never remember what I was going to project and what not to project. So in a sense, you get me as me. But engaging in activities like doing this podcast, like showing myself at conferences, like writing a weekly blog, like doing our free meetups and exchanges once a week, and just showing myself as the identifiable figurehead of Solutions Academy, is trust building.

And when people trust, then they consider buying courses with us.

Because that's in line with the, we don't go, okay, we'll sell you. So when they have an issue around, oh my god, how do I manage my coach pool, they can contact us and we'll help. And I think that's really useful if you are a coach and you have a relationship with companies and they know, hey, I can pick up the phone, I can use this Calendly or Acuity link to book a quick half hour with my friend and we'll have a little chat.

It sounds a little bit uncompliant, but I think that's how relationships work in the business world. You go have a coffee, you chat about things, you figure out what you could do together. And then of course, if it's a large company, you still have to do a request for proposals and the tendering and all that procurement business.

But I would recommend for coaches also to build relationships within their customer base. And one of the things that we say in our business development for coaches is, find the natural habitat of your clients and figure out what they need.

There's one last box that I would still like to open with you, and that is, next to being the trusted advisor, you first need to attract those people into the top of the funnel. At some point you started learning that together with an online marketing expert, and really building that sort of online marketing funnel.

What is it that you did there? How does your funnel look, back then and today? How did it evolve? What worked, what didn't work? Take us into that journey a bit.

So let's figure out not only what makes a successful coach training school, but what a successful online business does in order to be effective. And then I figured out, plus my ethos of, I am not going to do this, giving people nothing for their attention, I'm not going to do, yay yay, we're the best.

Buy with us. First buy a little thing, then buy a bigger thing. I really detest this. It works, hey, it works, right? The Scientology method of marketing really works, but I just ethically found it horrible. So, what can you do instead, and give people something for their attention? And Ian said, you need to get traffic to your website. How do you do that? By having a website that changes often, so that Google starts liking it. So the first thing, I

started writing a blog. Then the blog became a lead magnet for our newsletter, which is a content newsletter. Every week I write a blog, and we have opening rates of 50 percent.

So people really enjoy reading what I write, and it's really me writing and not some copywriter or AI or something. I hear about a problem in a free meetup, and I go, blog alarm, let's write about that. So I take a morning every week to think and write. And we developed something that you would call lead magnets.

Whenever we meet something that is a need in the coaching community, for example this free preparation course for the ICF credentialing exam. We try to have our ear on the market and see what it is that coaches need, and then we try to provide as much as we can for free, so people experience us as the kind of helpful people that we try to be.

Of course this then collects, with GDPR and so on. We are then able to connect with these people. Lead magnets, get to know us, and then you can subscribe to our newsletter. And in the newsletter you get an invitation, come to our free meetups.

You can see us on the screen and you can see if it's a fit. From that you can go and have a free info call to see which kind of course you would like, and then you take your first course, and then you hopefully recommend us to a lot of other people.

And that's how it goes. Basically a very traditional thing, but always with the ethos: we are not doing this to sell you something, we are trying to help you find the right path. And we never think of our free info calls as

sales talks. It's, okay, let's sit together, let's figure out what is the right way.

And we sometimes even recommend our quote unquote competition, if we don't have a course at that time that the person needs, and we know, okay, Erickson has a course, we'll send them to Erickson. Or somebody contacts me for mentoring and I can't, no, go to Anna. It's about what would be best for you.

So, very traditional marketing combined with a distaste for marketing, and an appetite for making it make sense.

I maybe say, okay, I want this free PDF with the demo coaching, I click subscribe, I get an email. Maybe then I watch a video that seems useful, with a demo coaching by Kirsten. And then I join a weekly group call, where I get to know you, I get a sense for who this person is. And then, if I like it so much that I'm actually considering signing up for a 3,000 euro training course, then I actually book a one-on-one call, where I am again not met with a sales mindset, but consulted on what is the best product for me.

Before I spend that kind of money I would want to know, who are these people, what is this program, what am I going to be learning, how am I going to be learning it? Is this my style, yay or nay?

So that's always a big one. How do I get credentialed? A lot is happening also in the in-house coaching sphere, where big companies have coaching pools and they want to make sure that the coaching pool consists of people who are actually knowledgeable and developing as coaches, and are not people who did a coach training 20 years ago and are still offering coaching, but there is no real quality control.

So that's something that we are hearing. And then the other is, how do we create a coaching culture, quote unquote. You cannot create a coaching culture. You can support it, you can grow it. And so those are the other questions that we are approached with, a lot from medium sized to big companies, of what are some of the activities that we can support with, either by supervision, training, or managing their coach pool, by way of creating a little website where they can be booked.

And then the other one that you mentioned now is this business persona. The company who says, I want to get a coaching culture into my leadership. And this is then a B2B customer of yours.

I think I need to still do things in the business. For example, doing the supervision course, doing the masterclass course, things that really match my skill set. Doing the thought leadership, being at conferences, writing white papers, writing books, writing articles. But I don't know if that's in or on the business.

And then the whole numbers, Christina does. Carlo does our international partners and all of the operations side. Chris does all the people things. I do the trainer management and customer relationship management. Ralf does customer relationships with companies.

So the thing with organic growth is that we are really super organized with our automations and everything, but we are more pragmatic than, this is a role description, this person does this, and siloed. We do stuff, and then when organization is necessary we organize. Which makes us totally flexible for companies, because we can be whatever they need us to be.

And at the same time we offer the professionalism, because we are lazy people and like to automate everything that is automatable.

And at the same time you built a team where all the operations are in good hands.

For example, we have an accountant, and he loves doing the nitty gritty numbers thing. It's completely incomprehensible to me that somebody can love that, but it is what he loves. So if he can create a lovely presentation where everything aligns, and it makes him happy, then I go, okay, I don't understand that, but I'm really happy to have you.

So I think that's the goal, to design roles in such a way that everybody loves what they're doing as much as possible, and that I can do what I love doing, which is thinking, and coaching, and training advanced coaches, and supervising, and talking to business owners about how coaching can support their businesses.

don't go for it in an, I need to get this now, way. Forget about it a little bit and see all the signs that are moving in the right direction, and appreciate all the opportunities that are coming your way.

And after you've appreciated two or three opportunities, that picture will change and something else will be possible. So I think this constant rocking back and forth between what you want and what you can do now. Holding strategy and vision very lightly, more fun than, need to cross that milestone in five months, oh no, I didn't cross that milestone, I've developed 10 other things that are helpful but I'm ignoring them because I didn't cross that one.

And making sure that you revisit it every once in a while, because it changes.

Thank you so much.

If you listened closely on this episode, you also heard that Kirsten really recommended the peer-to-peer support that you can get in the WhatsApp community of Solutions Academy. If that sounds cool, but you're not yet ready to sign up to Solutions Academy, then simply go to metafox.eu/community, where you can find our communities.

Also WhatsApp groups, for now, entirely for free. This was the Making of a Coach. I hope you enjoyed today, and if you also have a friend who might enjoy this, feel free to share. Feel free to leave us a rating, and tune in already next week. I'm Tobi from metaFox. All the best and bye bye.