Coaching Training Program Launch: build and upskill your practice with Tee Barnett Coaching Training (TBCT)

Applications are now open to join the pilot cohort of Tee Barnett Coaching Training! You’d be a great fit for this if you’re a current or aspiring coach seeking to gain skill as practitioners and/or establish your practice.

You can signal interest >> here <<

The deadline to submit the first round of applications is April 3.

We encourage people to start the process earlier because cohort coaches will asked to join and also initiate the program on a rolling basis. This will mean increasingly limited availability of cohort spots. 

• Program Overview
• Spirit of the Pilot
  • Philosophy of Approach​
• Intended Outcomes
• More about the Training Infrastructure
• Program Pricing
• Meet the Current Cohort
• Anticipated Questions
• Apply

Program overview

This pilot program is a multi-component training infrastructure for developing your own practice as a skilled coach. You could think of it as a proto-accelerator or proto-incubator for solo practitioners, which also includes access to business architecture that is essential for building and maintaining a stand-alone practice.

The infrastructure targets key developmental bottlenecks of coaches, including early client acquisition, real-world practice, training and oversight by multiple senior coaches, co-created learning plans, reputational benefits, business architecture, and more. 

The program is a key piece of a higher-level mission to boost the total number of skilled practitioners supporting people doing scalable good, including those in EA. 

Tee Barnett Coaching Training (TBCT) will include:
 

• A tailored curriculum co-created with cohort coaches
• Systematic and consistent client referrals for engaging in real-world skill building
• 1-to-1 coaching training calls with Tee
• Regular cohort calls with other cohort coaches
• Free access to office hours with Tee
• Peer coaching training calls
• Turnkey technical systems for building and expanding your practice  (partnering with Anti-Entropy) 
• Other guidance and resources becoming a coach, setting up and/or enhancing your practice
• Potentially also offering observation hours and guest senior coach interactive workshops

– Duration – the first cohort is expected to last about 6 months, though timelines may vary depending on the intended growth plans agreed upon with each individual cohort coach. 

– Pricing – costs of the program are currently reduced for the first cohort, pegged at roughly the equivalent of two personal coaching sessions per month with Tee. 

– Location – remote, though the option may open up for TBCT to sponsor travel and accommodations for periods of in-person coaching training.

>> Apply Here <<

Spirit of the pilot 

Concepts conveying the vibe of the program: early-stage pilot, co-creationary, integration & synthesis, complementarity, self-aligned

One-line summary: this is an early-stage coaching development program that provides infrastructural support for those in the process of establishing and enriching their coaching practice.
 

The working design of the training infrastructure is partly a function of the early-stage nature of the program, but also a portfolio of deliberate philosophical and methodological stances that encourage coaches to collaboratively sculpt their own learning process. For example, each cohort coach’s ‘curriculum'^[1] will be the end result of a collaborative selection process between Tee and the coach themselves, with both parties iterating upon chosen materials and methods that will culminate into a highly personalized experience within the program. 

Cohort coaches can expect much that comes with the territory of participating in a pilot program. On the one hand, participating in the ‘founding cohort’ can be thrilling and come with distinct benefits of the timing. On the other hand, there will be anticipated friction points associated with infrastructure and systems being under construction.  

Potential positives include: upsides of less overall standardization, more collaborative involvement in the design of the training infrastructure, more direct involvement by Tee, lower monetary costs, network and impact benefits that come with being part of the ‘founding’ cohort, etc. Potential negatives include: downsides of less standardization, less efficiency because the infrastructure isn’t settled and will likely be revised, less reputational signals (in some contexts), less certainty on program outcomes, etc. 

Philosophy of Approach

Contrary to what the wildly imaginative title of the program would suggest, Tee Barnett Coaching Training (TBCT) isn’t built in the image of Tee’s private coaching practice. We'll shift into a more literary tenor in order to communicate the philosophy that underlies the training infrastructure, fleshing out the implications of this approach concretely towards the end of the section. 

We can confidently assert that great coaches almost certainly had to take the long way in their developmental journey. Many, if not all, eventually had to part with notions like objective maps, silver-bullet guidebooks, or a strictly linear sense of progress. The developmental journey of a great coach is probably more like an odyssey of subjective sensemaking, with the most effective coaches mastering how to pass along the treasures that they’ve come across and synthesized.

Odysseys of this variety are often endured with a sober acceptance that the path may perpetually be unclear or incomplete, even without any definitive final destination. Those with a particular kind of spirit continue on. And it is this indomitable spirit driving the design of our training infrastructure, that which commits to the odyssey for the betterment of themselves and others. 

Continuously delivering fresh perspectives as a coach often requires skillfully meshing variety in inspiration with sensibilities of discernment. While innumerable existing approaches, methods and techniques exist, few will have the same effects, especially across different people and contexts. In much the same way subscribing to a particular discipline or paradigm can be limiting, we’d also encounter constraints in being indiscriminately open to all notions of human perception and development. 

TBCT balances this plurality of notions and discernment with a blend of firmness and humility that’s specific to this program. There’s firmness in privileging some tools over others. But there’s also a humility in admitting that we haven’t discovered (or will never discover) all tools, or claim to have fully mastered the tools we have found. 

The training infrastructure is shaped by the sentiment above through a portfolio of philosophical and methodological choices. Our particular portfolio prioritizes cultivating subjective sophistication as a coach. In other words, a training program for the refinement of your own sensemaking compass, and hopefully in turn, the skill and wisdom to guide others in refining their own compasses.

It’s an infrastructure that allows for coaches to integrate their preferred coaching methods, modalities, tools and intentions in a way that is ultimately intended to be effective when delivered to others. The turn from ‘grow in your preferred direction’ to ‘make it effective’ implies the presence of a supportive but also challenging process that intends to cause coaches to forge their own personal synthesis with their craft. 

Subtle choices regarding the inclusion, integration and synthesis of various approaches are made along dimensions that are more granular than entire disciplines or paradigms. For instance, it wouldn’t look like “how can I train to be an IFS coach”, but instead “what parts of IFS theory fit within my theory of mind and reliably work well for my clients?” It’s not really about this procedure or that procedure, it’s more about your personal experience with the effects of a given procedure. It’s more about what parts of the procedure are better highlighted, refined, modified, or discarded. 

Another way to get a better feel for the program would be to say that it isn’t “Tee shows you his way of coaching,” or “how to coach according to such-and-such discipline,” or even the purely agnostic “choose-your-own adventure with a coaching certificate at the end.” This style of approach reflects the belief that Tee is well-suited to construct this infrastructure and facilitate developmental progress for coaches on this path, in contrast to more authoritative positioning that might cut against integrating a plurality of traditions, paradigms, modalities, methods, approaches and intentions. 

But you will find evidence of our stances and choices all over the place, including the recruitment and selection of applicants, choices made in co-creating a cohort coach’s tailored curriculum, suggestions and guidance regarding development of coaching skill and business architecture, etc.

Here’s a sample list of how these stances and choices would surface within the program:
 

• Conceptions of coaching 
  • More like – engaging in wide-ranging and mutually enriching relationships with clients as a meaningful presence within their continuous process of self-discovery and self-actualization
  • Less like – purely a service for troubleshooting the practical and emotional problems presented by clients
• Self-development philosophy 
  • More like – Treating the cultivation and refinement of experiential observation and interpretation as critical to understanding (leading to better outcomes) 
  • Less like – doubtful of all self-interpretation and/or suspicious we can never really know what’s going on for ourselves. Defaulting to, or habitually relying upon, external judgment and decision-making generators 
• Coaching methodology
  • More like – gaining sophistication and facility with how the unconscious and semi-conscious mediate perception 
  • Less like – taking self-reports and explication at face-value when working with clients​
• Coaching intention
  • More like – truth-tracking and truth-seeking interventions and methods of interpreting reality 
  • Less like – forced mindsets or ideologies that privilege attainment of outcomes over engaging with reality
• Coaching development
  • More like –  encouraging the synthesis and synergizing of multiple modalities 
  • Less like – developing specialization within a single modality, or only developing the most basic general coaching skills
• Establishing a practice
  • More like – advocating for business architecture that meshes in a healthy way with client interests 
  • Less like – (un)intentionally perpetuating arrangements, or angling to upsell, for the purpose generating consistent or additional income

Intended Outcomes

Here’s a non-exhaustive recap of the program outcomes that were interwoven throughout the previous sections: 

• Program participants clarifying and securing the role that they want coaching to have in their lives^[2]
  • For aspiring coaches, it could mean achieving the ability to establish a viable practice.
  • For existing coaches, it could mean stabilizing their practice and taking it to exciting new heights, both in terms of personal and client outcomes
• Notable and demonstrable growth in coaching skill as co-determined between the cohort coach and TBCT. Indicators of this growth can include a selected mixture of skill bars set by the program, participant-driven goals, business viability of the practice, client satisfaction according to feedback, and others. 
• Proliferation of coaches who emphasize and capably facilitate self-alignment and internal integration in the creation, clarification and actualization of aspirations for clients
• Proliferation of coaches excited to grapple with (and guide others in grappling with) cultivation of virtue and the ethical/moral ramifications of consequences
• Establishing a scalable practitioner upskilling apparatus that boosts the total number of skilled coaches supporting people doing scalable good 
• Normalizing wide-spectrum and value-aligned relationships with coaches as a crucial component of one’s process of self-discovery, self-actualization and attainment of aspirations
• Generating memetically potent proofs of possible perspective, especially among those who influence group entities and cultures (e.g. promoting mental models that close the implementation gap between self-alignment and performance) 

The set of participant-specific and program-wide intended outcomes are moving targets that are subject to definitional clarification and revision, but increasingly specified and granular targets will be derived from the scaffolding outlined above. 

More about the training infrastructure

For those who can see potential in coaching to be a great fit for themselves as well as a compelling way to proliferate good in the world, this training infrastructure puts critical elements of the practitioner development journey within arm’s reach. 

All of us have unique psychological starting points that are only partially decipherable. The totality of what coaches bring to bear on any given coaching interaction will have a mixture of intended, unexpected and often confusing effects. This easily labeled, but incredibly high-dimensional interaction – a coaching session – can be a very difficult experience to make sense of. Even basic questions can feel tricky to answer, such as “what just happened?”, “did I make a substantive difference?”, “why do they (not) keep coming back?” or even “do I actually enjoy coaching?”. 

How coaches make sense of their experience is critically influential in their developmental journey. The training infrastructure is designed to meet coaches at these pivotal growth edges. From increasingly better positions of clarity across their many frontiers for potential growth, coaches can make better decisions within their practice. 

An overarching goal of this program for cohort coaches is securing the role that you want coaching to have in your life. For aspiring coaches, it could mean achieving the willingness and ability to establish a viable practice. For existing coaches, it could mean stabilizing your practice and taking it to exciting new heights. We traverse the pathway to these success states principally through the acquisition and cultivation of skill, in contrast to over-emphasizing the power of credentialing or various marketing techniques. 

Special care and attention is also paid, however, to setting up the appropriate business architecture (online presence, systems unifying scheduling softwares, invoicing, payment, follow-ups, etc.) as important for the sustainability of the overall practice. 

Program pricing

How Much – the program is currently priced at $750 USD per month over the course of roughly 6 months. Payment is requested in monthly installments^[3] over the course of the agreed upon duration,^[4] which typically spans about 6 months. 

There may be opportunities for scholarships. There may also be stipends for cohort coaches to pay for unaffiliated courses while being supported by this program in order to more directly pursue specific skills as part of their own developmental journey. 

Offsetting the cost – working with clients almost immediately serves a double function of being an important tenet of the program for engaging in real-world skill building, and is also a means of reducing or eliminating the costs of participating in the program for cohort coaches.^[5] TBCT will seek to provide systematic and consistent client referrals at a frequency co-determined by Tee and the cohort coach.^[6]

For an initial period of three months, clients referred to cohort coaches can expect to pay a guaranteed rate of $50 – $100/hr. USD. The exact rate within that range will vary as a matter of agreement between the supervised coach and client. ^[7]

Know someone who would be interested in working with supervised coaches at a discounted rate? They can apply here. 

What’s Included – The monthly cost of the program is the equivalent of two 1.5-hour coaching sessions with Tee per month at his standard rate. In addition to receiving three hours per month of 1-to-1 coaching from Tee focused primarily on coaching development, cohort participants also receive access to the entire training infrastructure mentioned above. 
Bird’s eye view of pricing dynamics – highlighting some of the operative dynamics and program intentions could contextualize both the program pricing and the overall mission. 

This program is drawing energy and resources from i) the tapping into a common desire to take active steps toward self-improvement among both cohort coaches and clients, ii) tapping into a collective willingness to make trades in order to try things out, iii) bets about what people are happy to trade given assumptions about the potential value of coaching and coaching training. 

In short, the training infrastructure model aims to scale personal growth options (coaching and coaching training) by reducing the number and severity of various tradeoffs at several key junctures. The hope is that altering the landscape by easing these tradeoffs will catalyze a number of collective upward spiral dynamics. Concretely speaking, demand for coaching could increase as the price to test it out drops, more would-be coaches get to test out the occupation and build skill models in lower stakes environments, and skill and trust networks get strengthened by consolidating a training infrastructure. 

​Anticipated Questions

– How do you choose which coaches you ask to join your program? What experience and/or qualities are you looking for?

A lot could be written about this, so I’ll try to keep it concise. Something I’d suggest applicants consider most is whether the vibe of the program, especially that which is outlined in the “Philosophy of Approach” section resonates, and that the plans for bringing the spirit of the program to life seem sensible to you. Aside from minor confusions and uncertainties, which I’d be happy to clear up for applicants who’ve progressed further into the process, if too many things are askew with how the program feels to you, then that would be important to heed.

More is said below on what we’re looking for in applicants. Don’t worry if you feel that your profile doesn’t seem to be a perfect fit. We’d like to have a diverse cohort derived from a heterogenous pool of applicants, so we’d be excited to be persuaded, take chances and examine our own assumptions about people during this process.

On a more concrete note, the first cohort of coaches will mostly consist of people who’ve already demonstrated a fair amount of experience guiding others in some form (e.g. teaching, consulting, therapy, coaching, mentoring, managing, leadership), especially in high-responsibility contexts. It’s less likely that we’d invite individuals who may be quite inexperienced and looking into being a coach as a prospective career.

We’re more likely to ask you to join the program if:

• Your heart is in this. We’re looking for this and care about it a lot.
• Unmistakably high rapport exists between us. Beyond just likability, there are important seeds of potentiality captured by rapport
• Participating within this program seems to fit within your life plans (including basic logistical considerations)
• Basic coordinating and syncing with people come relatively easy for you. High degrees of coordination and syncing abilities within diverse and complex environments would be even better
• You can demonstrate a track record of thoughts and actions that align with things mentioned within the “Philosophy of Approach” section, particularly evidence of having an epistemic profile that would allow for cultivating subjective sophistication as a coach
• We can tell that you’re viewing the training infrastructure (and the components therein) as important to a mainline plan that you’re already actively driving forward (or strongly intend to pursue)
• Your relationship to intellectual content and property is relatively open, respectful and trustworthy (i.e. we want to hand you tools and techniques to share with others. But it’s about how the content is shared)
• We can get a sense of a certain grittiness across different areas of your life
• You can demonstrate instances, periods, and/or patterns of sustained contribution to the commons or local culture (i.e. investing in the environment for friends, family, community, co-workers, etc.)
• We can detect your willingness and potential ability to handle the “business side” of running in your own practice, including markers of reliability, consistency, intentionality, etc.
• We get the sense that you’re treating this application process as a two-way street (i.e. we get some indications (e.g. questions) that you’re carefully considering whether to participate)

We’re less likely to ask you to join the program if:

• Many of your answers to the points above are directly or directionally not encouraging
• You plan to invest in things that are outside the scope of traditions we’re open to considering (e.g. homeopathy, intentionally unnamed ‘dark arts’ of various kinds)
• We come across sufficiently concerning evidence and/or indicators that coordinating would be excessively challenging
• We come across sufficiently concerning indicators, or even direct statements, that your development at TBCT will be channeled in non-benevolent ways
• We come across sufficiently concerning patterns of evidence linking you to causing material harm to those around you

– Do I need to self-identify as an effective altruist, or demonstrate being part of the EA community in some way?  Is this program only meant to serve effective altruists?

No on all counts. We're after genuine heterogeneity of cohort coaches, which is partially achieved through a diversity of worldviews and approaches. It would bode well to be directionally aligned with ideas of doing good effectively. Involvement within effective altruism would be viewed only as weakly encouraging. We're targeting those who have a strong intention to coach people dedicating their lives to scalable world improvement.

– Do you accept coaches on a rolling basis, or do you have a cohort start date?

The intended starting period for the cohort is May, though we’ll be flexible with the start date of each person in line with the highly personalized and tailored nature of the program.

– What’s the intensity level of the commitment to this program?

My current line of thinking is that commitment levels will be structured with a mixture of minimums and incentives. Regarding the minimums, handshake agreements regarding payment and duration can be found in the ‘Pricing’ section.

A crude overview of the incentives component is something like, “the more presence, contribution, growth, etc., the more access you’ll get to more things, including client referrals, training features, promotion of your practice, etc.” I’d want it to feel less like I’m monitoring you for attendance at cohort meetings, for example, and more like your level of investment into yourself, your peers and the program will engender reciprocal investment into you. In some cases Tee will have sole discretion over some of these determinations. In other cases the determinations will come as a consequence of joint decision, and/or natural social consequences.

In other words, there are no codified minimum requirements for time commitments unless the need arises. We’re trying to situate ways in which the rate of a cohort coach’s investment will correlate with the rate of offered benefits from the program.

– Got more questions? 

Additional answers will be added to this section as more commonly asked questions come in. The application will have a section for submitting questions, but you can also submit them to Tee at [email protected].

Apply 

Basics – You can signal your interest in this brief application. 

The deadline to submit the first round of applications is April 3. 

We encourage people to start the process earlier because cohort coaches will asked to join and also initiate the program on a rolling basis. This will mean increasingly limited availability of cohort spots. 

Process – The application consists of submitting basic information as an initial starting point. This will be a three-round process that aims to conclude by early May. 

• Round 1 – basic information and expression of interest
• Round 2 – short- and long- answer questions + submission of existing materials (where applicable)
• Round 3 – interview
   

As we mention in a previous section, don’t worry if you feel that your profile isn't a perfect fit. We’d like to have a diverse cohort derived from a heterogenous pool of applicants, so we’d be excited to be persuaded, take chances and examine our own assumptions about people during this process. 

1. ^{^}

   Defined as a semilinear progression of learning materials

2. ^{^}

   Attaining this bodes well for continued development and is a weakly encouraging indirect indicator of skill, efficient business architecture, etc. 

3. ^{^}

   Payment plans for cohort coaches can be crafted on an individual basis. Once a client is referred by TBCT, the client coach has full ownership over the terms of that relationship. (i.e. cohort coaches can treat that client as if they initiated the relationship themselves, with the exception of keeping the locked-in 3-month rate of $50 – $100/hr. USD.) This only wouldn’t be the case if the cohort coach requests a different arrangement, though Tee is generally trying to avoid commission, percentage sharing and other similar arrangements for a lot of reasons. Program pricing may change after the initial cohort. 

^{^}

 Currently there is no formal legal commitment on either end to see the complete duration through. All parties will be relying upon personal and shared approximations of value transfer. As a default, payments up to the current day are non-refundable, though Tee intends to make reasonable efforts to resolve disputes, including the potential for full or partial refunds. Due to the high-touch nature of the program, it seems very unlikely that a poor fit between the cohort coach and the program would be a protracted state of affairs. 

^{^}

Systematic and consistent client referrals to cohort coaches by TBCT will cease once a cohort coach moves on from the program. However, this wouldn’t preclude plans to informally continue to provide referrals, which is intended to be the case among a tight network of skilled coaches who would be happy to help clients find the right fit for them. 

^{^}

TBCT is unable to provide an ironclad guarantee that cohort coaches will get their preferred volume of referrals and client conversions. This is partially because attracting, converting and retaining clients is integral to building out a stand-alone practice, which is a core focus of TBCT infrastructural support. There’s good reason to believe demand exists enough to fuel referrals, especially at the initial three-month locked-in rate of $50 – $100/hr. As an example, our first cohort coach received 20 opportunities for matches with potential clients within the first month or two. (This was with very little outbound marketing.) 

^{^}

Within the first three months of taking on TBCT clients, the program pays for itself after 7.5 hrs. of client sessions per month at $100/hr. USD, or 15 hours of client sessions per month at the low end of $50/hr. For reference, Tee’s averages between 10 and 15 hours per week in his regular practice. How many hours per week/month it makes sense for cohort coaches to take on will also vary depending on the coach. Know someone who would be interested in working with supervised coaches at a discounted rate?

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