The ICF Credentialing Exam & Navigating Setbacks | Susan's MCC Journey, Part 2

Hey everyone, Susan Britton with the Academies, and this is an Encourage Your Brain segment. In a recent video, I shared about earning my MCC credential, Master Certified Coach credential, with the International Coaching Federation, and I alluded to a couple of setbacks that I had as well as some information about the credentialing exam. This video is about the credentialing exam, and I think it's relevant for anybody that might find themselves in a situation where it's kind of high stakes, like you You want to be sure that you do a good job, and yet you also have those moments where you think, oh my gosh, this is not going as well as I, I thought it might. So I had one of those experiences at— as I was taking the credentialing exam, the ICF Situational Judgment Exam. And you may be aware that as part of earning an ICF credential, you have to have a certain number of hours of training, a certain number of coaching hours of experience, and pass a performance evaluation, and then the final piece of that whole journey is passing the International Coaching Federation Situational Judgment Exam. And it's tough. It's not— it was not easy. And what I noticed is that it's a 3-hour exam, it's a proctored exam, and they give you 90 minutes and then a small break and 90 minutes. And so I went into it very well studied. I had studied all of the code of ethics and the values for ICF and the core competencies and I thought that I was pretty much ready for it. I had a bit of a plan. I knew exactly how many questions were in the first session and then how many questions were in the next 90-minute session and I ran into two problems. Number one, my math on my plan did not work out as I had planned. So when I say my math, I had figured that there were 41 some odd questions for 90 minutes, and I was thinking that I could spend about 2 minutes per question, and in those 2 minutes, that would give me a chance to read through the question twice and then start looking at the answers. And if I did that, I'd have a little bit of time to spare in the 90 minutes so that I could come back and check some of the questions that I was concerned about. Well, about I would say 30 minutes into my first 90-minute first half session, I realized my math is wrong. It is taking me longer to answer some of these things and read them and really understand them than I thought. And so I felt myself kind of panicking. I felt the whole red zone kind of experience biologically coming over me. The red zone being that fight-flight state where we sort of lose the best part of our prefrontal cortex thinking and get a little bit emotionally hijacked. So as I was noticing it, like, oh my gosh, my math is off, this is not working out, and I'm not going to finish this first segment in time, I really had to pause and take a deep breath and just refocus and think, that's okay, I can change my strategy. So that was one piece because that kind of threw me off, and I thought, I'm not going to be making as good a decision as I could if I were in more of a flow state as opposed to this fight-flight state. The other thing that washed over me was recognizing that the exam was not simple, was not easy in my estimation. Some people may say that it wasn't difficult, and that's okay. It was just my experience that it was difficult. And I remember very clearly about halfway through the exam thinking to myself this very thought: Oh my gosh. "if I don't pass this thing, I don't know what I'm going to do because I don't know how to study any differently or better." And that thought came and then it sort of repeated itself, and I'm noticing my divided brain thinking, "Pay attention to the question, Susan. Take it one at a time." And then the other part of my brain thinking, "Oh my gosh, if I don't pass this, how am I going to be able to study because I'm not sure I would know how to study any differently." So that was happening, and so bottom line, I really had to very intentionally kind of pull myself back and say, Susan, focus on the question. Remember the essence of what coaching is all about. It's about partnership. It's about collaboration with another brilliant human being in a capacity to engage them creatively, to pull out their wisdom. So I just had to go back to thinking about what's the core of coaching, what is the core of the ICF Code of Ethics and the competencies. And that was the, the turning point, I think, for me to be able to get back into test mode and not start letting my brain run off with all of the what-ifs if I didn't pass. Good news is that my score was much better than I thought it might be, actually, and I was pleased about that. And I feel like I'm much more equipped to be able to support other people with how to prepare for the exam. In fact, just had one of the participants in our Academy Academies programs reach out to me. We got our heads together and got to do a little prepping and just got news that she too had passed. So it feels good to have made it through the exam, understand it better, know how to prepare other people for it, and add my own experience to the many resources that we do offer at the Academies for when you're at that, that step of the process. All right, so good news, It's doable, and we've got some tools and some techniques that can support you in the process.