An improbable city, Venice is built on wooden platforms and it delivers exactly what it promises: canals, bridges, gondolas, grand architecture and fine art.

Not surprisingly, visitors flock to the city to enjoy its legendary cinematic beauty. “Venice never quite seems real, but rather an ornate film set suspended on the water.”

Two weeks ago this Italian city provided an atmospheric setting for an ICA meet up and it offered a new way of appreciating and understanding student-created coaching models.

For those of you unfamiliar with ICA, it’s probably worth explaining our approach in greater detail. As a coach training school, we are famous for avoiding off the shelf, cookie cutter approaches to coaching. Instead we give students transferable skills and space to refine their own unique identity. Over the space of several weeks and sometimes months, students investigate, explore and refine their own unique approach to coaching. They then take this approach and form it in to a “Coaching Model” that they can use to promote their practice and work with clients.

Sustaining a lifetime of successful coaching means that you must show up. By understanding and appreciating your own coaching voice and model, your authenticity will draw the right client, build engagement and guarantee career longevity.

So how does the coaching model work? Well, imagine yourself as a city and identify how you want your visitors to experience you. What will prompt people to visit you? What do your buildings and architecture evoke? What will visitors note as your values? How will they gain from spending time with you? Cities like London, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Venice all offer very specific experiences. Likewise the coaching model offers an opportunity for you to explain to your clients the journey that awaits them and how they will be supported to make the necessary shift in perception to move ahead and take action.

During the Venice Meetup, ICA Coach Trainer Rosella Pin introduced her own Coaching Model “THE AIM”, then senior students and graduates of the ICA Italian Coach Campus presented their own work. It was an immensely invigorating day with an incredible breadth of models produced.

Seeing the diversity of our students approach, hearing their passion, and learning about the story behind the development of the model, was once again, a demonstration that no one single model will work for all coaching settings. Coaching is contextual, clients are unique and their challenges specific. ICA is producing some powerful coaches and, like a global city, each coach has its own character, strength and energy.