In a world where titles blur and methods overlap, clarity is an act of care - for ourselves, our clients, and the profession we belong to.

At The Somatic School, we believe integrity begins with how we describe what we do. The question of what we can call ourselves after training is more than a matter of wording - it’s about coherence, ethics, and trust. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s about staying true to the principles of embodiment that sit at the heart of this work.

Once You Have Finished the Diploma You Will be a Coach - and a Certified One

Our Accredited Diploma in Body-Oriented Coaching is first and foremost a coaching course. It’s also the world’s first somatic coach training to be awarded a Level 2 accreditation by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

This accreditation means the course has undergone a rigorous review process to ensure that every graduate meets the ICF’s high standards for professional and ethical coaching. You’ll graduate equipped with the full range of established coaching competencies and skill set required to work confidently with clients - whether or not they’re already familiar with somatics.

After completing the Diploma, you’ll be a qualified coach with a professional certification. You can confidently market yourself as a Certified Body-Oriented Coach or Somatic Coach, trained at an ICF Level 2 accredited programme. These titles are respected across the global coaching community and signal you’ve received in-depth, standards-aligned professional coaching education.

You’ll also be eligible to apply for your ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) or Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential. Once awarded, these credentials can be included in your professional title too.

Staying Within Scope

As a coach, integrity means knowing where your expertise begins and ends - and ensuring your marketing reflects that.

Below are some important distinctions:

Working with Children and Teens

Body-oriented approaches can be wonderful to bring to children and teens. Youngsters often take to somatic work naturally. For example, there are many professional educators in multiple countries using Focusing (created by Eugene Gendlin and trained on our Diploma) in pre-schools, and schools - to help children and teens improve self-understanding, better regulate big emotions, improve well-being, enhance relationships skills (empathy, communication) and nurture positive growth moments.  

If you already hold training or experience working with children or young people, you can integrate the body-oriented coaching approach into that existing framework. You’ll simply apply your understanding of this age group within the ethical and developmental considerations you already know.

If you don’t have this background, we encourage pursuing additional child- or youth-specific training alongside or after your Diploma. Working with this age group requires specialist understanding - of both developmental stages and safeguarding responsibilities.

With the right foundations though, Body-Oriented Coaching can be a beautiful resource for younger people.

Working with Neurodiversity

The sensitivity of neurodivergent clients can be brilliant when bringing in body-oriented approaches, helping neurodiverse people get to know their own bodies and nervous systems better. So much of neurodiversity has to do with attentional and emotional regulation, both an expression of autonomic state. So people learning about their own bodies, and how to be with themselves in ways that create more resource and capacity can be an incredible support for people with neurodiversity.

As with working with children or young people, if you have prior experience or qualifications in supporting neurodivergent clients (e.g. ADHD, autism), you’ll be able to weave your understanding into the Body-Oriented Coaching framework.

If not, we recommend additional study to ensure you can work sensitively and effectively with these clients. There are important considerations around sensory processing, communication, and executive functioning that go beyond the scope of this training. 

With these considerations properly understood, Body-Oriented Coaching can be incredibly powerful for clients with different neurodiversities. Most systems and societal structures are built with neurotypical people in mind, but the whole ethos of coaching is to discover what’s right for each client. Body-Oriented Coaching can help and empower neurodivergent clients to understand what might be best for them - and to discover that their bodies often know something about what they need.

Working with Trauma

This is an especially important distinction.

There is a difference between working on trauma and working with trauma if it arises. We help you do the latter, not the former.

Body-oriented coaching is trauma-sensitive, not trauma-therapeutic. We’ll equip you to recognise signs of dysregulation/disorganisation if it arises spontaneously within a session, to support clients in staying within their window of tolerance, and to foster safety and agency.

However, working directly on trauma - such as treating or resolving PTSD or complex trauma - requires additional clinical training. We hold that trauma therapy must be done by qualified therapists, and trauma therapy is a separate professional path - typically a multi-year qualification.

Therefore, it would be unethical to market yourself as providing trauma healing, trauma therapy, or services for PTSD and other clinical pathologies unless you hold separate credentials in these areas.

Why These Distinctions Matter

These boundaries aren’t limitations; they are part of what makes this work powerful. 

By staying within scope, you protect both your clients and yourself. You uphold professional integrity, avoid harm, and strengthen the reputation of the wider somatic coaching field.

More than that though, these boundaries are in service of the work. They bring focus and aliveness to your coaching work.

Clarity in language mirrors clarity in practice. And a few things can happen when you set a clear container in this way. 

1. It attracts the right kind of clients. 

2. It primes clients before they even get into the space.Thus, they bring to the session what’s appropriate for that session. And because of that right-sizing of the work, you’re more likely to help them attain their desired outcome. 

3. It leads to shared expectations. Both parties know what they’re doing together in the space.

4. And finally, that clarity of containment is what allows true immersion. Just as time-bound practices can be very helpful for people - a 20-minute meditation, a set-length yoga class, a defined exercise window - a clear container can create safety that settles the bodymind even more. When something isn’t open-ended or vague, we can let go more fully into the experience.

The same is true in coaching.

A well-defined container, set through language and held in practice, gives clients (and coaches) the safety needed to drop in, to soften, and to engage more deeply with the work.

All of this can supercharge your coaching work.

A Closing Note

So when you finish your training at The Somatic School, you can proudly say: “I’m a Certified Body-Oriented Coach or Somatic Coach” - and you can also know exactly what that means. 

You can confidently convey through your marketing what you’re able to do to support people, and help others understand exactly what Body-Oriented Coaching means too. And as a result, the people who need that kind of support will feel confident coming to you.

Body-Oriented Coaching is one specific way to help people. And as the somatic field continues to expand - as more practitioners discover the efficacy of working in this way - it becomes even more important to differentiate between the diverse methodologies, modalities, and practices available. 

Not all somatic approaches serve the same purpose, nor do they carry the same scope, training requirements, or ethical boundaries. Some are therapeutic, some are healing-focused, some are movement-based, and some - like Body-Oriented Coaching - are rooted firmly in professional coaching.

This is a movement. Some clinicians, like Barnaby B. Barratt, even suggest that within the next five years all helping professions will have a somatic dimension to them. With growing insight into how the nervous system functions - and increasing evidence for intelligence beyond the intellect - a somatically-informed approach is becoming the norm.

In our technological age, where disconnection from the body is common, people are hungry for a deeper, more connected experience of themselves. Body-Oriented Coaching is emerging as a cutting-edge response to the kind of support the modern human is seeking today.

Now you have more clarity around the scope of Body-Oriented Coaching. You may also know what additional pieces you might want to bring in to offer sensitive and ethical support to the populations we’ve discussed above.

There is an opportunity here - to bring this approach into fields that may not yet have a great deal of access to it, but where a body-oriented, nervous-system-conscious way of working could be deeply valuable.

To support people in the ways they are truly seeking.
To serve with integrity.
And to bring your coaching into the world in a way that feels whole, alive, and aligned.

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