Even the best coaches hit moments they were never trained for.
Even the best coaches hit moments they were never trained for.
A client brings something heavy, or nothing you try lands, and suddenly you’re second-guessing whether you’re any good at this. You are good at this. You’ve just got gaps your initial certification didn’t teach you how to fill. Socratic Coaching fills them, so you can walk into any session sure you can handle whatever comes up.
The Socratic Coaching Method Certification
The only certification built and taught by Master Certified Coach Kara Loewentheil: Yale and Harvard Law graduate, host of the top-charting UnF*ck Your Brain podcast, and author of the New York Times bestseller Take Back Your Brain. So you learn to coach with a level of intellectual rigor most of the industry can’t approach, and you walk away with a license to use her proprietary tools with your own clients.
You love this work. You're just not always sure you're as good at it as you want to be.
Coaching changed your life.
That’s why you do it, and most days you love it.
But you don’t always feel sure you’re delivering the caliber of coaching you know you’re capable of. And you can feel it in your sessions. (I know. I’ve been there too.)
Sometimes the conversation goes in circles, your client hopping from one thought to the next like a frog across lily pads, and you can’t catch them long enough to get anywhere.
Sometimes a client is so resistant you’re wrung out by the end and already dreading next week.
And sometimes your favorite client says “oh my god, I never thought of it that way, everything’s different now,” then shows up seven days later with the exact same problem. Groundhog Day, again.
Your brain wants to file every one of these under “proof I’m not cut out for this.”
Your brain is, as usual, assuming the worst, and it’s wrong.
None of this means you're a bad coach. It means you've got gaps.
Every coach has them, because every human has them. Some are gaps in your coaching theory. Some are gaps in your practice. Either way, they’re what stands between coaching that’s good and coaching that’s reliably world-class for every client, not just the easy ones
The tools to fill them exist.
You just haven't been taught them yet.
Your certification handed you some tools. And then, more or less, left you to it.
You were supposed to figure out what to do with those tools, how to use them well, and how to handle whatever walked into a real session, all on your own.
No matter how good the tools were, that’s a bit like being a baby bird shoved out of the nest before anyone mentioned flying.
Or being handed a tricycle with training wheels and sent out to compete in the Tour de France.
That's not how we roll. (Pun intended.)
We teach you to coach at an advanced level. And we teach you how to keep getting better at it, year after year, long after you’ve certified.
Welcome to the Socratic Coaching Method Certification.
We train confident coaches to deliver reality-based results through the Socratic Coaching Method, using cognitive psychology, social theory, and somatics to change your clients’ lives, and your own.
Enroll now to claim this bonus:
BONUS:
Business Mindset Coaching Calls
(expiring Friday, July 10)
Choose your certification experience.
Same method. Same certification. Pick how close you want to get.
Socratic Coaching Method Certification
ONLINE EXPERIENCE
Starting September 8, 2026
Get certified from anywhere with a wifi connection.
This includes:
:: The Full Socratic Coaching Method Certification Program: Complete access to our proprietary, evidence-based curriculum designed to make you a masterful coach.
:: Weekly, Small-Group Instruction & Implementation Calls: You’ll meet weekly with your small group to learn tools to use with your clients and practice coaching each other with them, getting feedback and guidance from our certified and master certified coaches.
:: Regular live coaching, Q&A, and teaching calls with Kara: Throughout the program I’ll be hosting regular coaching and QA calls – and I’ll be teaching Phase 3 live biweekly!
:: Private Student Community: Connect with a dedicated community of peers for practice, support, celebration, and collaboration throughout your certification journey.
:: Comprehensive Resource Library: Access a full suite of workbooks, scripts, and tools to support your learning and client work.
:: Reality-Based Coaching Approach: Learn to coach within an inclusive framework that acknowledges systemic power structures and real-world client experiences.
:: Final Certification Assessment: Demonstrate your mastery and earn your official Socratic Coaching Method Certification.
Your investment: $10,000
Payment plan option: $1000/month for 10 months
We begin September 8, 2026
Socratic Coaching Method Certification
IMMERSION EXPERIENCE
Starting September 8, 2026
Immersion Event: February 1-5, 2027 in Savannah, Georgia
Add an in-person intensive to your learning experience.
This includes EVERYTHING in the Online Experience, PLUS:
:: A Five-Day, Live Immersion Intensive from Feb 1-5, 2027: Dive into five days of in-person learning, skill-building, and practical coaching. You’ll benefit from early hands-on practice and direct, in-the-moment feedback from Kara to sharpen your coaching mastery.
:: Live Coaching Feedback from Kara: Get my personal feedback and guidance during real-time practice sessions. The Immersion Experience is the only place you’ll find this.<>
:: Collaborative IRL Community: Build lasting, face-to-face connections with fellow participants, and a support network that extends well beyond the Intensive.
:: Distraction-Free Growth: Fully unplug from your daily routine and immerse yourself in a focused environment designed to accelerate your learning.
:: BONUS: New Professional Headshots: Celebrate your journey with a beautiful new headshot from our trusted photographer – our gift to you in your next chapter.
Your investment: $18,000
Payment plan option: $1,800/month for 10 months
We begin September 8, 2026
Coaches who can coach through anything a client brings them, and get real results, set their rates with confidence. Many sell packages in the $2,000 to $6,000 range, so it only takes a few clients to earn back your investment.
You can also make it back through the value you bring to a job or business you already have – because the difference between managing your direct reports to hit their revenue targets (and secure your bonus) or coaching yourself through a business challenge is worth many times the investment.
Either way, the skills you learn keep paying you for the rest of your career.
Socratic Coaching is the only form of coaching that doesn’t just make you a better coach today – it gives you the tools to keep getting better for the rest of your career.
Why Socratic Coaching works, for you and for your clients:
(Click each one for the full story.)
It’s built on cognitive psychology and radical inquiry (so you’re never winging it).
Socratic Coaching isn’t woo, manifestation, or vibrations. It pairs philosophical principles dating back to the Ancient Greeks with modern cognitive psychology to help your clients decide who they want to be and how to get there.
And our work is evidence-based: the core concepts and tools were validated by a peer-reviewed, double-blind study (the gold standard) published in JAMA Network Open.
It’s grounded in reality (so you can confidently coach anyone).
Most coaching pretends life happens in a vacuum, as if the same tidy model works for everyone regardless of their identity and circumstances. But people have different resources, constraints, and realities, and political, social, legal, and financial systems shape all of them. Socratic Coaching teaches you to meet a client where they actually live while still holding the vision they can’t see yet. That’s how you get sure you can help anyone who comes to you.
It’s collaborative (so your clients own their own change).
Traditional coaching, especially when it’s aimed at women, can push clients toward what the patriarchy has told them they should do. Socratic Coaching interrogates the why behind a goal and checks it against the client’s own values, so goal-setting builds their agency instead of their perfectionism. Your clients stop people-pleasing you, stop pretending to understand things they don’t, and stop using thought work against themselves.
It’s anchored in somatics (so you always know what to do when “it’s not working”).
Most clients (and coaches) stall out because they’re disconnected from their emotions, running cognitive change work while ignoring the brain-body connection that actually creates new beliefs. Socratic Coaching connects the two, so you can pinpoint what’s going wrong when a client can’t shift a thought or take an action, and tell them exactly how to fix it. And you’ll never have to wonder whether your coaching is working either, because we teach you how to coach yourself back to confidence, fast, whenever you lose your footing.
Here's how you'll actually get there.
The certification runs in three phases.
Foundation & WIRE Framework
You will learn the Socratic Coaching Method, along with our WIRE framework for helping clients connect to their emotions, change their thoughts, and create new habits and actions.
We’ll also be doing deep dives into trauma and nervous system regulation and neurodiversity in coaching.
Phase 1 is taught online, with regular coaching and Q&A calls taught by Kara and integration calls hosted by our program coaches. At the end you’ll take a written test (open-book) to advance in the certification.
Real-World Application
You will learn how to apply these tools to specific areas of your clients’ lives, like work and money, family and relationships, sex and dating, new habits, body image, organization and productivity, and more.
For each topic you’ll learn new tools and exercises, dive deep into the socialization that impacts your clients’ brains, and see how to apply the core Socratic Coaching Method to these areas of clients’ lives.
Phase 2 has two options: Self-study with an online curriculum OR a week in person with Kara in a fabulous venue in Savannah, Georgia (additional investment).
Practicum and Certification
It’s all about application and practice. Kara will be teaching this phase live online, and you’ll also meet in small groups with expert instructors to practice coaching and get personal feedback and guidance. You’ll learn exactly what to do before, during, and after sessions to show up confidently and handle any challenges that arise. You’ll also practice a self-assessment model for continually improving your coaching.
At the end of Phase 3, you’ll submit five self-evaluated coaching calls, and have a session reviewed by a coach instructor to achieve certification.
Want more details?
Click to expand for a week-by-week overview of what you will learn in each phase.
Phase 1: Foundational Coaching Tools
- WIRE Step 1: Get introduced to the WIRE Framework and Socratic Coaching Method radical inquiry tool – and learn how to use it on your clients and yourself.
- WIRE Step 2: Learn somatic tools to use with clients and the TEB cycle of cognitive psychology.
- WIRE Step 3: Learn a framework to help clients understand how their thoughts are impacting the returns they are creating in their lives.
- WIRE Step 4: Learn a process to coach your clients through experiences of shame or resistance so they don’t get stuck.
- WIRE Step 5: Learn how to help clients develop and implement new value-aligned beliefs.
- WIRE Step 6: Learn how to help clients identify action steps and troubleshoot lack of follow-through.
- Deep Dive on Trauma, the Nervous System and Abuse: Learn how trauma impacts coaching, how to spot and handle nervous system activation in your clients, and how to screen for clients who need additional mental health care, and how to handle those scenarios.
- Deep Dive on Neurodiversity & Coaching: Many coaching clients are neurodiverse (as are many coaches), likely because they grow up in a society that tells them they should be different and they seek out self-help to try to cope with expectations about how they should be that don’t match their lived experience. In this deep dive you’ll learn how neurodiversity can impact the coaching experience and how to best support neurodiverse clients.
At the end of Phase 1 you will complete an open-book test on what you have learned in order to advance to Phases 2 and 3.
Phase 2: Topic-Specific Coaching Tools
- Impact of social messages on thought systems and beliefs
- Dating, romantic relationships & sex
- Family, parenting, & household labor/management
- Eating, movement, & relationship with the body
- Time management & organization
- Career confidence & performance
- Money (earning, spending, saving, investing, & debt)
- Confidence & self-worth
- Coaching on experiences of discrimination
- Numbing & buffering (eating, drinking, shopping, social media, Netflix etc.)
- Habit breaking & formation
Phase 3: Practice & Integration
- Practice coaching with live feedback and guidance from our expert instructors
- Personal feedback from an expert coach
- Learn a self-assessment model for continually improving your coaching
- Submission of five self-evaluated coaching calls, plus review of a session by a coach instructor to achieve certification
Want to go all in, in person?
Join us for the Immersion Experience.
Savannah, Georgia. February 1–5, 2027.
Picture a full week dedicated to nothing but your coaching, at The Malin in Savannah, surrounded by serious coaches, with my direct mentorship at every step.
This is the only place you’ll get live, personal feedback on your coaching from me. You’ll practice coaching out loud early, get real-time input, see your strengths clearly, and work your growth edges on the spot. You’ll also step fully out of your daily routine and into a room of people doing exactly what you’re doing.
Immersion bonus:
Stunning new headshots from our go-to photographer, to mark your new chapter. Our gift to you
And don't miss this time-limited bonus when you enroll now:
BONUS:
Business Mindset Coaching Calls
(expiring Friday, July 10):
These three group coaching calls are designed to help you practice the beliefs you need to effectively grow your business with real confidence. Each call will focus on a different topic: becoming more visible in marketing, overcoming imposter syndrome, and selling with confidence.
In less than a year, you'll be a Certified Socratic Method Coach.
You’ll have a higher-level skill set, with tools and frameworks that get your clients the kind of results most coaches only hope for.
You’ll have rock-solid confidence in yourself, because you’ve got better theory and better tools under your belt.
And you’ll have a different relationship with your own work, because you’ll know how to coach yourself through the brain drama of being a coach. Plus, you’ll have a way to keep assessing and improving year after year.
You didn’t get into this to do it half-assed. This is how you build the coaching career you always wanted, but maybe didn’t quite believe you could pull off.
Choose Your SCMC Experience
Socratic Coaching Method Certification
ONLINE EXPERIENCE
Starting September 8, 2026
Get certified from anywhere with a wifi connection.
This includes:
:: The Full Socratic Coaching Method Certification Program: Complete access to our proprietary, evidence-based curriculum designed to make you a masterful coach.
:: Weekly, Small-Group Instruction & Implementation Calls: You’ll meet weekly with your small group to learn tools to use with your clients and practice coaching each other with them, getting feedback and guidance from our certified and master certified coaches.
:: Regular live coaching, Q&A, and teaching calls with Kara: Throughout the program I’ll be hosting regular coaching and QA calls – and I’ll be teaching Phase 3 live biweekly!
:: Private Student Community: Connect with a dedicated community of peers for practice, support, celebration, and collaboration throughout your certification journey.
:: Comprehensive Resource Library: Access a full suite of workbooks, scripts, and tools to support your learning and client work.
:: Reality-Based Coaching Approach: Learn to coach within an inclusive framework that acknowledges systemic power structures and real-world client experiences.
:: Final Certification Assessment: Demonstrate your mastery and earn your official Socratic Coaching Method Certification.
Your investment: $10,000
Payment plan option: $1000/month for 10 months
We begin September 8, 2026
Socratic Coaching Method Certification
IMMERSION EXPERIENCE
Starting September 8, 2026
Immersion Event: February 1-5, 2027 in Savannah, Georgia
Add an in-person intensive to your learning experience.
This includes EVERYTHING in the Online Experience, PLUS:
:: A Five-Day, Live Immersion Intensive from Feb 1-5, 2027: Dive into five days of in-person learning, skill-building, and practical coaching. You’ll benefit from early hands-on practice and direct, in-the-moment feedback from Kara to sharpen your coaching mastery.
:: Live Coaching Feedback from Kara: Get my personal feedback and guidance during real-time practice sessions. The Immersion Experience is the only place you’ll find this.<>
:: Collaborative IRL Community: Build lasting, face-to-face connections with fellow participants, and a support network that extends well beyond the Intensive.
:: Distraction-Free Growth: Fully unplug from your daily routine and immerse yourself in a focused environment designed to accelerate your learning.
:: BONUS: New Professional Headshots: Celebrate your journey with a beautiful new headshot from our trusted photographer – our gift to you in your next chapter.
Your investment: $18,000
Payment plan option: $1,800/month for 10 months
We begin September 8, 2026
Meet Your Teacher
I’m Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and creator of the Socratic Coaching Method. I’m a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, and in my former life I was a women’s rights attorney and academic.
These days I teach women how to live a confident life, and train coaches in how to use the Socratic Coaching Method to blow their clients’ minds – and their own. I’m the host of the top-ranked UnF*ck Your Brain Podcast (60 million downloads and counting!), The Future Coach Podcast, and the author of the New York Times-bestseller Take Back Your Brain.
As a coach I’ve coached thousands of women from all over the world, and been featured in publications like The New York Times, Glamour, and Forbes. My company, The School of New Feminist Thought, has created over $28,000,000 in revenue.
I drink iced coffee year-round and when I’m not working you’ll find me reading novels in a hammock by the creek next to my 200-year-old farmhouse upstate, or corralling my family of excitable raccoons (by which I mean husband and step-kids) in a brownstone in Brooklyn. I enjoy cheap pizza, expensive travel, and asking people inappropriately deep questions in social situations.
FAQs
You've got questions? We've got answers!
Is this certification based on, or teaching, the LCS model?
The certification includes the The Life Coach School Model, but the Socratic Coaching Model goes well beyond it to add new proprietary tools I’ve honed and tested over the last decade – like how to coach the reaction clients have to their models and how to coach around the impact socialization has on clients’ thoughts.
Whatever coach training you have already completed, including LCS, this will expand your knowledge base, sharpen your skills, and give you access to and license to use an entire new set of tools and techniques that are not otherwise available for you to use with clients.
Learning to improve your confidence as a coach and learning how to self-assess and improve will also up your coaching game long-term and help you show up more powerfully as a coach.
Here’s what one of the LCS coaches who went through a previous iteration of this program said:
Don’t hesitate. It will uplevel all that you learned in LCS and take you to such an empowering place. – Julie Squires
And here’s what a coach who had been certified by another school had to say about it:
I now understand coaching in a way that I was unable to before this program. I can recognize patterns in my clients with their thinking, what they fear and where they’re holding back and now I know why. Before, it felt like I was coaching on the surface and now I can recognize the deeper cause of their issues. This deeper understanding has made me one thousand times more effective as a coach. – Sandy
I’m already experienced as a coach. Am I going to be bored while you’re teaching basic coaching skills to new coaches? Are there any experienced-coach specific elements?
No, you won’t be bored. Of course, as a coach, you have some foundational coaching tools – and you may recognize some of the cognitive psychology-based tools we cover especially in Week 1. But the rest of the curriculum is based on the concepts, theory, tools, and practices I have developed myself through coaching thousands of women over a decade at the highest level.
What makes this certification so powerful for anyone, and perfect for existing coaches as well, is that I focus a lot on what other certifications don’t teach you – how to trouble-shoot when something isn’t working, how to solve the common obstacles that come up in mindset coaching, and how to continually coach and improve yourself and your own skills.
Depending on the makeup of those who enroll, we may sort the small groups by coaching stage and experience. But either way, you’ll learn to coach more efficiently and effectively no matter what your previous training.
I love coaching but I’ve experienced a lot of privilege-blindness in coaching spaces. Is that going to be a problem in this certification?
No space is entirely privilege-blindness-free, but The Socratic Coaching Method is built around bringing an intersectional feminist lens to the coaching world.
We call our coaching method reality-based because it takes into account social, political, legal, and financial systems of power and oppression and teaches coaches how to make space for those realities in their coaching while also empowering clients to see new possibilities for their lives.
Here’s what a student in an earlier version of this program said about participating in it as a woman of color:
“Right from the beginning of this course I felt seen and heard as a Black woman. I honestly did not expect it. As a woman that belongs to a number of marginalized groups it was amazing to see myself reflected back in this curriculum and have acknowledgement of my experience in the world! If you’re thinking about doing the program then the answer should be HELL yes! It has truly upleveled my coaching!” – Dr. Sonia Wright
I’m a therapist (or other mental health professional), not a coach. Is this certification still for me?
Absolutely. I’ve trained many therapists in using my tools and concepts in their practices. So I’ll just let a couple of them tell you directly how it helps:
After I started implementing this perspective a client said to me: Where did you learn how to be a therapist? Because I’ve been in and out of therapy and I’ve never done it like this. – Katy Delagardelle, LISW
The lens Kara brings is not taught in any of the places I gained education from, and I’m very skilled with CBT and DBT, those were my core curriculum. This brought an entirely new layer to my practice. I specialize in addictions and trauma and this work transformed my relationship with myself and empowered me to facilitate deeper transformation with my patients. – Sasia Lile, MSW
Is this certification accredited by any coaching industry groups?
Nope. Neither was my coach certification or master coach certification when I got trained.
And in a decade of coaching thousands of women, writing a NYT bestseller, speaking on corporate stages, and hosting a top-ranking podcast, not a single client or booker or agent has ever asked me if it was.
No one is going to ask you either. They just want help.
I know Kara’s work directly with clients focuses on feminist confidence coaching. Is this only for people who coach women and/or only open to women students?
This certification is open to anyone of any gender identity who coaches any kind of human!
The first phase of this certification focuses exclusively on foundational coaching tools and processes that applies to anyone with a human brain. And honestly, that phase on its own is worth the cost of admission.
Phase two of the certification focuses on how social messages impact people’s brains, and how to apply that theory to various areas of clients’ lives. This phase does focus more on gender socialization than other factors, but also covers socialization along identities like race and ethnicity, neurodiversity, body size, age, gender identity and sexuality, etc.
If you do coach people socialized as women in whole or in part, it’s invaluable as-is. If you coach exclusively people socialized as men, the concepts will be very useful as a framework for developing your own understanding of how men are socialized and how that impacts their thought patterns.
Take it from Matt, a current SCMC student:
“As a Gay Gender Nonconforming Man (he/him), I’ve always related to Kara’s content so much even though I don’t fit the phrase ‘people socialized as women.’ When SCMC began accepting its first group, I worried I’d be turned down but signed up anyway – to my delight, I was welcomed in and the community (of many intersecting identities) has been incredible to learn from, and connect with. The Patriarchy affects everyone after all.”
Bottom line: If you coach people with brains, this certification will make you better at doing it.
I’ve already taken some of your programs. Can’t I just use those tools as a coach without going through a certification?
No, that’s not a good idea.
If you haven’t been certified by a coaching program, you don’t technically have a license to use their intellectual property in your business. Which brings us to our next question.
Do I get a license to use the Socratic Coaching Method tools with my clients?
Yes. When you successfully complete the Socratic Coaching Method Certification, you receive a limited license to use the SCMC tools and materials in your own private coaching practice with your clients (but not for certifying or training other coaches).
Because enrollment in the Socratic Coaching Method Certification is limited, alumni become part of an exclusive group of professionals with access to Kara’s proprietary coaching tools and frameworks. These tools are designed to help coaches create deeper client breakthroughs and more effective coaching outcomes in their own private practices.
Still have questions? Book a call with our Certification Concierge!
This is a no-pressure, informational call with a certified coach. She doesn’t work on commission. She’s just available to answer your questions.
**Some testimonials on this page were provided by graduates of earlier iterations of this program.