The phone call came on a Tuesday morning.
The person on the other end was a senior figure in the global coaching credentialing world — someone I respected deeply, and still do. We'd been in conversation for months about a pathway I was building: a training program rooted in التفكير الحسّي — Somatic Thinking — that would lead coaches not just to another certification, but all the way to MCC, the Master Certified Coach credential. The highest level in the profession. Held by fewer than 5% of coaches globally.
"Samer," he said, with the kind of careful warmth that precedes difficult news. "This is a beautiful vision. But I don't think the field is ready for it. This can't be accredited."
I remember exactly where I was standing. I remember exactly what my body told me in that moment — not defeat, not anger. Something quieter. A kind of stillness that, over the years, I've learned to trust.
I said: "I hear you. I'm going to build it anyway."
Let me explain what this pathway actually is — and why it matters enough to build against resistance.
Most MCC coaches reach that credential through a combination of hours logged, mentor coaching, and a final performance review. The path is well-defined. You accumulate. You demonstrate competencies. You pass.
What that pathway doesn't ask — and this is the gap that's been quietly growing for years — is whether the coach has developed a philosophy. Not a methodology borrowed from their training school. Not a competency checklist internalized until it becomes invisible. An actual philosophy of what development is, what presence means, and why awareness matters more than any technique.
I know MCCs who are breathtaking technicians. I know MCCs who couldn't tell you, in their own words, what they believe growth is for. The credential doesn't ask. It measures behavior. It doesn't measure depth.
STAIC — the Somatic Thinking Advanced ICF Coaching program — was built to close that gap.
The Arabic intellectual tradition I grew up inside has a concept that Western coaching training has no equivalent for: مراقبة — muraqabah. Attentive self-witnessing. Not as introspection, not as journaling, not as reflective supervision. As a disciplined practice of observing the interior in motion — the إشارات حسّية جسدية, the physical sensory signals — so that the coach arrives to every session from a state of presence, not performance.
Most coach training teaches coaches what to do. STAIC teaches coaches how to be.
That is not a marketing distinction. It is a methodological one. And the difference shows up in sessions with a kind of immediacy that is almost difficult to explain until you've experienced it. Clients don't report that their coach asked better questions. They report that they felt something rare: a quality of presence that allowed their own النَّفْس — their living, feeling self — to be seen without being managed.
That quality is trainable. It takes depth, practice, and the right methodology. But it is trainable. And it leads, naturally, to the kind of coaching that the MCC assessment was always trying to measure — and has never had the right pathway to develop.
Building this program has taken longer than anything else I've created. The curriculum draws on 30 years of embodied practice, 10,000 coaching hours, peer-reviewed methodology published in academic literature, and — perhaps most importantly — the honest interrogation of what my own failures as a coach taught me.
The first few years of my practice, I was a good coach by every measurable standard. I was also frequently in the way. I was managing the session more than holding it. I was "helping" in the way that carries the unspoken message: I don't fully trust you to find your own way. It took years of inner work — and the rigorous development of somatic awareness as a professional foundation — to become the kind of presence that gets out of the way while remaining fully in the room.
That is what I'm trying to build a pathway for. Not coaching as competency. Coaching as a living state of attentiveness — brought freshly to every client, in every session, regardless of what the session holds.
The person who called me on that Tuesday was right about one thing: the field wasn't ready.
But the coaches who come to STAIC are ready. They arrive with years of experience, strong credentials, and a growing sense that their practice has reached a ceiling that technique cannot break through. They're not looking for more tools. They're looking for the layer of development that their original training never addressed.
That's who this pathway is for.
If you're reading this and feeling a quiet recognition — if you've sensed the gap between the coaching you're capable of producing and the coaching you're capable of being — STAIC opens in September. Applications are now being reviewed.
The MCC pathway nobody asked for turned out to be the one some of you have been waiting for.