There’s a question Cindy Schmelzenbach, MCC often gets asked: When did you know coaching was the space you were made for?

Her answer surprises people. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it wasn’t a crisis that sent her toward coaching. It was a classroom.

She was finishing her Master’s in Counseling, working in cross-cultural humanitarian aid and community development, when she signed up for an elective: Introduction to Coaching, taught by Dr. Gary Collins.

“I took it and was completely hooked,” she says. “I knew this was the direction I wanted to go.”

But knowing the direction and knowing how to get there are different things.

Before formal coach training, Cindy had spent five years using CliftonStrengths with the teams she served overseas. She was good at it. People valued it. She assumed she was coaching.

She wasn’t.

“What I know now is that we were consulting and teaching – not coaching. It was beneficial, but so limited in its impact.”

The distinction would take years to fully appreciate, but the seed was planted when she hired her own coach and experienced something she hadn’t encountered before: the particular kind of discovery that only happens when someone creates space for you to find answers yourself.

Over two years, she developed self-awareness, self-motivation, and self-efficacy in ways she hadn’t experienced in any previous context. “I wanted to be a part of offering that experience to others.”

In 2015, Cindy completed her counseling degree and enrolled with PCCI – one of the few ICF-accredited faith-based programs offering virtual coursework at the time. She was living overseas. PCCI made the path possible.

The early training was humbling in exactly the right way.

“Like most, I had to unlearn what I thought was more valuable – telling.” She’d spent years in helping professions where expertise meant giving guidance. Coaching inverted that. And one session in the Essentials course reoriented her more than she expected: the teaching on what listening really is.

“I began to consider the value of listening and being listened to in an entirely different way.”

That shift – from someone who brings answers to someone who holds space – didn’t happen overnight. She spent five years as an internal coach before concluding with certainty: this is what I want to pour myself into.

Today, Cindy holds the MCC – the Master Certified Coach credential, held by fewer than 4% of ICF-credentialed coaches worldwide. She serves as Director of Education at PCCI and as a Global Ambassador for the International Coaching Federation. Her full-time practice spans life coaching, leadership coaching, strengths coaching, and partnering with coaches in development through mentor coaching and supervision.

But the credential that matters most to her isn’t a credential at all.

“I started by trying to coach well – and do it like others did it. Now I am who I am and I coach from that place.”

11 years of practice didn’t make her more polished. It made her more present. “I take coaching more seriously than ever, but I don’t take myself as seriously.”

The clients she remembers most aren’t the ones with dramatic turning points. They’re the ones who came in carrying a story about themselves – limited, not enough, insignificant – and, over months and sometimes years of partnership, began to live into a different one. Unique. Valuable. Sacred.

“Partnering with clients to imagine, practice, and then live into an identity like this is humbling and motivating.”

Her theology shapes how she holds that work. Not as a technique or a talking point, but as a posture. “I see clients as sacred created human beings worthy of God’s love and my respect.” The word she reaches for is honor.

If you’re wondering whether you’re qualified enough to begin – Cindy has a direct answer.

“You will be better a week from now, a month from now, and 10 years from now. That doesn’t keep you from bringing value now. Bring what you have, give it what you have, and trust the growth process.”

And if you’re wondering whether this is worth committing to?

She points to the most unexpected return on investment: the way coaching has reshaped her own theology, her relationships, her understanding of what it means to be human.

“This – if this were all I ever gained from coaching – would have been so much more than worth all I’ve put into it.”

That’s not a marketing line. That’s 11 years of sacred conversations talking.