Newfield Network

Newfield Network was founded in 1991 by Julio Olalla, a Chilean-born philosopher and coach who had fled the Pinochet dictatorship and later worked closely with Fernando Flores. Flores was one of the central figures in applying the philosophy of language to human development. Alongside Rafael Echeverria, Olalla co-founded The Newfield Group in the early 1990s, establishing one of the first professional coach training schools in the world. After the two parted ways around 1996, Olalla formed Newfield Network in the United States, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, while Echeverria continued separately. In the decades since, Newfield Network has trained more than 70,000 coaches, leaders, and individuals across 63 countries.

Olalla, who holds the ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) credential, is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of the coaching profession. His core contribution was adapting ontological philosophy (the study of being and existence) into a practical coaching framework. He drew on thinkers including Humberto Maturana, Martin Heidegger, and Fernando Flores. The result is a school of coaching that is explicitly philosophical in origin, asking not "what skills does this person need?" but "who is this person as an observer, and how does that shape what they can do?"

A coach trained at Newfield Network carries a credential that signals more than completion of a skills curriculum. It signals immersion in this tradition, and engagement with a conceptual framework that has influenced the coaching field broadly for more than three decades.

The Coaching for Personal and Professional Mastery Program

Newfield Network's primary offering is the Coaching for Personal and Professional Mastery (CPPM) program, a nine-month, 100% virtual curriculum that serves as both personal development and a coach certification track.

Program structure

The CPPM runs in two halves. The first focuses on the student as learner and observer: examining how their own language patterns, emotional habits, and bodily dispositions shape what they perceive and what feels possible. The second half shifts to coaching practice, developing the skills to bring about that same kind of shift in others. Across the nine months, the program includes:

• Three virtual multi-day intensives (six-day opening conference, a mid-program coaching intensive, and a closing three-day intensive)

• Two 16-week modules with live interactive classes, peer study groups, and individual coaching hours

• One-on-one mentoring from Newfield Certified Mentor Coaches

• 50+ hours of logged coaching practice

Newfield Certified Coach credential

Graduates who complete the CPPM and log at least 50 coaching hours earn the Newfield Certified Coach (NCC®) designation (Newfield's proprietary credential) by submitting a recorded 40–60 minute coaching session for evaluation. The NCC is separate from, though complementary to, ICF credentials.

ICF accreditation

The CPPM is an ICF Level 2 Accredited Coach Education Program, which means its graduates are eligible to apply directly for the ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential without additional training hours, provided they meet ICF's experience and mentoring requirements. The program has been attended by participants from over 63 countries.

The ontological approach

What distinguishes Newfield from most coach training schools is its insistence that lasting change requires working at the level of the observer, the whole human being as a biological, linguistic, and emotional system, rather than only at the level of behavior or strategy.

Ontological coaching, as developed by Olalla and his colleagues, works across three interconnected domains:

• Language — the moves people make in conversation (assertions, assessments, requests, promises) that constitute their relationships and their identities. Coaches trained in this tradition learn to listen for the structure of a client's language, not just its content.

• Emotion and mood — treated not as byproducts of events but as predispositions for action. A person living in resignation sees different possibilities than one living in ambition; a shift in mood is therefore a shift in what is available to them.

• Body and somatic awareness — the understanding that posture, breathing, and physical habits are not separate from thought and feeling but are constitutive of a person's way of being in the world.

The theoretical lineage runs through the work of Fernando Flores (speech act theory applied to organizations), Humberto Maturana (the biology of cognition), and the broader continental philosophy tradition. Ontological Coaching® is a registered trademark of Newfield Network.

Where it sits in the coaching field

Newfield Network occupies a distinctive position among coach training organizations. Where schools aligned with the ICF core competencies tend to teach an empirical, skills-based model, largely derived from humanistic psychology and active listening traditions, Newfield's approach is grounded in philosophy of language and phenomenology. This makes it closer in spirit to schools such as New Ventures West (which also draws on Heidegger and somatic traditions) than to competency-driven programs like those offered by the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) or iPEC.

The school is boutique by design. It does not grant multiple credential tiers or broad program menus. Its single flagship program has remained substantially consistent across more than three decades. Around it sits a short continuing education catalogue: the Applied Somatic Coaching Certification Course and Lumina Process Level I, each carrying 40 ICF CCE units, and the on-demand From Freaking Out to High Functioning, carrying 10. That is a deliberate choice, reflecting a belief that depth, not breadth, produces genuine transformation. The 70,000+ figure cited by Newfield refers to people trained across all programs and contexts, not solely graduates of the CPPM certification track.

What this means for you

If you are considering working with a Newfield-certified coach, the credential reliably signals that the coach has spent nine months examining their own patterns of observation, meaning their habitual language, emotional dispositions, and somatic tendencies, before applying those same lenses to client work. Ontological coaching is particularly well-suited to clients who feel stuck in ways that skill-building or goal-setting alone hasn't resolved, and who are open to inquiry at the level of identity and worldview rather than tactics. It is a more philosophically demanding approach than many mainstream coaching styles. Ask the coach how they work with emotion and the body in a session, and what they mean by "the observer." The answer will tell you how they bring the methodology to life.