Before they ever met, Bill Tierney and Rachel Fink Parks each spent decades doing deep personal growth work and extensive coach training. They both built successful coaching practices and were known for making a profound impact in the lives of their clients. Independently, each found their way to Internal Family Systems, and it changed everything. Then they found each other, and everything changed again.

Rachel's journey began with a Master's in Counseling Psychology in 1993 and, after her early work as a therapist and social service supervisor, she was drawn to the depth and possibility of ontological coaching. That led her first to Landmark Education, where she first coached and led programs, then to Accomplishment Coaching, where she trained intensively and soon began coaching full time.

Her leadership within Accomplishment Coaching quickly grew. As the first Certified Program Leader, she led the flagship Coach's Training Program in San Diego from 2004 to 2010, mentored emerging leaders, created curriculum, and guided the team that secured the program's first International Coach Federation accreditation. There she became known for her insightful reflections and expansive presence that awakened self-compassion and self-belief in those she supported.

Over the next 15 years, Rachel continued to serve Accomplishment Coaching in the role of Leader Emeritus and trained in a wide variety of additional modalities that supported her and her clients to grow. But when she encountered Internal Family Systems (IFS), it was as if a door opened onto something she'd been circling for years without knowing it. IFS resonated so deeply because it brought together everything she already knew and organized it into a model that gave her clients far more than she'd been able to offer previously. She trained with the IFS Institute and the Institute for Healing and Awakening, as well as completing advanced study in areas like money, grief, and plant medicine integration. While utilizing IFS with her coaching clients she was challenged to integrate this impactful model with the other coaching tools in her toolbox. She realized that even the IFS trainings marketed to coaches were essentially the same as those offered to therapists. She could find no training designed to comprehensively train coaches to use IFS as a tool for the scope, purpose, and power of transformational coaching.

She continued searching for it. That search led her to Bill.

Bill's professional path could not have started out more different from Rachel's. Without a formal degree beyond a few college credits, he built his career through lived experience, deep inquiry, and the ongoing practice of what he was learning. He began working with The Work of Byron Katie in 2002 and drew deeply from his 12-step recovery, years of therapy, Landmark Education, and the many self-help books he rigorously applied to his own life. But then, in 2011, he started coaching others. In 2016 he graduated from the Accomplishment Coaching Coach’s Training Program in Seattle and in 2017 he started his IFS journey. Over the following years he took many IFS trainings, became an IFS Certified Practitioner, IFS Institute Program Assistant and Co-Founder of Parts Work Practice.

Yet behind this growing expertise was a gnawing awareness that something was missing in his formal IFS training. Like Rachel, he had been trained alongside therapists and shown how to use the IFS model in a therapy setting, yet no one had taught him how to apply it within coaching. He searched for a coaching-oriented framework, but the offerings felt ineffective or incomplete. So he created one himself. He brought more focus to the results his clients were producing and began using IFS as a tool within the structure of his coaching. Over the next four years he continued to evolve and refine this process before publishing The Compassionate Results Guidebook in 2025, formalizing a complete IFS-informed coaching protocol.

Bill's protocol turned out to be exactly what Rachel had been looking for.

When they met, the alignment was immediate. Both saw the same unmet need for coach training that integrated IFS and coaching. Rachel brought decades of coaching leadership, curriculum development, and mastery in training coaches. Bill brought extensive training and a deep, lived integration of IFS along with a fully developed coaching protocol rooted in the IFS model. Both felt called to offer other coaches access to this extraordinary methodology.

ELEVATE was born from that calling. Together, they created this unique program that comprehensively integrates IFS within the framework of transformational coaching. It provides coaches with a structure, protocol, and pathway to work with parts in a way that offers the most impactful coaching available. And it supports coaches to do their own inner work so they can hold a deeper, more expansive space for their clients to do the same.

ELEVATE is not just another training program. It's a revolutionary container that sets the standard for IFS-informed coaching. It's where seasoned coaches develop into the most effective practitioners in the coaching profession today.