The Story Behind ELEVATE

A partnership grounded in experience, integrity, and a shared commitment to human transformation

The ELEVATE partnership between Bill Tierney and Rachel Fink Parks emerged naturally out of two long, parallel paths, each shaped by decades of deep work with people and a shared desire to understand what truly creates lasting transformation. Even though their backgrounds were very different, they discovered they had been searching for the same missing piece. When they met, it quickly became clear that they could create something together that neither could create alone.

Rachel has spent more than twenty years at the center of coach development and transformational leadership. With a Master’s in Counseling Psychology and early work as a therapist and social service supervisor, she was drawn to the depth and possibility of ontological coaching. That calling led her to Accomplishment Coaching in 2001, 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 from 2004 to 2010, mentored emerging leaders, created curriculum, and guided the team that secured the program’s first International Coach Federation accreditation. She continues to serve as Leader Emeritus and is known for her expansive, unconditional presence that awakens self-compassion and self-belief in those she supports.

Over the next 15 years, Rachel explored a wide range of models for human change, but when she encountered Internal Family Systems (IFS) she felt an immediate sense of resonance. IFS unified everything she had learned about behavior change, emotional development, somatic experience, successful relationships, and spiritual growth. 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. Yet she began to notice that even the IFS trainings marketed to coaches were essentially therapy-based. There was no training designed for the scope, purpose, or power of coaching.

She knew the coaching world needed something different. She began searching for it.

That search led her to Bill.

Bill’s professional path could not have been 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. In 2011 he started coaching part-time, gradually developing tools to share the insights that were changing his own inner world. At the end of 2015 he devoted himself to coaching full time and six months later he graduated from Accomplishment Coaching’s one-year ICF-accredited Coaches’ Training Program. His focus was always on helping people uncover the inner mechanisms shaping their emotional and behavioral worlds.

When Bill began working with a therapist trained in IFS, everything shifted. Instead of challenging a client’s thoughts or beliefs directly, he saw how powerful it was to understand the parts inside a person that carry those beliefs. He experienced how these protective parts soften when they are met with compassion rather than pressure. IFS offered the depth and clarity he had been searching for. Bill went on to train extensively in the IFS model, becoming an IFS Certified Practitioner through the IFS Institute (www.IFS-Institute.com), serving as a Program Assistant in Institute trainings, completing the IFSCA Stepping Stones program, and training in two levels of Intimacy From the Inside Out (IFS for couples).

Bill also grew a significant presence in the Internal Family Systems community. He cofounded Parts Work Practice, a large practice group that meets weekly and is supported by more than a dozen IFS-trained practitioners. The community also includes a private Facebook group with more than 6,000 members. Bill leads multiple IFS-informed coaching groups, supervises practitioners, hosts the Parts Work Practice Conference, and cohosts The True You Podcast. He is also a prolific writer, having authored four IFS coaching workbooks and coauthored the forthcoming Parts Work Guidebook.

But behind these accomplishments was a gnawing awareness that something was missing in his 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 shifted. 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 transformational 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 is the training born from that calling. It’s the only program of its kind that truly integrates IFS within the framework of 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 in doing their inner work so they can hold a deeper, more expansive space for their clients to do the same.

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