A structured certification for practitioners who want to read the assessment, run the methodology, and earn a credential that says they actually know what they are doing.
The Stronghold Certified Practitioner program trains you to use the Stronghold assessment with real clients. It is built for licensed clinicians, Christian counselors, pastoral counselors, pastoral ministers, and coaches who want a structured, scope-respecting way to integrate the platform into their practice.
The credential signals to your clients that you have read your own assessment, walked through your own reports, completed structured training on every platform surface, and passed the quizzes that go with it.
Stronghold is a coaching and screening platform, not a diagnostic tool and not a substitute for clinical care. The certification is a competency credential on the platform, not a license to practice anything else. The training makes this distinction unmistakable.
Core is required for every practitioner. Couples and Business are optional specializations that unlock after Core. All three are included with your enrollment.
The foundation every Stronghold practitioner needs. Scope of practice, the assessment engine, reading the report stack, running the platform, methodology, legal and ethics, cert mechanics.
Deep work on couples coaching. The Couples Layer questions, dual personality stacks, compatibility and friction reports, dual-practitioner workflows, the Marriage Crisis Cluster, pre-marital coaching.
Coaching founders. The Business Owner 360 module, the 11 business composites, founder identity fusion, delegation experiments, the cost dimensions, exit readiness and succession.
One payment. No subscription. Your certification, all three training tracks, and Stronghold Coach — the practitioner platform and CRM — in a single bundle, plus 10 client assessments to start selling with on day one.
Everything is included — there are no tiers to pick and no monthly platform fee. Full payment terms are in our Terms of Service.
Need a team or organization plan? Mention it in your application and we will tailor it.
Secure checkout by Stripe. Right after payment you'll get an email to set your password and log in to your practitioner dashboard.
Prefer to talk first, or have questions about fit? Apply below and we'll respond within two business days.
The platform and CRM every plan includes. The tool you'll actually run your practice on, at stronghold.coach.
Open the live demo and click through it →
Every client's assessment, history, session notes, documents, and timeline in one place. With safety alerts and referral tracking when something needs licensed care, and access restricted at the database level so you only ever see your own clients.
Clients book sessions on your calendar; reminders adapt to how the session actually happens. A map link in person, a join link on video. Calendar invites show a first name and last initial only.
Reads each client's results before you do. Session prep briefs, plan recommendations, pattern summaries. Bound by hard conduct rules and never in front of your judgment.
Reports generate from a client's answers and land in your dashboard. The same six named reports and 274-measure depth shown in the samples, ready to read together.
Client emails carry your logo, your colors, your business name, written in your voice. And replies go to your inbox, not a no-reply address.
Connect your Gmail and the Email Center lives inside the CRM. Client mail sent and received in one place, threaded to the client record, and every reply lands in your real inbox.
Your own landing page with your services and working Buy buttons, backed by Stripe checkout. A purchase creates the client, issues their assessment codes, and drops them into your pipeline automatically.
Package a client's results into a Clarity Plan, then let the platform draft a weekly coaching brief ahead of each send. You approve, it emails on schedule. Your client gets a steady drumbeat between sessions.
An independent oversight layer monitors system health, AI conduct, and scoring integrity around the clock. And reports to a human. Read The Stronghold Standard.
Six steps from application to certified.
Fill out a brief application. We ask about your credentials, your practice context, which tracks interest you, and why you want to do this work. Five minutes.
Before you coach anyone through it, you take it. The full thing: set aside about an hour, and you can pause and resume. This is the most important step in the program: every time you later read a client's pattern, you will remember reading your own.
Your reports and Coaching Brief generate, and Macy. The platform's AI co-pilot. Walks you through them in a guided conversation. You see exactly what your future clients will see.
An automated review of your results. If something acute surfaces, we ask you to address it first, not because you are not welcome, but because practicing while in acute crisis is unsafe. Practitioners with lived experience are explicitly welcomed; the check is for crisis, not for friction.
Your enrollment activates and the platform unlocks. Core training begins. You can take the Couples and Business specializations once Core is complete.
Complete your training tracks and pass the module quizzes. Then you get 30 minutes one-on-one with Dr. Hines himself to talk through your practice and how you'll run Stronghold in it. Your credential is issued, and you choose whether to be listed in the practitioner directory clients search.
You're also joining a platform that holds itself to a published trust and safety protocol. Independent AI oversight, hard conduct rules for the AI you'll work with, database-level privacy for your clients, and a tamper-evident incident record. Read The Stronghold Standard before you apply: your clients' trust is built on it.
Five minutes. We respond within two business days.
Already certified? Log in to your practitioner portal →