The latest research shows that coaching presence is not about the coach alone. As presence is not a tool. Not even a tool of self … as it is not about your intention how to show up. While presence includes your capacity to listen actively and other all-time highs such as ‘attunement’, ‘cocooning’, and ‘being fully there’ for our client, at its core it is more than deepening and expanding your ‘self’. It is an entire network and crossroads of stimuli and needs, that navigate us and that we’d better navigate if we were to pretend that we are present.
While we espouse to have presence as a powerful way to focus on what is relevant, most of the time we have too much or not enough of it. Other times, we believe that presence is an end per se rather than a means to an end. The result is that we remain presence-less in our efforts to ‘be’ more and ‘do’ less.
When we are really present, we have a compass that urges us to:
- challenge our internal as well as external authority
- challenge paradigms and theories and models and processes in place
- challenges us to reconnect with our own senses to sync in with reality rather than take things for face value
- challenges our worldview and that means ‘trouble is brewing’