Presence in coaching

This evening I had the great pleasure of attending the following workshop with Tunde Erdos and Maureen Owen.  

Integrative Coaching Presence: A needs exchange through somatic responsiveness in dialogue.

Presence is defined as the capacity to spontaneously respond to others’ needs at any given moment. This capacity shows in your body before you even utter a word. The body comes before the brain.

We all tend to have a default setting about money, love, work, and presence, which limits our potential to have healthy relationships. While we think we are present, we may have too much or not enough of it. The result is our presence-less-ness as we miss seeing what is relevant in our interactions at any given moment.

In this workshop, we will explore two obstacles to a presence in coaching as a growth intervention. We will reflect on:
– the consequences of our presence-less-ness in our default setting
– our presence-ness integrating the I, Other, and We in coaching

The workshop is based on a recently conducted large-scale international coaching research that investigated 184 coach-client pairs.

So what?

Initially, I was slightly overwhelmed by the content, in that I wasn't quite sure what was going on. It seemed like a bit of an airy-fairy session. I'm so glad I stuck it out because further into the workshop, I was pleasantly surprised by how much sense Tunde was making. Perhaps the stand-out statement for me was that 'everyone has a need'. Being present is about the 'I' too, in that you have to understand what you are wanting from the coaching relationship e.g. I want to work on my questions, I want to get through the format etc. Tunde shared an example that resonated with me so much, when coaching a client the story sounded familiar to one she had heard previously she made a connection and remembered a powerful question that was asked in the session, so she used it (her words were 'dumped' it) in the coaching conversation she was having and the client found it overwhelming. Might presence be more about being in tune with your client in the coaching dance?