Coaching is a Work-in-Progress

Gaurav: There are times when I am so much cluttered with my own internal conversation that I feel it actually hampers my clarity, and not being able to be fully present for the other person. How can I hold that space where my being is fully in alignment with the conversation that I’m having?

Tracy: We are also human beings, we are just as prone to the complexity, to the fear, the confusion, the agitation, the bias, all of those things that our clients are. Just because we are coaches, it doesn’t mean that we have elevated ourselves to another level that we are prone to human responses and feelings. So, I think of this as being a work in progress, you know, this is not something that is a switch.

We are in that work-in-progress. And like our clients, there will be days or periods in our life, when that mindset is hard for us to access because we have things troubling us, we have a lot going on in our world. There are times when perhaps as coaches, we probably would be better not to coach other people because our capacity to be truly present for them is sufficiently impeded that we cannot give them the fullness of the benefit of the work. Here, we need to step back. So, we may even have a responsibility to say no to that conversation if we feel that we cannot sufficiently access enough of that mindset. But it is important that we are self-aware, which is one of the other things, of course, that comes out in the competency is how self-aware are we? Because in order to bring that being, we have to constantly try to learn about ourselves, not just our clients, we are part of the vehicle of the process of coaching.

Ingredients of presence

Gaurav: Would it be a fair assumption to make that the more self-aware you are of yourself, the more present you would be in a coaching conversation?

Tracy: There are more ingredients of presence than just self-awareness. But if I’m not self-aware, I think my ability to be truly present with a client is going to be impeded. So, self-awareness is pivotal. To me, being able to access myself, which is then coming into that state of presence with somebody else. And if I’m in my own state is out of my consciousness.

If I oversimplifying this, my mind with your question immediately goes to three elements. One is myself. So, part of my presence is my self-awareness. And what I’m bringing in is another part of my presence. It’s not just, giving a one-way presentation to someone, this is an interaction a transaction, or dialogue between us. So, I think part of my presence is then not self-awareness, but awareness about my client. And then the third place that I go, is more the space. And the context is when I’m here, and you’re here, what, what then is created around us, what is the space then that we evoke, that we create together? And there’s probably then a fourth, which is what’s outside of us? What’s the context? You know, that’s behind the client, around the client? Or what’s the context, that’s behind or around me? And it could probably go on, you know, I mean, there are layers aren’t there? And, and I’m not saying that as a coach, I have to be, you know, so omni-focused. I’m aware of every single dynamic because that might be quite overwhelming, I’m sure. But at least that I’m conscious that it’s there that I’m aware that those dynamics are happening, and to just be alert to that, to be sensitive to that, and to consider how might that be affecting the conversation that we’re having.