Presence-Based Coaching

Cultivating Self-Generative Leaders Through Mind, Body, and Heart

Doug Silsbee

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780470460160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Presence-Based Coaching offers coaches a hands-on resource for developing the capacities and skills needed to be reliably present in all situations, and shows how to let go of habitual —and often ineffective—ways of responding. As author and leadership expert Doug Silsbee explains, once a coach has mastered the inner moves of directing their own attention, they can work to develop the same capability in their clients. The ability of a coach to facilitate lasting, sustainable development in leaders rests on the presence a coach offers to the coach-client relationship.

PART ONE

Presence, Self-Generation, and the Role of Coaching

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.

Martha Graham

IT IS ESSENTIAL FOR ANYONE PRESUMING TO GUIDE others in a journey of change to be clear about the foundation on which they stand. We all have assumptions about what it means to be human, how we got the way we are, and how we change. Most of us have never questioned those assumptions, but they guide and restrict us whether we’re aware of them or not.

The leadership training and coaching fields have often missed this questioning of core assumptions and have predominantly focused on training leaders to work with what’s “out there.” By this, I mean that leaders are accustomed to thinking about how they can make decisions that optimize the arrangement of materials or functions or humans, provide information that will advance their goals, or communicate in a way that will produce desired results. We train leaders to act on their worlds as if they were in a complex chess game, and their role is to make sure that the pieces do what they are supposed to do.

What’s missing in this is the inner game. By separating ourselves from everything around us and treating people and other resources as chess pieces, we lose touch with the fundamental connectedness of all things. We forget that our inner state (meaning what we perceive, where our attention is placed, and how we experience ourselves in relation to the world around us) is central both to what information we can access and respond to, and to how we will be perceived by others.

Consider that the same leader, at two different times, responding to the same situation with exactly the same words, can produce radically different results. A primary determinant will be the inner state of the leader. For example, it is intuitively obvious to most of us that a rigid, controlling inner state is more likely to produce defensiveness or resistance in others. A relaxed, open, and optimistic inner state, and the same words, are much more likely to produce openness and acceptance.

Our inner state is not an accident. We can become familiar with it, eventually developing mastery in working with it. This mastery of our inner world is a requirement for our effectiveness and is key to accelerating our development as humans and as leaders. As coaches, this mastery is central to our ability to cultivate real and lasting change for our team members and our clients. (Given the challenges we face in the world, accelerated development of effective leaders should be of great interest to all of us.)

This inner state is fundamentally what Presence-Based Coaching is about. The most resourceful, ready, resilient inner state, available to all of us at every moment, we call presence.

CHAPTER 1

Presence

It’s not enough to simply understand intellectually that if we continue on the path we’re going on we’re going to fall short of our goals … we have to feel it. When we have a deep enough emotional experience of the impact of a behavior, our life changes permanently.

Kevin Cashman

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

Oprah Winfrey

I WAS COACHING A SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AT A LARGE financial institution with a business goal so radical and ambitious it had never before been tried anywhere. My client had been extraordinarily successful, often by sheer energy, will, and force of character. He was viewed as charismatic and inspirational, but was often criticized for being a one-man band.

The goal had been agreed to by my client and his president with little input from others. Wisely, my client recognized that being successful in this goal required a level of ownership and buy-in that his senior team was sorely lacking. He knew it had something to do with him, but no clue as to what to change in order to build this ownership. It seemed that the more he tried to inspire them to step up their game, the more passive they got.

In one of our early conversations, I was feeling a bit stuck. He was expressing his frustration at the unwillingness of a couple of his key players to step up to the plate and didn’t see how his leadership precluded their doing so. At one point in the conversation, I stopped in my tracks. Out of nowhere, I simply knew what to do. I experienced a sudden clarity, a sharper awareness. I suggested an experiment. I invited him to stand, to hold his body in an aggressive, forward-leaning stance, and feel what it was like to ask others for their ideas in that stance. Then I requested that he do the same while leaning back, in a receptive stance.

As he did so, the light of recognition came over his face. He sensed in that moment that his words were absolutely incongruous with the message that his body was sending. His words said, “I want your ideas.” His body said, more loudly than his words, “This is MY show, and I’m going to make it happen. It’s about me.” He saw in a moment what his people had been watching for years. In that moment, my client realized that he had to shift how he interacted with people. He felt, in the core of his being, that he was inauthentic in his requests and that something deep in him needed to change. That awareness came from the power of presence.

This was one of many experiences of presence I’ve had as an executive coach. It has become clear to me that presence is in fact central to what it means to coach others from a centered place; be an authentic leader; and have a full, rich, and satisfying life. Presence is a fundamental capacity, inherent in being human. Our work as leaders and coaches provides us a unique opportunity to discover this within ourselves.

PRESENCE DEMYSTIFIED

There is no magic here; in fact, I intend to begin by thoroughly demystifying presence. So here are some additional examples. By seeing the range of the territory, you can first understand what presence is and then explore what it can show you about leadership, development, and coaching.

• Jerry had decided to let go of a manager, whom he had recently hired and was not working out. Jerry was frustrated, and the manager was both unproductive and defensive. He had gone way out on a limb for this guy, against the recommendations of almost everyone else in the hiring process, so letting him go was personally difficult. Jerry was conflict averse and had a strong tendency to keep people around, even when they weren’t performing well. Confronting this situation also meant confronting his own habits. Jerry had a habitual tendency to tell himself stories to keep from having to hold difficult conversations. (“He just needs a little more time. I can work with him. He’ll get this moving.”)

In my work with Jerry, he spent considerable time in introspection, letting go of his frustration, recognizing his own contribution to the problem, and working with his emotional state. The story he was telling himself fell away, and it was instantly clear that it was time to take action. Then it became a question of how to hold the difficult conversation rather than what conversation needed to be held.

After this preparation, Jerry met with the manager. With calmness, caring, and candor, he explained that it wasn’t going to work. He took responsibility for his own miscalculation and acknowledged that it also was a very difficult situation for the other man, who had relocated his family from the opposite coast. The conversation actually came as a relief to the other, who had felt a bit like a drowning man with few options. They were able to work out an equitable solution with mutual respect.

• There’s a US Airways agent named Bob who frequently works behind the counter at the Asheville, North Carolina, airport, from which I frequently depart. As I enter the airport, preoccupied with my day, I scan for Bob, because I know that my day will be different if I find him. Bob is inevitably positive, even upbeat. He makes eye contact, addresses every passenger by name, and asks how people are doing (and he means it). I never fail to notice my own mood shift. After being around Bob, I always feel more alive, lighter somehow, and ready to enjoy my day. I’ve watched him for years and consistently notice how others lighten up around him. Bob is contagious.

• A few years ago, after filling my tank with gas at our local station, I pulled over to the side of the highway with a nagging suspicion that I hadn’t replaced the filler cap. I looked and was shocked to see the entire nozzle and gas hose hanging from the side of my car! I’m not proud of this, but my first instinct was to take the hose and throw it in the weeds and drive off. Then I remembered a time when a colleague did the same thing, and the entire gas station flooded with gasoline from the broken pump. I visualized my local BP station engulfed in hundred-foot-high sheets of flame, and the stakes suddenly went way up. I also realized that if I threw the hose in the bushes, I would never be able to look my kids in the eye again and tell them not to lie.

This was an existential moment, with a very clear choice between following my baser but nonetheless seductive instincts, or the values I’d always espoused. I experienced that familiar “deer in the headlights” paralysis, knowing that my values were on the line and that either choice had real consequences. I stood, not knowing what I was going to do. Then it became absolutely clear that there was no real choice. I loaded the twelve-foot, heavy, smelly hose in the passenger seat and headed back to face the music.

• Most of us remember starkly and clearly, wherever we lived in the world, the morning of September 11, 2001. (I was lingering over breakfast with my parents, who were about to leave to drive home three days after my daughter got married at our retreat center.) We each heard, or saw, the news at a particular moment. At some point soon after that moment, we had a realization that something fundamental had changed. How we each interpreted that change depended on many factors: where we live, our cultural assumptions and beliefs, our personality and orientation in life. But before our interpretation kicked in to provide our own meaning from those difficult events, the world seemed to stop. Our internal world shifted; we became aware of a larger truth, and we could never go back to being the same. This too was a moment of presence.

These examples provide wide-ranging examples of experiences involving presence. The commonalities may not yet be readily apparent. While you may not have named your own experiences of presence as such, we’ve all had them, and we’ve witnessed them in others. Some of yours may have been large and dramatic, like the events surrounding 9/11, while others may have been matter-of-fact and practical, like my client’s conversation with his manager.

Given this range, let’s explore what presence is, and how it’s relevant to your work as a team leader, coach, or executive.

EXERCISE 1.1.
Experiences of Presence

SO, WHAT IS PRESENCE?

Presence turns out to be a devilishly slippery and challenging word to define. Other writers have approached it in a variety of ways. As you look at the following descriptions from gifted observers, notice what reactions you have. Is this something you want more of? What strikes you about the definitions?

“Presence means bringing yourself when you coach: your values, passion, creativity, emotion, and discerning judgment—to any given moment with a client.”¹

“Presence … a deep listening; of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense.”²

“The ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others, in order to motivate and inspire them toward a desired outcome.”³

These descriptions generally describe what ...