How to Be Present in Your Body: Powerful Coaching Techniques
Coaching presence is the ability to be aware of the present moment. This type of presence creates an organic, spontaneous, and supportive relationship not only with the client, but with oneself and one’s own body.
As a student of Ideal Coaching Global, you can and will learn to become a coach. First and foremost, we offer our students the opportunity to become more compassionate with themselves, to be relaxed in their bodies and their minds. This allows students of ontology to design the life they desire. Our students become open, flexible, and confident, not only as coaches, but in their everyday lives and as citizens of our world.
In a word, they learn presence. So why is presence worth learning?
When you are present, mindfulness takes center stage.
Major universities offer 3-day courses on mindfulness. Late last year a popular magazine devoted an entire issue to this topic. Online courses are available with long-time, well-respected practitioners in this discipline. We are encouraged to eat mindfully, parent mindfully, and even save the planet with our mindfulness.
The claims and virtues of mindfulness are not to be ignored– more peace and more compassion come from being present. Long-time practitioners and teachers alike claim mindfulness creates a body that is resilient and generates wise, mature decisions and actions.
Writings and teachings by mindful ‘experts’ are descriptive, “You are good when you are one with yourself. Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil. For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house,” Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet.
Thich Nhat Hanh: “Keep your attention focused on the work, be alert and ready to handle ably and intelligently any situation which may arise– this is mindfulness. [Mindfulness] calls back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore[s] it to wholeness so we can live each minute of life.”
Presence also has its champions. In 2004 Bella Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar wrote, Leadership Presence. In the book, they claim that presence is, “The ability to truly connect with the thoughts and feelings of others, to motivate and inspire them towards their desired goals.”
Doug Silsbee writes that “[Mindfulness] is a state of consciousness at a time, characterized by a felt experience of connection without time and a greater truth.” (Presence-Based Coaching: Cultivating Self-Generative Leaders Through Mind, Body and Heart, 2008.)
Former ICF President, Elianne Fierro; “With practice we become masters of our internal states and the experience of presence is more accessible. As leaders, our quality of presence is essential to the effectiveness of our profession. The presence engenders creativity, flexibility, authenticity and resilience.”
There is a consistent theme from both camps– connection, compassion, master of our internal states, creativity, flexibility, resilience.
Something else is also touched on– practice, felt experience of connection, our internal state, the creation of a new, different body (or Self).
Presence, be it in coaching or with a loved one, begins with one body– yours. Your felt experience of your connection to yourself. Knowing the state of your internal state. Recognizing how your current ‘shape’ or your emotional tendencies define your world. To become an effective listener, to inspire and to lead others, requires a body that firstly knows itself.
How do you practice presence?
At Ideal Coaching Global, we say we are what we practice and that our life is a result of our practices. We practice letting our emotions overcome us, we practice interrupting others, we practice driving our children to events. We also practice taking care of our needs– sometimes well and other times not so well. We become our practices, consciously or not. Our practices define and shape our bodies and hence; our lives.
Once we become aware, we can choose. How do we begin to observe our individual and inherited practices? How can we design new practices aligned with our values, ethics, care and commitments?
Are you allowing your body, and yourself, to evolve by giving up old patterns and habits that no longer support the person you desire to become? Or are you continuing to entrench ways of being that no longer support you and what you care about?
Perhaps your body generates your language and your language generates your practices and hence your world. Explore your mind-body connection and how your world was created with master coaches at Ideal Coaching Global. Learn more by clicking here.
© 2017, Ideal Coaching Global, Merle McKinley, PCC (Ideal Coaching Global’s Senior Staff Coach)
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