Here and now presence in coaching and leadership

Much has already been said about professional coach presence, deep listening skills, a receptive posture, a totally inclusive systemic attitude, etc.?

To be attentively present, one obviously first has to be reasonably conscious.?If indeed one has passed out or is more or less unconscious, it would be difficult to be really present or profoundly receptive both to internal and external stimuli. Consequently, the quality or depth of our general consciousness is the first necessary condition by which we begin to be present to the here-and-now within us and with others around us.

To be even more present to our environment, the next step is to clearly distinguish between the raw information we initially receive through our six senses, and the attention we pay to our own internal reactions to this information.? When external information passes through our emotional, mental and action-oriented filters, we actually react to perceived external stimuli with personal interpretation.? Our reactions and interpretations consequently act as a secondary internal information source, that may often veil the primary stimuli originally received through our senses.? Note our reactions do not feed on our primary sensitivity but result from individual processing, filtering, preferences, judgments and adjustments.?Our reactions are personally distilled consequences of what each person perceives, each in their own way.

Take for example a perceived event that would provoke a witness’s panic fear, a flight?reaction followed by an active search for means to ensure future protection.? Considering that an immediately neighboring onlooker could react totally differently to the same original situation, for example with humor and laughter, individual reactions to a single perceived event are totally personal and interpretative.? These personal reactions all rest on the perceiving individual?’s history, past experience, personality, culture, etc.? Much more so than on the nature of the triggering external event to which the reactions apparently respond.? As such, they are internally manufactured.

• Much finer sensitivity to information directly originating from our six senses can doubtlessly allow us to perceive external events as they are, at a pin’s drop, here-and-now, before reacting with our emotions, actions, or mental processing.

Consequently, in order to develop a deeper systemic-coaching presence, we need to re-learn how to be hyper-conscious of what we first perceive through our six primary senses, before engaging in our own internal thoughts, emotions and drive for action.

Such information received through our six senses directly feed our ??here-and-now?? presence. This is before they invite us to be the hostages of our personal thinking, feeling and behavioral reactions.? Our six primary senses more directly connect us to others and our larger environment’s complexity.?

Most often, however, our own emotions, thoughts and actions will rapidly seize information from our senses to then feed us with self-confirmed interpretations. These will rapidly influence our judgmental, behavioral, linguistic, relational reactions, etc.? Thereafter, our presence to our own emotions, reactions and thoughts actually makes each of us as managers, coaches or humans beings, particularly present to our own inner selves.? Then, we are not directly and profoundly present to the immediate environment, unfiltered by personal and cultural interpretation.? Over a much larger here-and-now permanently interacting with the emerging flow of the larger environment, we then mostly favor the reality of our own personal internal experience.?

Note that listening to one’s own emotions, thoughts and actions or to our personal?interpretations of reality may be useful.?However, this source of information is clearly restricted to one’s personal experience and ambitions, to one’s own acquired behavior, to one’s own specific education and training,?and to all that constitutes one’s singular identity.? Strictly speaking, these interpretations are not inclusive of the larger environment, a more widely shared form of?here-and-now.

OUR SENSES

In order to develop a deeper, more inclusive here-and-now presence, systemic coaches professionally exercise to acquire a fine awareness of what each or their senses continuously communicates, all the time and just-in-time.??Such training is not only based on learning coaching active-listening skills.??Such intense training ensures the deep development of a raw, vulnerable hyper-sensitivity in one’s way of being present to life, all the time, and everywhere, the universal systemic complement on which rests a more local here and now.????

Such a sensory focus concerns here-and-now presence to a continuous flow constantly emerging, and serving as the true vehicle of human awareness.?When we are directly present through our senses, through the unfiltered hypersensitivity of all that is happening now, all the time on the edge of becoming, then we are true systemic coaches.?

The intense quality of such deep here-and-now presence probably explains why many embark on a journey to develop as coaches, managers, parents and spouses through meditation, contemplation, personal development and therapy, art such as poetry and music, writing, etc.? Through their six primary senses, those simply aim to develop a fundamentally unfiltered, primary presence to their larger environments.?They yearn to develop an intimate, sensually-connected quality of existence, in constant, open interaction with universal life in themselves.?They know this inclusive awareness will be always of use, no matter their trade, the focus of their personal or professional lives.

As far as the realm of conscience and presence is concerned, much has been written about ultra sensitive or hypersensitive people.?On the subject, it is useful to consider that all life forms are naturally hypersensitive.?In intimate and vital interaction within complex environments, all members of the plant and animal kingdoms are by definitions hypersensitive to all their surroundings.?

• To be convinced, just profoundly observe, with no intention whatsoever, any living entity for just a few hours.?Obviously, such deep systemic presence is equally available to all of us human beings.
• To be convinced, just attentively observe how the newly born and truly innocent subjects are constantly captivated by all that may be happening around them. Usually just beyond the conscience of most knowledgeable surrounding adults.?Anyone can indeed deeply learn by just observing life for a few hours.?

Before going through an educative process, structuring acculturation, collective socialization and theoretical programming, most children display how they perceive through all their primary senses in a constantly actualized here-and-now form of existence.?Children epitomize the original here-and-now sponge.? This is the type of hypersensitivity we adults, coaches or systemic beings yearn to recover, should we really desire to reconnect with a more universal, deeply essential here-and-now.?

Two complementary learning strategies are necessary to reconnect with our original animal awareness, our primary sensitivity or primal connection to the amazing complexity of our external world, just out there at hand’s reach.

• We first need to unlearn the over-rated importance we give to information we receive through such personal filters as emotions, behaviors and thoughts,
• We then need to learn to value the raw information received as is, through our six senses, without any mental processing, emotional surge or drive to action.

If we truly want to develop an authentic here-and-now presence as systemic coaches, we need to embark on an intensive, condensed, methodical, practical, behavioral and sustained sensory-training program.?Such a program should be long enough to deeply anchor new sensory habits.???In a neuro-plastic frame of reference, one habitually mentions a minimum of two-hours of daily practice, for thirty consecutive days.?A good progression in intensity could cover three months. Without this intense learning discipline, no use wishing for measurable and sustainable evolution.?

• Caution:? Such a learning journey is totally engaging, to the point of being physically, psychologically and existentially disruptive.?It first realigns synapses, and then in time, through sustained retro-active reinforcement, tends to provoke more permanent epi-genetic mutation.

Engaging in such a deep sensory transformational process has profound consequences.??Return on such an investment include a disruptive questioning of all an individual’s preexisting thinking, emotional and behavioral patterns.?Far beyond the simple acquisition of communication tools and behavioral skills, this deep-learning process essentially leads to existential rewiring.?This is how, for systemic coaches and others, the development of a profoundly new?here-and-now presence becomes totally transformational. Expect a total remodeling of one’s worldview or life paradigm, a personal expanded awareness of a larger, systemically connected environment, a new, intimate inner resonance synchronous with much larger, more complex, networked contexts.?In short, expect direct access to a much more inclusive personal universe.

SENSORY EXPANSION

Note that a methodical sharpening of our six primary senses opens access to an incredibly extended sensory reach, each sense existing in intimate interaction with the five others.?We thus discover there are deep connections between our primary senses and to a whole entwined network of extended sensory skills.?

• Take for instance common business sense or entrepreneurial flair for opportunities, intimately connected to our animal sense of smell, so naturally deployed by carnivorous trackers and hunters, and symbolically by entrepreneurs. This primary sense drives those who relentlessly strategize and deploy to achieve targeted preys or desired outcomes.?Often, more than possessing the prey, their fundamental motivation is fueled by the hunt.?Our sense of smell is thus the most likely to serve our urge to achieve.???
• Visualize also how visionaries and seers seek to build future predictability, much beyond their immediate visual horizon. This immediate vision and longer-term visioning sense is motivated by the need for order displayed by many expertise-driven managers. It is accompanied by an array of organizational, structuring, modeling qualities, all intentionally deployed to materialize a precise visually-anticipated form. Our sense of vision thus extends into?our capacity to take control of our present and model our future.
• Get a hold also, of the generous motivation to give or transmit displayed by teachers, artists, writers, and more . The urge to give is deployed by our hands that can touch hearts and souls to the point of healing, and reaches much farther out with all who know how to deeply touch others through music, sculpture, writing and other manual extensions, regardless of physical distance and time.?Thus our immediate sense of touch is intimately linked to our extended capacity to transmit.
• Hear also how well-developed audition, a sense so central in coaching relationships, comes laden with a very fine capacity to distinguish or discriminate right from wrong, truth from illusion.?Our ear can indeed perceive whatever most appropriately fits in a played symphony as much as whatever specific instrument may incoherently disturb the whole. Audition skills help us precisely discern discrepancies and harmoniously tune into our environments.?It should be no surprise the sense of audition extends outwards into our capacity to pertinently develop systemic harmony in our lives and relationships with others.
• Savor also the power of energetic resonances that connect individuals of the same taste, when these align and channel to the point of merging their deeper beings. From there on, their intimate connection or soul communion will prove to instantly reach beyond distance.? Oftentimes, between such blessed connected beings, twins of sorts, the extended sense of taste borders on telepathy, merging across large distance apparently distinct individual presences.
• Catch also what more occasional internal or bodily indicators attempt to signal, when sudden gut feelings and other sensations?in our flesh, nerves, muscles, bones and organs suddenly cry to attract our undivided attention. Much like antennas connected to wider environmental resonances, our bodies also know how to sense the universe and then alert us of pending unusual upsurges and existential threats. Such physical sensations convey synthetic premonitions to alert that something will emerge out of our environment, possibly to vitally affect us. Our physical sensations are thus often linked to their subtle extension, our intuitions.?

If this last intuitive capacity is physically felt, it is most probably networked into all our other primary and extended senses, ideally all well-developed and operating together as a whole coherent system.??Consequently, by exacerbating a deeper awareness of all information directly received by each of our primary senses and their systemic information network, we dramatically increase our capacity to recognize and relate with complex interactive patterns. These intricate forms reveal the intimate connections between our apparently individual existences and our much larger universal environment much more than all of our interpretative thoughts, emotions, and desire to act can ever tell us.?

To be sure, the latter are sometimes useful.?They give clear indications of interpretations, originating from various personal and collective heritages. In parallel, however, our much more inclusive, systemic network of primary senses are there to connect us with our environments in a form of augmented reality, of a much larger, strategic dimension, inclusive of a constantly emerging universe.??That is how a systemic here-and-now presence can exist in permanent, intimate interaction with others and our surrounding universe.

On an evolutionary level, after longs historical periods marked by man's excessive reasoning, emoting and obsession with action, all driven by biased personal and collective interpretations, our hopeful next step may be to rest our criteria for human identity on whatever reality emerges from deeper connections to our six senses and extended sensory network.

_______________

To practice profound presence to your primary senses and their extensions, and acquire professional coaching skills, enroll in Metasysteme Coaching 's Systemic Coaching?Fundamentals, a very practical, intensive, nine-day, deep-coaching, community-learning adventure. Click here ?for information, and do not hesitate to Call us

To consult an article presenting the Systemic Coaching book collection available on AMAZON and KINDLE books, Click here .