TOOLBOXES: The Essential Art of Coaching Presence,
Attentive Presence: The first and last Systemic Coaching Competency

This article is an extensive introduction to the mastery of systemic coaching.  It aims to define the specific characteristics of a truly systemic coaching posture and the role it serves in a systemic coaching process.  To introduce this complex subject, the text will first focus on one of the most difficult skills for coaches in general and for apprentice systemic coaches in particular: that of listening with profound attentive and transparent presence, without intention.

The competency of attentive presence can be considered the single foundational skill in systemic coaching.  It is central in transforming a very short coaching sequence into an extraordinarily complete client and coach growth experience.  Profound presence is absolutely indispensible to create the conditions that permit masterful emerging changes in client and coach perspective.

Indeed, whenever a coaching session or sequence does not rest on an open, deep, respectful and attentive presence and focused listening, powerful questions loose their edge, contracts and agreements veer off track, seemingly effective action plans get bogged down and client progression becomes laborious.  Without deep, focused attentive presence, all the other coaching skills invariably loose their potential power.  Inversely, when coaching presence really rests on deep listening and true attention without intention, a reasonably competent coach can rapidly and almost automatically help clients achieve masterful if not magical results.

A word of caution on the text below is however necessary.  The concepts of attentive presence and listening are neither easy to define nor to describe.  Words do not readily convey the subtleties of systemic coaching: this especially goes for the precise characteristics of masterful listening. 

In fact, words are most often used as noise to disturb silence and disrupt the intimacy of true presence to oneself and to others. 

Language is extensively used to fill the spaces that may otherwise lead to the deeper, more attentive presence of being.  Attentive listening, on the other hand, grows roots in shared silence, and deep presence will easily fill apparently empty volumes with shared warmth and acceptance and truly sustainable personal development.

Consequently, writing an article on attentive presence through deep listening is a truly paradoxical adventure.  One would better be silent and let the reader reflect, explore and expand in the open and fertile space provided by a blank page.  That would be the one most congruent way to help consider that only silence can permit the understanding of attentive presence and listening, and consequently of systemic coaching. Unfortunately, blank pages generally face the writer, not the reader.

As a matter for fact and to suggest useful homework, once this article is put aside and on a regular basis, the reader is invited to indulge in long spells of attentive silence.

Note that this text serves as an introduction to the numerous other Toolbox articles presented on this website.  These subsequent articles present extensive and very practical sets of professional coaching tools, techniques, skills, and know-how.  Needless to say, all these other very useful behavioral competencies first and fundamentally rest on a coach’s capacity to be transparent, to listen, to attentively be fully present and to have no intention on the client or on client results.  This deep coaching presence rests on a way of being.  Without the type of coach presence to self and clients developed below, all the other coach skills presented on this website can only superficially be considered, and will not lead to masterful systemic coaching.  

To summarize, rather than centering on how to do coaching, the question approached below is focused how to truly be a masterful coach.  This article will attempt to demonstrate that the quality of simple, profound attentive presence can be the main if not the sole competency conducive to the type of client and coach change of perspective systemic coaching claims to accompany.

Measure that in most professional coach communities, listening is one of the least publicized coaching skills.  It is rarely the key subject in advanced theory and practice-related articles. It is only occasionally the central focus of deliveries by keynote speakers in major conferences.  On the other hand, asking powerful questions, restating or reformulating with precision, clarifying client agreements and expected outcomes, co-designing effective and very structured action plans, etc. are coaching concepts that attract much more attention.  In essence, note that they all are much more active competencies. They consist in doing and giving.  Such active skills are commonly much more valued.  For one, they more easily serve to reinforce coach social and professional identity.  Unfortunately, this reinforcement is generally at the expense of a simple, patient, humble and respectful listening coach presence that would permit a much more profound context for emerging client development.

Consequently, listening with attentive presence fundamentally rests on a coach way of being, not of doing.  It is generally perceived as an inactive or passive skill.  Associated by beginning coaches and clients with just doing nothing, listening is definitely not a very sexy concept. 

In training sessions dedicated to learning how to coach, one can often observe that young apprentices to the profession consider that they naturally know how to listen.  What indeed could be simpler and more inbred a skill than knowing how to listen to another in order to respond intelligently?  All through our different phases of life, we have all been taught how to listen to our parents, to our teachers, to our bosses, to our clients, to our partners, and then to our children.

Some participants in coach training are so certain of their competency in the field of listening that they may attempt to negotiate the possibility of skipping the few training sequences allocated to developing that skill.  They want to rapidly focus on more serious workshops dedicated to powerful questioning, establishing solid contracts and agreements, designing effective action plans.  For these participants, those are the truly important skills that compose the essential core of what the coaching profession has to offer.  For them, those are the competencies that really define the specific originality of the coaching process.

Other participants already trained in psychological or humanist techniques such as NLP, TA, Gestalt therapy, Jungian analysis or coming from the corporate environment also consider that for them, the arts of attentive presence and profound listening holds no secrets.  No need to waste time to revisit such obvious and commonly practiced skills.  They wish to quickly move on to what really differentiates coaching from other more traditional therapeutic and consulting approaches and communication theories. 

For these professionals, coaching may merely be another technique to accompany clients towards health and success.  They often perceive that coaching follows existing tracks previously laid out on the existing market.  For them, the foundation of coaching is the same as that of all other psychological and communication approaches.  They may accept that a few behavioral techniques specific to coaching sometimes add a measurable difference, but that's about it.

As a consequence, rather than considering that coaching is a fundamentally new and original field, these professionals come to coaching simply expecting to add a few secondary practical skills to their already established frame of reference.  Their aim is merely to add a few more useful options to their established professional vehicle, a few new tools to boost their clearly defined career development.

They cannot imagine that the main new profession of the third millenary could in fact help them totally reconsider their acquired and deeply rooted personal and professional foundations, that coaching could help them much more fundementally change who they are.

If listening skills for coaches are different from those of other professionals, it is because they subtly and directly concern the frame of reference of coaching.  Indeed, coaching is an approach that rests on a number of fundamental, almost existential win-win positions.

• First, in coaching, the client is a priori considered as a unique, intelligent, capable, powerful, honest, and motivated being.  The sole fact that clients initially collaborate with a coach to improve their personal or professional context is an obvious proof of motivation and responsibility.
• Secondly, coaching clients are a priori considered as very well informed as far as their issues are concerned.  Each client indeed has a complete and intimate knowledge of personal projects, goals, problems, vision and ambitions.  

These two principles are foundational to any coaching process. 

Consequently, a coach can consider that detailed listening and analysis of a client’s words, focused on the description of the subject of his or her concerns is of very little benefit for either the coach or the client.

In fact, the detailed description of any situation already known to any client can only reinforce that client’s acquired frame of reference and inventoried perspectives. When a client calls on a coach, it is precisely because that personal acquired frame of reference and those inventoried perspectives have not led to any positive outcome.  Consequently, one can assume that accompanying clients on an already beaten track that has been studied and revisited numerous times will not be likely to bring extraordinarily new solutions. Unless of course, one considers that the client is not informed.

For a coach, what indeed could be the use of accompanying a client up the same street that the latter has explored time and again to the point of calling on another party, specifically to get out of that dead end?

To be sure, some clients may lack knowledge, competencies or information.  Some may not have all the needed means to alone understand an issue or may not have the technical and intellectual capacities to achieve an ambition.  Those clients could surely use the services of a trainer, an expert or a specialist, but would not need (only) the competencies of a coach.

When a client calls on a coach, it is principally to be accompanied off her known and beaten tracks, to be lured off his mental freeways, to be aspired out of her usual perspectives and be provoked out of the limits of his routines. To be effective, a coach’s listening skills needs to hear what the client is not saying, to imagine the growing edge of his development patterns, to feel the constraints of her beliefs and habits, to perceive the outer limits of the client’s perception of reality. 

This original listening around what the client is saying is what is suggested when it is affirmed that a coach listens to the form of a client’s dialogue, rather than to its content.  Through attentive presence to the external boundaries of the field explored by the client, beyond the implicit frame of reference around the client’s words, focusing on the underlying architecture that supports the client’s existence, a coach can ultimately accompany the relationship to new and unforeseen realms and possibilities.

Consequently, one can often observe that a coaching process rests on a subtle and creative interactive game.

• On the one hand and very naturally, clients attempt to expose the details of their issues, the context of their projects in order to explain to their coach why and how they get stuck in virtual corners, and illusionary blind alleys.  Obviously, if coaches follow these clients too closely in their descriptive process, they will quickly experience feeling stuck a very similar exit-free perimeter.
• On the other hand, coaches listen around, above and below client descriptions, imagining them in different landscapes otherwise rich in open variables, hidden options and opportunities.  They avoid focusing their attention on the content of client descriptions that have already provided less than satisfactory outcomes.

This type of listening skill is obviously not that of a competent expert, pointedly competent in the defined field of client preoccupations as those initially are defined.  This particular form of attentive presence attempts to imagine clients within a much larger, global or universal context.  This listening skill that we propose to explore more deeply will permit the emergence of a much more ambitious and unexpected outcome.  In order to illustrate, consider the following coaching situation.

• EXAMPLE:  After immigrating to a far-off country for the larger part of his adult life, a client decides to return to his region of origin.  Rapidly, he faces intense adaptation difficulties, especially with his family that had remained under the heavy influence of a very homogeneous and fundamentally traditional culture.  This client calls on a coach to be accompanied in the development of a more satisfactory relationship with his parents.  The coach listens to the description of the client issue and stays attentive to the larger client context.

The client defines his personal evolution abroad as the principal factor at the origin of his relational difficulties with his relatives.  Totally immersed within a very different culture for much too long, he had totally changed and cannot adapt back to fit into his original context.  The facts he relates help him explain the gap between his frame of reference and that of his parents and friends.  According to the client, his lengthy stay in a far-off land and in a very liberal culture has permanently changed his outlook on life.  There is no returning to his previous self, and that impossibility provokes the clash with his parents.  Indeed, if one follows that chain of thought, there is not much one can do.

It is however possible to imagine a relatively different situation to reposition the relationship between the client and his family.  It is conceivable, for example that the client had in fact left his country because of a pre-existing gap between the life he wanted to live and the one his original environment and tradition reserved him.  To develop in the way he wished to grow, the client may have decided to leave and put a great distance between himself and his family burdened by heavy traditions.  Consequently, what the client currently perceives as a problem could very well have been, years ago, a very creative youthful solution.

If what the client defines as a problem, was in fact a solution, what was the original problem, and what could be other solutions?

The type of logic conveyed by this question could both create confusion and be conducive to a general reorganization of the mental patterns of all the partners in the client environment.  Granted, this type of reframing strategy has value only if it helps the client reconsider his situation with a completely different perspective, and then proceed to design original satisfactory solutions to the present situation.  The sole purpose of this illustration here is to illustrate the type of unexpected directions masterful listening can help unveil.

Systemic coaching listening is a skill that aims to expand client frame of reference as it is conveyed through client dialogue.  It focuses on a landscape, a context and issues that are much larger and deeper than the ones proposed by the initial client perspective.

For the moment, simply consider that the listening skill resting on attentive presence is not so much focused on the immediate content elaborated by a client. The coach attempts to simply be present and attentive both to he client and to the more general frame of reference conveyed, within which the client positions a problem or issue. To implement this specific type of listening skill, it is useful for a coach to very simply be attentively present much more than to display numerous other behavioral and linguistic competencies.  It simply concerns a very attentive way of being in the presence of one’s self and of others.

Consequently, to effectively listen and accompany clients, coaches need neither to analyze nor to understand the detailed content of their concerns. This affirmation may seem paradoxical.  It may even surprise all those who have not experienced the specific nature of a masterful coaching process. In reality, it is regularly confirmed by a large number of professional coaches that it is realistically possible to accompany clients in fields totally foreign to a specific coach’s knowledge and background.

When masterful coaches listen to clients, they are attentively present to their whole personal and professional context, much beyond the restricted presentation that constitutes the focus of client dialogue.  Client issues and problems presented in a specific sessions are always part of a much larger ensemble. This concerns the more global client context including their history, their future, their motivations, their perspectives and frames of reference, their knowledge, their relationship with family and friends, their expected outcomes, their experience, etc.

In a way, it would be more precise to say that coaches don't listen to clients, but listen with them. 

Attentive presence to everything about the client that exists beyond client words would be a more correct definition of what masterful listening is about.  When coaches listen with clients, clients gradually learn to listen to themselves.  When clients listen to themselves, the focus of their dialogue gradually shifts.  Clients begin talking about themselves to themselves and with the coach, rather than to the coach.  Consequently, the real coaching process begins when coaches attentively listen with clients rather than to them.  This particular co-listening relationship specific to masterful coaching will be very extensively explored further below.

All themes or issues initially presented by clients to coaches in a given coaching session need to be considered as timid invitations to another listening relationship.  Introductory work focused on current goals, projects or problems indeed need to be perceived as mere invitations, simple doors that give access to much larger landscapes, or small windows that open views to much vaster horizons.  Why then linger on the threshold of these invitations and focus on the door or the window? Consequently, in order to discover and explore much larger or more fundamental issues, coach and client face to face conversations first need to evolve into internal dialogues where coaches are essentially listening with clients who are listening to themselves.

When listening with a client, systemic coaches also do not necessarily try to understand them.  Consider the following question: Why should a coach need to fully understand client descriptions and explanations? Note that to understand and to comprehend really means to seize, to hold or to control. These words indicate that if one were focused on having a very clear understanding of anything, this would be kin to wanting to control it.  Comprehend also means to include such as comprehensive and inclusive.  To want to understand is often the equivalent of wanting to include and to predict.  In coaching, this control is entirely under the client’s responsibility. 

Furthermore, consider that it is impossible to understand what understands us.  We cannot include that of which we are part.  Even if one of the declared objectives of modern science is to understand life, for example, this ambition is out of human reach, by definition.  We are part of life. It includes or comprehends us.  We are understood by life. At best, we can respectfully welcome and cherish life with the humble attentive presence it deserves. That attitude would be conducive to implementing sustainable development and much deeper respect of the environment.  The same attitude is necessary with clients in coaching.  Coaches are part of the coaching relationship and process.  Coaches cannot attempt to control the process that includes them, the client and the client issue.  At best, coaches can humbly accept that process, welcome it, flow with it, and trust it.

Consequently in coaching, it is rarely useful to want to fully comprehend whatever belongs to the client.  It is for clients to keep their bearings, decide on their direction, choose their battles, and select their solutions.  Coaches are only there to accompany clients with attentive presence unhindered by any intention, including the need to understand. In the coaching community, the importance of this attitude and posture is very often repeated and just as often misunderstood or forgotten.

This specific posture is difficult to achieve for most apprentice coaches. They must first to learn to let go on their need to comprehend.  They must accept to forget years of training to develop listening skills focused on understanding content, that is considered as almost peripheral in coaching. Now, if it is useful for coaches to pay much less attention to the content of client dialogue, it is just as important for them to focus their attentive listening on all the rest.  But then, to what do coaches really listen? 

Much like in any other situation, listening with real attentive presence in coaching first rests on the capacity to remain silent.  To begin to listen, one indeed needs to be quiet.  In coaching, true listening not only rests on external silence but also on profound internal quietness.  This capacity to be inwardly still is fundamental to coach attentive presence. Consequently, coaches are said to practice a detached listening attitude, holding no personal intention on client issues and goals, trusting them to proceed and succeed at their own pace.  

But beware.  This description of coach listening is often superficially understood. Not only are coaches present and silent, but they also need to be internally empty, almost transparent to themselves.   Coach listening needs to be free of all internal noise and references to other contexts than the one inhabited and revealed by each client's presence. This capacity to listen beyond client words with unconditional acceptance, without conditions or conditioning, with complete openness to client presence is neither natural nor easy.

In this realm, the first major hurdle for coaches is to listen without filtering client dialogue through an intellectual, conceptual, emotional, personal, technical, spiritual, etc. framework.  In coaching, client presence and expression is very simply welcomed in a form of vacuum materialized by the coach’s complete and attentive presence.  Ideally indeed, coaches will not attempt to understand, nor classify, nor lighten, nor structure, nor remodel client dialogues.  Ideally, coaches welcome client words and by leaving the coaching relational space and context wide open for client expression.  In this way, coach listening and presence is completely free of intention.

For all those of us who already have preferences, habits, opinions, certitudes, theories on personalities and life or problem solving methodologies, listening to others without filters and without attempting to structure their dialogue seems close to impossible.

Habitually indeed, most listen to others to understand through their own personality, through their years of expensive training, through their long experience of life and through their sometimes exclusive and very performing theoretical grids.  These filters are actually forms of philters.  They succeed in charming coaches to cherish a particular personal approach, a preferred frame of reference, a pet theory or methodology rather than just focusing on clients as they are.

Also, when coaches want to differentiate themselves on their professional market, they maneuver to build a strong identity.  To do this, they design and market a personalized and attractively packaged coaching approach related to a specific set of exclusive skills and tools.  Often, they elaborate a personal twist on an existing theory or they add complex expertise to simple skills.  Very paradoxically, this marketing strategy to attract clients to a personal product is instrumental to losing simple attentive focus on the client.  Furthermore, identity building by adding fancy twists to coaching is generally conducive to coach ego development, and that also at client expense.

Consequently, the more coaches identify themselves with a particular theoretical approach or personally relate to a specific professional strategy, the more their clients will be kindly requested to adapt those models and to fit the frame of reference of the coach.  That will be at the expense of their personal freedom and identity as clients. 

Beyond the trap of theoretical grids, coaches also may listen to solve, to be useful, to understand, to feel, to help, to act or react, to discuss or convince, to compare and evaluate, to be close or to dissect, to interrupt, etc.  In systemic coaching, one needs to listen to do nothing.   Coaches just need to be present to clients as they are. 

Consequently, coach listening is very particular.  Without intentions, coach attentive presence represents an empty and shapeless receptacle or chalice simply offered for clients to fill each in the way they please.  This very malleable receptacle is offered to do nothing, and for nothing other than to just permit client expression.  For the listening coach, there is nothing to look for or to find when listening to client dialogue.  The provided space or volume is just there to let client mind and meaning totally permeate the whole coaching context and relationship.  In that way, attentive presence just lets clients proceed with their quest unhindered, to freely expose and meander with their issue.

The particular quality of this attentive listening relationship between coaches and clients gradually becomes the central vehicle for client development, the principle factor that will ensure coaching process success.

This underlines that attention only focused on client issues and supported by all the problem solving techniques a coach can align in the course of a coaching process are not the most important success factors for client development.  In a way, coaching is quite similar to all other forms of help and therapeutic relationships:  It is the particular rapport that is established between the master therapist and a patient that is the principal success factor in recovery and healing. Indeed, specific therapeutic methods or psychological theories used by  therapists do not influence for more than ten percent of the healing process.  The quality of the therapist's attentive presence to therapy clients is the real cure, much more than the publicized therapeutic method(1).  The same holds for coaching.  In fact, the first service a client acquires from a coach is an empty free space or environment.  In modern times, such space to freely think, feel, envision, grow and expand is so rare that it can even be considered luxury.

This explains why the fundamental hurdle for most beginning coaches as well as for numerous professionals is nothing short of an identity crisis.  If coaches cannot link their personal, social and professional identities with their training, their knowledge, their capacity to help, their experience, their analytical edge, their creative solutions, then who are they ?  If coaches really leave all the coaching space to the client, then they may quickly have the impression they no longer exist.  If all they have identified themselves with in the past becomes useless, what makes each different from another coach and from other professionals?  Paradoxically, the true most profound answer to that question should be “nothing”.  

The single greatest difficulty in learning to become a master coach is that one first needs to literally unlearn all previously learned behavioral reflexes, thought patterns and all other historically determined identity supports.

Consequently, in the accompanying relationship characteristic of masterful systemic coaching, there is almost no room left for coach ego.  The more one learns to be simply and attentively present to the client and coaching relationship, the more one becomes conscious that there is no room for the coach self as it would exist in a normal social context.

The shedding of all that previously served to socially define coach identity can provoke deep essential questioning on personal existence and presence to others.  This questioning process focused on coach identity often makes coaching a profession that drives its professionals to undertake a deep and committing personal quest.  Consequently, learning how to be a coach is unquestionably transformational for the coach.

In order to proceed further and define the coaching process that spontaneously permits major changes in client perspective, it is first useful to define the larger focus of systemic coach listening.  Coach listening is an intention-free and simple attentive presence, open to the much larger or global client context.  In short, a coach does not only listen with two ears but with all other available senses, and these need to be sharpened.

Totally, sensitively and attentively present, coaches connect and feel all that concerns each client within their personal extended contexts. To reduce the quality of this coach presence and attention without intention to silence and listening probably contributes to confusion and misunderstanding about the one key skill in masterful coaching.  Indeed, if one considers the global client context to which a coach is profoundly attentive, the simple act of listening to the content of client descriptions quickly becomes almost insignificant.

What is the range of client energies? What are the client rhythms? Where do client eyes focus? How does the client move?  What are the client positions? What tones and modulations of voice does the client use? What senses does the client use and which ones does the client seem to ignore? What are the client gestures? What emotions does the client display? To what drummer does the client pace? What are the client speech patterns, range of emotions, subjects and objects, habits, comfort zones, silences, hesitations and precipitations? How does the client relate and interface with the coach and larger environment?  What is the extent of the client internal universe? What are the client beauties, limits, aspirations and fears? This list can indeed be infinite.

In a dynamic way, when attentive presence is sharpened by all of a coach’s senses, the latter is put in a position to receive much more information concerning both the client and how they interface with their immediate environment. In this perspective, the coach must also imperatively consider being an integral part of that client environment.  Indeed, far from being a neutral external observer, consider that coaches are very significant actors in their client systems. 

Consequently, the client-coach interface is extremely rich in pertinent information.  How does the client address the coach? How much does the client trust the coach?  How does the client look at the coach? How does the client answer questions or react to all other coach input? How does the client participate in the co-creation of a respectful relationship, focused on achieving results? How does the client accept personal silences, support, and more direct confrontation?  How does the client search, find, build, and assume personal responsibility or commit? How does the client accept proximity, intimacy or distance with the coach?  How indeed does the client live and relate in the presence of the coach? 

The client-coach interface provides the systemic coach with a host of indications on how the client relates and interfaces elsewhere and with others.  In that light, all coach feelings and emotions, impulses and reactions, freeways of the mind and physical impressions can provide numerous indications of the nature and quality of interactions within other client contexts, related to the client’s life.

As if projected on a photographic plate, all coach reactions when facing clients can become important indicators concerning the nature of each client’s work and life contexts.

In this sense, almost as a chemical revelator, as an attentive receptor, coaches can consider themselves an integral part of each of their client’s universes.  If coaches bring very little of their own internal noise to the relationship, they can become aware that whatever they feel, think, emote, etc. provides very pertinent although indirect indications on client frame of reference, context, and environment.

Consequently when systemic coaches feel an emotion such as anger, fear, joy or sadness, when they perceive an intuition, feel a sensation, have an unexpected impression or again an unusual though, they can often assume that personal reaction is pertinent to the external context developed by the client.

Systemic presence to client contexts includes being present to all the spontaneous coach reactions when facing a client. In fact, complete attentive presence in systemic coaching includes:

• Attention to the client
• Attention to the coach  
• Attention to the quality of the coach-client relationship
• Attention to the two partners operational interface focused on achieving the client’s objective.

An attentive and inclusive presence to this whole ensemble, a deep listening to that inseparable system is the foundation for systemic coaching.

Whenever we define a situation, an objective, a project or a problem, we tend to proceed in an objective fashion.  That is to say we put distance between ourselves and our ambitions, situations or problems so as to consider them from afar.  We consider them as external objects that are can be observed from above so as to better analyze and understand them.  Very naturally, clients proceed in that way.  Naturally, also, coaches could listen to clients by placing them as if they are facing their issues, problems and ambitions with a similar perspective and distance. 

In order to approach client situations more systemically, coaches can consider that neither they nor their clients are separated from client problems, issues or goals. 

According to systemic thinking, it is almost impossible to solve a problem or manage a project if one does not consider being an integral part of the problem or project. It is likewise practically impossible for coaches to authentically accompany clients if they do not perceive themselves as being totally part of the accompanying process and very personally involved in the coaching context.

Consequently, when systemic coaches accompany clients, they are simply attentively present within the coach-client relationship, fully aware of the common and shared issues within the system and shared by all its members.  This systemic approach is much more inclusive than one that would just be applying behavioral tools and skills to a situation which is perceived as external to the concerned actors.  In this all-inclusive approach, systemic coaching tends to be ecological.

Coaches are never neutral when facing clients, always involved.  Clients also are never neutral when facing their problems, issues, projects and goals.  The systemic coaching frame of reference rests on the principle that the interfaces between an issue, a problem, an ambition, a client and a coach are all interrelated and entirely, subjectively involved.  The whole is intimately linked to the subjects or people present in the accompanying process. Both the client and the coach are in the issue, in the problem, in the project and in their common development process. 

In order to develop a real capacity for systemic listening, it is useful to consider that together both the coach and the client are within or an integral part of the client problem, project, issue or ambition. 

With this perspective, one does not listen to client descriptions as situations that are external to their identity or being, in space or time.  Systemic coaches listen to clients as they describe who they are through their perception of their issues.  In this way and considering the systemic complexity of coach-client relationships, it is often surprising to discover how much client themes also intimately concern coach personal and professional lives and issues.
Systemic coach listening is inclusive of the client, the issue and the coach.  It is an attentive presence to one complete whole.  This listening posture is foundational to the systemic process that facilitates new emerging client perspectives.

With attentive presence, the systemic coach will often observe that what clients describe as external phenomena and occurrences are actually present within the coaching relationship, in the here and now of the coaching context.  Clients describe who they are and what they do elsewhere while simultaneously enacting what they describe within the accompanying process.  All client issues come alive in the coaching context, with the coach generally enacting the roles of preferred client partners. In those instants, when an attentive coach and client become present both:

• To what is described as external to their relationship, and
• To what they are reenacting together,

Then new perspectives begin to emerge. 

While being attentive and present to the coaching relationship and client context it is also useful to listen to the client’s expressed objective, issue or expected outcome. Indeed, during a coaching session and process, clients are present with more than just their internal and external context.  Their issue, problem or project also positions them in a relationship with a desired outcome situated sometime in the future, and at the end of the coaching sequence. The client presence is stretched both by a vision in time and by the need for coaching process results.

Consequently, in the beginning of each coaching session coaches generally propose that clients quickly focus on and formulate the desired outcome they wish to achieve during their work process.  In the first minutes of all coaching dialogues, coaches reputedly ask one or two questions and then rephrase and reformulate one or two client answers to clarify client sequence or session objectives.

But some caution is useful concerning this clarification process.  Coach questions and rephrasing should not be offered with the simple objective of eliciting very precise answers in order to implement a highly structured process focused on neatly achieving expressed client goals.  Indeed, masterful coaching is not to be confused with professional project management.  Coach question and restatements focused on helping clients specify their desired outcome are only there to have them set a relatively precise direction for their quest, so as to start their exploration process.

The purpose of client sequence objectives is to set a cardinal point, a general direction or an approximate outcome.  Even when clients are very determined on their goals, coaches need to stay open to possible future adjustments and changes.  For the coaching process to allow for emerging solutions, one must always allow for unexpected changes in client direction and other creative process modifications.  Systemic coaching needs to allow space for new solutions to come forth out of the folds of client dialogue and evolution, in relatively adaptable exploratory spaces. 

Consequently, what is often called a coaching session or sequence contract could well be redefined as a relatively loose agreement to jointly proceed together.  The object of this clarification is just to have the coach and client tune in to each other, looking in the same direction, in order to advance in concert.  In this light, objectives and expected outcomes are useful to give clients a direction to their dialogue and to provide coaches with a compass to witness and accompany client progress.  Much like when making music together, tuning in to the same chord in the beginning of a coaching session or sequence mainly serves to co-create a common foundation and sense of direction.  The rest can be open to all the positive surprises life processes generally have to offer.

This beginning coach-client agreement will help both the client and the coach remain attentively present to the direction of the coaching process and client progress in time.  Coaching agreements are therefore particularly useful in systemic coaching when they permit the partners in progress to regularly check on the direction of their common endeavor focused on a direction or horizon that stretches the client forward, sometimes towards a relatively imprecise goal.  In this process, coaches can nonetheless be totally present and attentive to their clients as they submit themselves to their aspirations and ambitions, and as they gradually give more detail and precision to what they yearn to become.

As soon as the process towards the loosely defined client direction seems to whither, becomes unclear or looses its productive tension, the coach can comment on the subtle changes and ask where the client stands.  The client can then choose to confirm, reconsider or totally change directions towards whatever appears to be the emerging preferred course. 

Consequently, throughout the coaching process, intention-free attentive presence is focused both on the general client context and on client aspiration in a direction that is often redefined and gradually refined.  In this way, clients are progressively pulled or aspired by initially undefined horizons.  Only as they progress forward, client desired outcomes begin to unfold, gain in precision and materialize to gradually become emerging reality.

Systemic coaches need to perceive client environments as the reflection or the extension of who they are.  Client tools, offices, cars, homes, clothes, lifestyle, etc., everything from the way they dress to their behavior and language patters can be indicators of who they are.  In a way, the universe around clients can be perceived as extensions of their being in a larger space and volume.  It is consequently very useful to know habitual client environments and be attentively present to the way they inhabit them.  This can be an excellent argument for the pertinence of shadow coaching, when coaches follow or shadow clients as these continue their day-to-day activities in their real work and life contexts.

Systemic coaches can rest on the principle that clients occupy their environments in the same way they inhabit themselves. 

Consequently, the list of client manifestations to which a systemic coach needs be attentive and present is practically infinite.  Coaches keep their senses, their awareness and their attention loosely focused on all direct and environmental client manifestations, never really concentrating on any single client parameter. This floating attentive presence may seem extremely complex if not outright complicated.  However, if there are no limits to all these client facets, if the realm of coaching attention is indeed extremely complex and apparently dispersed, the systemic coach’s focus holds in one word: the client.

Simply put, coach listening and attentive presence concerns only one question: Who is each client, in his or her total, global and human complexity?

It is impossible for a coach to consciously or intellectually analyze the mass of pertinent information emitted by clients second by second, minute by minute. There are millions of information bits involved at each instant.  In a systemic way and quieting all useless internal noise, however, coaches can globally and intuitively grasp the general client context and global patterns as they unfold in the accompanying process.

Sometimes coaches can also visualize client absent environments. Attentive presence to client context sometimes permits sudden coach intuitions concerning unmentioned pertinent actors, unperceived potentials, unused support systems, on the outer fringe of client awareness.  Sometimes, the presence of a very important client partner or foe can physically be felt in the course of a dialogue within which the person was never mentioned, within which the client ignores their weight.  In this way, presence to client context also includes an intuitive openness to the much larger client personal, social and professional environment. 

Consider that all subjects presented by clients at a given time, that all their defined issues or envisioned projects are merely offered as temporary vehicles to introduce much deeper aspirations.  Client existence and all that is really significant to their being surpasses by a wide margin the limited and conscious subject they initially offer as an introductory point of focus.

If coaches limit their listening and attention to the perimeter offered by initial client goals or to the simple content of their dialogue, they limit their work to a relatively restrained field of client consciousness, a superficial range of passing interests.  In each coaching session and sequence, the expressed client preoccupations need to be considered as simple introductions that can give access to a much vaster and more significant client universe. The attentive presence of a systemic master coach needs to be listening to that much wider potential reality.

Beyond the simple coach-client relationship, it is useful for the coach to be attentive and present to the quality of relationships and interfaces clients establish within the immediate environment defining the coaching context.

How does the client enter the room? How is the client conscious of the immediate environment? What is his or her interest for the furniture and objects in the room?  How does the client presence adjust to that environment?  How does the client say hello, and what follows? What attention does the client give to personal movements and gestures? How does the client acknowledge the presence of others in the immediate environment?  The way clients exist and move in any environment, and the environment’s spontaneous reaction to clients offer numerous indicators that coaches can seize with a loose attentive presence, in order to feel the specificities of each of their existences. 

A master coach needs to be conscious that what is most systemic about any client is totally local and constantly present in each client interaction within their immediate environment and in the coaching relationship.

Everything the client says and does in a coaching context, from the first to the last second, follows patterns that will mirror client issues, client interfaces with other absent environments and the client as an inseparable part of a larger whole.

This underlines that all systemic experiences of the universe rest neither on lofty principles that give new structure to perception nor on detailed knowledge of intricate, global, hidden architectures.  Systemic experiences of our universal environment manifest themselves in short, immediate, local and very simple interactive patterns.  Indeed, systemic experiences constantly emerge out of very close and almost insignificant events, through their structure and processes.   They often express themselves with limpid transparency and with a form of simplicity that often provokes knowledgeable scholars to shrug them away as insignificant.  Paradoxically, one needs to be very present and attentive to heed these minute coincidental details, to pay them the respect they deserve, to listen to their messages, to perceive their significance.

We exist in a systemic coherent universe built of numerous flowing patterns of connection and echoing occurrences, of coincidences, and other unexpected connections.  Recognizing and cherishing these experiences can first jolt us and awaken us with surprise, then attract attention as they convey pertinent messages to all those who can be truly present and attentive. 

Apparently, systemic experiences and their immediate meaning they convey cannot be easily explained, at least not if they are considered with a classical, linear and materialistic approach.  But in a systemic perspective, the coaching context can often magically reveal infinite details of client interactive and existential patterns.  Obviously, the coach is also powerfully and intimately concerned and involved in these patterns.  The whole coaching context and the coach-client relationship very personally includes the coach as one of the key revelators of client systems and patterns.

Consequently, clients and coaches reproduce together and unconsciously, within their local common environment and interactive context, the larger structures and patterns intimately woven into the fabric of client issues and ambitions. Masterful attentive presence to this local interactive structure and these immediate patterns offers numerous opportunities to access the real-life client context and the larger client personal and professional reality. 

In coaching, like in all other professions, time is also a key performance indicator. As a matter of fact, such expressions as here and now and time-space reveal that if coaches need to respect client space, they need to equally respect their time. 

Consequently, professional coaches are attentively present to all client time patterns and rhythms in the course of each client session and sequence. Beware, however.  It is not a coach’s job to effectively pace clients and manage coaching time to make sure they achieve satisfactory results within set deadlines.  Coaches, again, are not project managers for client issues and ambitions nor are they responsible for achieving client results within imperative time frames.

Knowing that the coaching time-space essentially belongs to their clients, paying adequate attention to the coaching relationship’s time is also a question of respectful, attentive presence without intention.  Rather than feeling they must be the keepers of shared time and become   efficient pacers of the coaching process, it would be more coherent with the philosophy of coaching and a truly professional posture to let the client express who they are within their own time. It is entirely sufficient for attentive coaches to be truly present to each client’s time and to how each inhabits it.

Does the client make time, take time, run after time, loose or waste time, cherish time, use time, buy time, write off time, etc?  How can a coach accompany clients until they develop their own firm presence to themselves, to their lives and to their personal time-space as it slowly unfolds?

Masterful systemic coaches need to develop a sensitivity to client time patterns, an attentive presence to the way they install themselves in the time of coaching sessions, sequences, homework, action plans, and personal dialogues. Some clients are slow to start, others have difficulties to finish or conclude what they begin.  Some are long distance runners who display a steady capacity to keep a good pace while others are very powerful sprinters, achieving extraordinarily brilliant, almost immediate results. Some clients get lost in original and creative meandering, others choose to take surprising tangential shortcuts, and still others adapt to new directions with surprising ease. Whatever the pace clients choose to adopt, systemic coaches accompany them as witnesses, offering an attentive presence to each client’s specific time-space pattern.

An attentive presence to how each client begins, follows and closes an hour-long session, a sequence over minutes or a sentence over seconds provides masterful coaches with an intimate understanding of the way those clients manages life segments over months, years and decades. 

Clients inscribe themselves in coaching sequences in the same way they install themselves in their life and professional times. A presence to client time patterns permits coaches to feel how each client’s rhythm and energy is deployed in the pace of all they decide to achieve. Consequently, resting on the principle that the universe can be perceived in a grain on sand, client patterns in all segments of a coaching process illustrate their time patterns in all they undertake during their personal and professional existence:

• The way clients start a sequence illustrates they way they begin all their other projects and action plans.
  
• Their pace in the way they follow up, their hesitations and accelerations, during each sequence of a coaching relationship illustrates their follow up patterns in all other realms of their existence.
• The way clients end or close a sequence, a session: early, on time or late, softly, abruptly or with precipitation etc. also illustrates their capacity to properly wrap up and the quality of their conclusions in all they do elsewhere in their personal and professional processes.

Obviously, coaches can exert quite some influence in the management of client time processes:

• On the one hand, coaches could choose to play a central role.  They would then actively and effectively manage coaching time processes in order to ensure timely client results.  In this case, coaches would leave little room for clients to be really responsible for their achievements and would regrettably end up carrying too much of the client process.
• On the other hand, coaches could choose to simply accompany clients in their own time management.  Coaches could then occasionally give respectful indicators about the way clients choose to be in their own time.  This would be more in keeping with a truly masterful posture, corresponding to just being attentively present to the client’s time-space, without intention. 

This second option is obviously less conducive to creating client dependency.  It respectfully helps clients become conscious that time is precious and that they can gain in managing it effectively on their own.  Gradually with this strategy, both coaches and clients will really gain the consciousness that when each really inhabits their own time, then they can easily find their proper or just place within their environment.

The coaching context is such that almost all clients bring to coaching personal themes, issues and ambitions that are also central to their coaches’ personal and professional lives.  In short, client issues generally fit their coach’s issues to a tee.  For each client, this does not concern vague concepts, nor general values and principles.  This concerns very specific occurrences, real personal characteristics and significant incidents in the coach’s life.

This type of coincidence is not due to chance but to natural underlying processes that structure interpersonal attraction and seem to underscore all relationships. As the saying goes, likes attract likes.  Affective clients find affective coaches, technocrats trust technocrats, angered individuals relate with other angered people, etc.  When we pay more attention to these unconscious shared attractions, they turn out to be very precise.  A client who has just lost his father may meet with an older coach who has just lost his son.  A manager who lacks time structure may be assigned a coach equally incompetent in managing agendas.  A client considering major changes in relationships may unknowingly partner with a divorcing coach.  Consequently, transferential situations are the rule in coaching too. 

This may render a coach’s task much more difficult whenever facing client contexts.  Personal and sometimes painful life events in a coach’s life may suddenly surge out of a client issues or problem and make inwardly peaceful and open attentive presence all but impossible to achieve. Suddenly, a client’s hot problem and a coach’s current issue seem to be one and the same.  In these situations, coaches may even temporarily completely lose sight of client contexts, and become overwhelmed by their own very open wounds and personal urgencies.  They may then experience a very real loss of distance and competency. The open, empty unconditional receptacle for client development is suddenly overflowing with coach experience, thoughts, emotions, limits, and personal intensity. 

For a systemic coach, overlapping patterns between coach and client reality are the rule rather than the exception.  They are to be considered the common lot of most normal coaching relationships. When these take place, professional and authentic coaches can rapidly recover their just posture and attentive presence to clients through the use of simple and effective communication with a clean ethical stance.  An attitude of humility and the capacity to accept one’s own shortcomings and humanity obviously are the first conditions to bring these occurrences into the coaching relationship for the benefit of clients.  

Obviously, regular supervision is the preferred setting to attempt to make the difference between what really belongs to each coach and what may belong to their clients.  In that setting, the goal is not to achieve a theoretically ideal level of awareness where overlaps between client and coach contexts will cease to surface.  The object of supervision is to achieve a positive awareness of these echoing phenomena between coaches and their clients, and then learn how to use them to grow together.  Obviously, all those who consider that it is more than useful for coaches to commit to a personal therapeutic process probably come from the same frame of reference. 

In systemic coaching, it is also very important to constantly expect these overlapping occurrences between all client issues and significant personal experiences on the coach’s part. Professional coaches can systematically prepare themselves to meet their own issues and challenges in every theme that every client comes forward to offer.   This is almost paramount to achieving really masterful attentive presence.

The personal question one can ask oneself when facing any client is: “What is this human being bringing here today that is going to teach me something about my own shadow and light?”  This is how we discover that a very important part of attentive presence to clients is also a deep attentive presence to the personal if not intimate context of coaches. 

When meeting a client, or at every meeting with every client and so as not to be suddenly surprised by a overwhelming overlapping process, coaches can ask themselves a few personal preparatory questions.  Who is this client for me?  To who does that client correspond in my past or present close environment? How is this person part of my family or of my closest intimate circle?  What is this person coming to teach me about my issues, my challenges, my ambitions or my life quest? 

In this way, each client can be perceived as a messenger or as a mirror for coach development, indirectly coming to ask vital questions hat have a boomerang effect.  By asking for themselves a few coaching questions linked to issues offered by clients, coaches start perceiving new personal perspectives that in fine can also be useful for their clients. 

When coach and client attentive presence have reached the right level of quality, intensity and depth, when they are both aligned, co-accompanying each other, sharing rhythm and destination, then the magic of coaching can begin to operate. However, just calling this instant characteristic of masterful coaching a magical emerging process may not be enough.  A more detailed description of what it entails may be useful.

For one, a disruptive and shared feeling of loss, dispersion or confusion often precedes this magical moment  as if both the coach and client attentive presence had suddenly dissipated.  If and when they succeed in breaking through this difficult passage or hurdle, the following magical moment is characterized by a sudden feeling of almost overwhelming liberation provoked by an unexpected, naturally emerging new and exciting perspective. 

This perception of a new and enlarged shared reality generally feels immediately right, global, coherent and sustainable. Without warning, it subtly seems to impose itself as if of its own will, jumping out of the woodwork, unfolding out of the shared coach and client context, emerging out of the larger environment.  When this happens, space seems to open, light and energy seeps in to transform the coaching relationship, offering large avenues where only seconds before stood the equivalent of a thick brick wall.

Until this point, it seems that the coaching posture could only be defined in negative terms, as an empty space, as non-intention and non-action, almost a form of non existence to create the necessary space for client aspiration and development.  At this point, one observes that the hollow systemic coach posture is actually a very active preliminary strategy that serves to create a specific accompanying context: one that ultimately permits a very particular form of quasi-explosive emerging  liberation.  

Almost instantly, at a pin’s drop, both coach and client feel they have arrived at their destination, in the presence of a new realm of opportunity, a new territory in which they can unhindered redeploy their energy. The most surprising feeling for both client and coach is that they agree that this newly shared reality was continuously present, although hidden by a thick veil of misconception and misperception.  

The sections below will attempt to give a few precise indications concerning the different steps that constitute and follow this emerging process made possible by attentive listening and presence without intention.  Although these steps may not always be clearly perceptible and although they do not always present themselves in a set order, they often serve to characterize what is commonly defined as the magic of masterful coaching.

Just before new perspectives emerge, immediately preceding the liberating switch or coup de théatre which characterizes systemic and masterful coaching, coaches and clients often have to suffer through a very real period of shared discomfort and confusion.  Without this almost obligatory passage, it seems that the emerging liberation will often just not break through into the realm of perception.

During this difficult phase of the coaching process, often linked to the meandering efforts displayed by erring clients, coaches and clients may experience tension.  The partners in travel share an impression that the process is at a standstill. Client attempts seem to lead nowhere, the coach is not feeling very useful, the shared process does not appear to be an effective vehicle for development. Both client and coach experience the possibility of failure, perceive a culminating point marked by shared frustration. 

This coaching moment is highly critical.  While both the coach and client are inwardly wrestling with their feeling of confusion and frustration and together wander in the chaos of their quest, the option of taking an easy way out becomes very temping.  Coaches sometimes interrupt client difficulties by asking futile or superficial questions.  Clients sometimes change the subject and offer tangent issues or input humorous comments.  Those avoidance strategies consist in making a lasting mistake in order to solve a passing difficulty.

Here, one needs to be tenacious.  The moment of shared confusion is there to be seized and held.  At this point, experienced coaches search deep within, tap on all remnants of their trust in themselves, in their client and in the universe.  This is precisely the point at which they need to accept not to know and not to want in order to accept to get lost with their clients.  This is precisely the point where clients need to let go and abandon themselves to the wisdom of the shared accompanying process. More than at any other time, this passage through confusion is the critical moment where coaches must not attempt to save the situation or their clients.  It is urgent to wait out the difficulty, in full, silent and attentive presence to the context of chaos.

In nature, it is indeed only from chaos that can emerge really original forms of life.  In human history, confusion and disorder has always produced innovating forms of organizations and social structures.  Gothic cathedrals are emanations from the dark ages.  For the traveler also, it is often out of anguishing fogs and after great storms that emerge hidden continents and mythical lands.  In coaching like elsewhere, to be able to attract and seize new opportunities, it is useful to have empty hands, an alert mind, an open heart, and a good deal of trust in the self-organizing capacity of the universe. 

This also where the feeling of emptiness or fathomless void can attract novelty. When favorable conditions are set, when a real presence to the client development process is well installed, confusion is a mere temporary passage into a different reality.  This  passage is specifically characteristic of the breakthrough process in scientific innovation.  At this point, one really needs to trust that sunshine also follow bad weather and storms.

Experimented coaches know this passage.  They sometimes provoke and facilitate the coming of a state of client confusion by abandoning all reassuring linear processes.  They will provoke rapid illogical changes in client dialogue, jumping from an intimate personal issue to a strictly professional theme, skipping from one subject to another, hopping from one critical field of interest to a lighter social conversation, approaching several parallel themes with no apparent logic, interrupting out of rhythm to immediately come back to the central client issue. 

At this point, one needs to be conscious that client and their issues are not segmented. All their preoccupations and themes, all their subjects and all their concerns are integral parts of a much larger whole.  The subject of client presence is the client.  When one accepts that a state of apparent confusion remains right in the middle of the coaching context, this may often facilitate a thorough reorganization of the client’s quests.

Consequently, rather than accompanying clients to deepen only one subject or issue, a single line of thought or preoccupation, systemic coaches often help to create a necessary fluidity between different client themes.  They facilitate numerous connections between apparently separate client fields. These interruptions aim to create a greater circularity between different client states, within a much larger range of emotions and reactions.  Within this larger and apparently more chaotic ensemble is exactly where new perspectives are most likely to emerge.

Consequently, a systemic coaching process may sometimes appear disorganized, segmented and meaningless.  But confusion perceived from too close and at a given time often helps to paint a much larger picture, whose coherency and beauty will only be perceived from a distance and in time. In this process, not only is it recommended for a coach to accept and welcome the passage represented by  shared confusion during a coaching sequence, it is sometimes useful to know how to provoke this fundamentally uncomfortable state. 

A breakthrough takes place when the veil of perception drops and both coach and client experience a sudden passage into a new reality.   Almost simultaneously, both establish new perceptual connections and pierce into a different awareness of their common context.  New meanings emerge, unexpected perspectives take shape and creative solutions come forth. Out of the enlarged context emerge new forms of awareness, different architectures of reality, original references and restructuring perspectives. These are always surprising to the partners in coaching. Neither expected nor voluntarily provoked, they  seem to emerge and impose themselves as if of their own free will.

EXAMPLE:   In the course of a relatively intimate discussion with his coach, a client indulges in the expression of some of his more personal sensations and emotions.  These concern his perception of the infinitely insignificant place he occupies in the universe.  The client illustrates his thoughts by sharing his experience watching stars out in the open sea, on moonless nights, with nothing but the horizon offering a frame for infinity.  With his words and images, he shyly attempts to share his spiritual dimension, an almost universal experience of being part of an infinite whole and simultaneously feeling almost insignificant in that immensity.

The coach then asked: “When you describe this infinite universe that marvels you, are you sure that you are looking outside, or is it inside yourself that you are peering?”  Silence first followed, then a shared burst of laughter.

A few indicators define this type of occurrence as powerfully magical. First, the coach question or comment just seems to appear out of the blue, without preparation and it formulates itself without any precise intention.  Secondly, coaches seem to hear and experience the power of their question or comment at the same time as their clients.  They are just as surprised and affected as their clients by the reach of their own comment. Immediately after that, a strikingly new perspective emerges as if by magic, and re-organizes their shared perception.

The immediate apparent reaction is usually a profound silence, sometimes a break of shared laughter filled with excitement. Less visible are the spinal chill, the physical choc, and the mental disequilibrium that accompany the radical change in context architecture.  Often, a feeling of deep, almost embarrassing intimacy signals that together coach and client are transformed and need to each take time to personally rediscover who they really are.

EXAMPLE: In the course of an apparently social conversation on formal marriages with a coach who happened to be both legally and religiously married, a confirmed bachelor innocently declared that considering that he had been living with his partner for years, his engagement was practically “the same thing”.

“Sure, it’s the same thing,” answered the coach, “but it’s the same thing as what?”  The ensuing silence quite eloquently put a stop to the chitchat.  In the course of the following year, the bachelor and his companion got legally and religiously married.

Once more, the conception and formulation of that type of question can never be prepared. prior to the instant it is expressed.  It does not aim for one or another specific objective nor suggest any particular action. The comment just seems to emerge out of the shared context, to channel through the coach and impose itself spontaneously to enlarge the client’s perspective. 

It equally surprises and provokes the all partners in progress. The function of this type of coach question is simply to create the quality of space for both the client and the coach to properly inhabit their common context, then confront themselves to different perspectives and then take whatever action may seem most appropriate.

In this last example, one could consider that the coach’s question is quite influential.  Being officially and religiously married, there is a good chance that the coach considers that his own union with his wife has great value and deep meaning. Through a simple question, the coach undoubtedly communicates numerous confronting perspectives and provokes reflection where the client previously had answers.

It can also be argued that this confrontation is precisely the one for which this particular client was subconsciously searching with this specific coach.  We can consider that chance does not exist, that we may all choose our relationships for a reason, and that everything that comes out of them may convey an important lesson.  In this perspective, it is important for coaches to remain humble on the relative influence they may have on clients, and just proceed with their open and confronting questioning. 

Back to breakthroughs, it may be useful to underline that the paradox of masterful coaching is difficult to solve: 

• The more coaches intently listen to consciously find the one best intervention or question, the more these seem to escape their awareness.
• The more coaches are just attentive and present to the general coach-client context with no specific intention nor expectation, the higher the chances that a surprisingly different perspective will just emerge out of the shared context. 
• The more coaches try to protect clients by avoiding uncomfortable passages through doubts and internal uncertainty, the more breaking through the proverbial mirror becomes impossible. 
• The more coaches follow the flow of the relational contexts that bind them to their clients, trusting the creative accompanying process, the more that process will serve the partners in their common quest.

All seems to indicate that a totally intention-free interactive environment is the necessary framework that permits a spontaneous creation of new mental synapses.  A known common context must be reshuffled before an unexpected and innovative solution can be expected to emerge.  Only when we really let go of our voluntary and programmed intentions can the accepted vacuum welcome new forms of perception, new mental passages to innovative solutions.  Our only responsibility as coaches and clients is to seize these breakthrough moments when they appear. 

Consequently, without conscious and directed intention, a coach’s attention is on the lookout for unexpected emerging perspectives.  Remember Archimedes who very tired of searching chose instead to relax in his hot tub: suddenly a solution emerged out the foaming chaotic context of the bubble bath.  Apparently resting but attentively present, Archimedes was ready to seize his breakthrough solution:  Eureka! 

Systemic coaching described up to this point permits a naturally performing breakthrough process. To grasp and embody this process, coaches need to fully understand the importance of the intention-free listening strategies described throughout this article.

• On the one hand, masterful listening is deep, silent and attentive, and requires extreme personal presence and concentration.
• On the other hand this listening skill it is free, floating and agile and without intention, accepts apparent client uncertainty, meandering and questioning.   It never stops to dig deeper into any specific client direction.

Consequently, masterful attentive presence is not focused on any one or other of the multiple dimensions client manifestations. Logically speaking, this listening without intention blossoms in apparent diversity if not confusion.  With a systemic frame of reference, coach listening and attentive presence freely melts into the folds, echoes and meanders of client mind and awareness, integrating the coaching relationship context.

This listening skill is not focused on any particular objective but attempts to be present to the coach-client context as if to an undivided whole. Through this attentive systemic presence, coaches invite, welcome and follow all possible connections between manifestations of their client contexts as if they all were parts of one unique and coherent subject. 

Gradually, without directed attention, a coach’s presence taps on to the connections that exist between the numerous elements of a given client’s context, and this includes all those that very personally intimately and personally concern the coach. Progressively, a masterful coach can welcome the general direction of client meaning, issues, attitudes, motivations, thoughts and emotions, beginnings and ends, assurances and hesitations. Facilitated by this interactive architecture, a new unpredictable, specific and coherent form can self organize and emerge from each individual client’s global context.

Masterful coaches rest assured that new configurations emerge from the totality of diverse client manifestations and comments concerning multiple subjects, often presented with approximation or apparent disorder. All these separate elements are in fact intimately connected, necessarily interacting, rest on a common foundation. They all create an inseparable whole. 

In masterful coaching, new perspectives regularly emerge in totally unexpected ways. This process takes place in the same fashion as when loose and informal network systems give birth to original and performing forms of organizations.  The process is also identical to chaotic creativity sessions that help elaborate totally unexpected and innovative technological solutions.  In nature, the same process underlies the sudden creation of new forms of life within apparently inhospitable environments. This same emerging process allows the apparition of new, coherent and client-pertinent patterns in masterful systemic coaching.  This commonly takes place when client contexts are left entirely free of all linear, structuring and preconceived constraints and when coaches abandon themselves (and their self) to unconditionally accompany shared coach-client energy and context.

When coaches let go on all urges to guide client processes, when on the contrary, they facilitate the expression of lateral and complex connections, of multi-polar and contradictory client motion and emotion, then new forms of global, synthetic and systemic connections can emerge.  Professionals in the fields of cybernetics and systems thinking know this process well.  It is the capacity of freely interacting living systems to self-organize and very naturally  create novelty.  To be sure, this life process permeates everything in the universe.

Reputedly, professional coaching processes permit new and more performing client decisions.  In the context of attentive presence and listening describes above, however, that affirmation also calls for clarification and questioning.  To introduce the reflections below,  a transnational linguistic reflection may help understand some fundamentally different approaches concerning the notion of decisions.

Consider for example that in English, decisions are made, when in French, decisions are taken.  In the first linguistic context, they must be fabricated or constructed.  They are perceived as previously inexistent.  In the second context, they are seized as if they had always been present, suspended somewhere, waiting to be properly handled.   This difference can surely offer both sides of the Channel another reason to endlessly debate on which of their two perspectives is the most appropriate for humanity.  One can also enlarge the debate and imagine an indefinite number of other perspectives concerning how decisions may occur.

In both contexts, however, note that there exists a common foundation.  Both cultural contexts agree to the fact that an active and responsible individual needs to either take or make the decision.  One way or another, a decisive actor must exert some form of voluntary responsibility, choosing what decision needs to  be made or taken.  We can also reverse that proposal.  One can imagine other cultural contexts where truly appropriate decisions are so evidently obvious that they leave us humans no other choice but to follow.

When a truly present and attentive coaching process permits fundamentally emerging or unfolding dynamics to both the coach and client, one may often perceive that only the best decisions surface and come to impose themselves as  pertinent and almost inescapable realities.

In numerous masterful and systemic coaching situations, obvious decisions and new emerging perspectives almost simultaneously appear, hand in hand.  They present themselves as integral parts of larger unfolding realities.  Appropriate decisions almost seem to preexist, in total coherence within surfacing frames of reference, as if belonging to a larger, almost universal context that reaches far beyond the client, the coach and their common quest. 

Consequently, client breakthrough perceptions and appropriate decisions often appear in synchronicity.  Both are intimately felt to be integral parts of newly discovered realities.  When clients perceive and welcome truly appropriate emerging perspectives, they seem to also automatically accept the decisions that come along with them, as if in a bulk package.  Being integral parts of new realities, these emerging decisions immediately and intimately feel truly appropriate, just, ecological, and fundamentally sustainable.

Consequently, when masterful coaching rests on profound and intention-free attentive presence, the process will often provoke coaches and clients to question some fundamental principles and beliefs concerning its voluntary and individualistic achievement-oriented reputation.  In this perspective a truly masterful coaching relationship accompanies clients as they truly realign, not only with themselves but also within a much larger, almost universal context.

This realignment first takes place between the coach and client, and then gradually includes all the pertinent interfaces within the larger coaching context.  Through attentive presence, first the coach, then the client center themselves on and with all that connects them and their larger environment.  Within this larger all-inclusive context, appropriate perspectives, decisions and actions naturally emerge.  When these become so self-evident that they impose themselves, decisions are neither to be made nor to be taken.  They are simply present, in a much larger and comprehensive perspective to which both clients and coaches are invited to belong.

Evidently, this article underlines that attentive presence is the main systemic coaching skill.  It is so intimately linked to the mastery of all the other coach competencies that one could say it precedes and includes each one of them. Without attentive presence without intention, other skills such as listening, questioning, silence, the capacity to create new perspectives, to accompany client decisions and action plans, etc. may loose their power and be relegated to mere superficial techniques.  With true and profound attentive presence, all the other coach competencies mesh to make the art of coaching a truly essential and innovative development process.

To conclude, this text proposes that the one fundamental coach posture is an intimate and attentive presence, not only to the client, but also to the coach and to the whole coaching context.  This text suggests that attentive coach presence needs to be perceived as the envelope that gives a very specific edge to all other tools, techniques and strategies in that profession. This central competency rests on a very intimate, transparent, personal and profound way of being.  When a coach develops it, all the other acquired behaviors and doing skills naturally and effortlessly fit into place.

Consequently, attentive listening and an intention-free presence to the client, to the coach and their shared context should be the one central focus of all coach training and development.  All the other coaching tools should be presented as secondary incremental skills that can be acquired only if and when they naturally fit into the accompanying process.

Imagine for a minute this type of profound, unconditional and welcoming presence, without intention, in the course of coaching relationships:

• On the one hand, clients explore their intentions, their aspirations, their motivations and goals.  They pursue their personal dialogue, stretching themselves towards their expected achievements and development.
• On the other hand, without any personal intention, coaches are present, in a state of receptive and alert suspension. They simply respect client time and space and melt their presence into their client contexts. They shortly, lightly and freely, accept to manifest themselves, remaining on the outer fringes of their client’s quest.  They attentively listen, but for nothing.  They yearn for nothing.  They simply let their presence welcome their clients in the space created by their attentive silence.

This context creates the chalice that allows masterful systemic coaching to take place. This very structured and protected developmental architecture is the one that permits coaching clients to truly expand and deploy in exactly the way they see fit. Accompanied by the wide and profound silent presence of their coaches, clients start to listen to themselves and begin to express and give form to their deepest potentials.  In this infinite coaching space, time or volume, the magic of coaching can begin to unfold.