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

What?  Another text on coaching? What can be the real added value of more text on the subject?  There is already a very large number of available articles and books about the profession on the net and in print. The subject can well be considered extensively covered, if not suffering from a blatant case of media over exposure. 

Of course, this is quite true about general definitions of coaching, the inventories of its specific tools, and the extensive descriptions of habitual coaching strategies used in different personal and professional contexts. This text will demonstrate that number of the most important dimensions of the field, however, still remain relatively mysterious.  That is particularly true if one considers what really defines true mastery in the profession and what is very commonly and usually elusively referred to as the magical dimensions of coaching.

Beyond the texts on the art and science of coaching, beyond the numerous writings on techniques and exposés on the specific dialogue process that defines the general skill set particular to coaching, there are still very few articles and books on the art of how to be a true master coach[1]. Indeed, not much precision is readily available on the specific posture or way of being of master coaches and very little is said about their powerful and minimalist attitude, when they seem to do nothing and just be there, and that nothing very clearly overshadows whatever any other coach actually could do.

Yes, the history concerning the development of coaching is well researched, the different schools of thought and traditions are somewhat being inventoried to keep track of the complexity that is gradually coming into the field, oftentimes uselessly.  Yes, cultural differences between national traditions and style differences between individual preferences can be reasonably well pinpointed.  But how many people can understand and describe a master coach’s more mysterious ways, the magical dimension of some of the deeper transformational processes and the profound and essential nature of a successful personal or professional quest accompanied by a master coach?  Can this wizzardry be explained?

This text proposes to dig beyond the basic definitions of the profession as they are usually presented, beyond a practical presentation of its originality and effectiveness, and beyond the range of tools that are extensively displayed elsewhere on this website and taught on the exceptionally successful coach-training market.  In the art of accompanying individuals and teams that are truly focused on achieving ambitious goals, this text offers an in-depth reflection on some of the following essential questions concerning coaching:

• How can we define real mastery, in a way that applies indifferently to masterful individual, team and organization coaches?
• How does coaching mastery rest on a state of being, both  with an intensely attentive presence, and without any perceptible coach intention on the nature of client results?
• How does this attentive presence clearly participate in creating coach-client resonance and how does that resonance facilitate the surfacing of new emerging forms and solutions?
  
• How can we define with precision the paradoxical way a fundamentally minimalist master coaching approach can permit huge measurable breakthroughs in client transformation and results ?
• How can we define, expect and routinely provoke the surprises, accelerations, breakthroughs, and other perspective landslides that emerge in the course of a masterful coaching process?

Both for the client and for the professional coach, alchemical sequences that precipitate personal mutations and provoke deep and seemingly unpredictable transformations routinely surface as if by accident.  During large group sessions in organizational coaching and during more personal and intimate one-on-one coaching meetings, masterful magical instants are legion to the point of being integral part of a very precise emerging process.

Note indeed that coaching is commonly described as an accompanying process that proceeds by making ample room for emerging solutions.  This definition can be taken lightly, simply signifying that the profession routinely offers spaces and volumes for unexpected surprises.  That would be excessively underestimating the importance of the expression.  Coaching permits emerging perspectives and solutions in a very precise way.  Emerging or surfacing patterns and solutions in coaching are inherently the same as when new life forms emerge in nature. They are identical to the most recent artificial intelligence theories demonstrated in modern software design and developement. They copy the inherent creativity that naturally emerges in all complex systems that are inherently decentralized in their implicit or formal architecture.

• Caution: Much as within other environments, the emerging dimension in coaching underlines that new perspectives and solutions surface from the bottom up, from the local to the global.  Emerging processes are complete opposites to those that occur in centralized structures where shapes, forms and solutions are proposed if not imposed from the top down. 

In order to approach the more intangible aspects of master coaching, this text suggest that we consider this new professional relationship by considering it’s hidden dimensions, by studying the processes that escape the wills, intensions and control of the interrelating actors, by accepting to dive into the hollows, meanders and silences. or masterful coaching This text proposes to delve into what happens when the relating coach and client wander beyond appearances, go through and beyond the more superficial interactive rituals into the deepest reality of all that is being left unsaid and unexplained in masterful coaching.

In effect, this extensive text proposes to question all that we think we know about coaching and maybe about reality as it is commonly perceived.  It invites us to forget all about the doing tools and techniques commonly put forth in training programs focused on acquiring the behavioral skills of the profession.  Rather than on doing coaching, this text very simply and humbly chooses to focus on how to simply be a coach.

Consequently, if the coaching process is often described by listing its precise and useful tools to accompany clients while they focus on achieving their goals, the first section of this text will suggest that all these tools be firmly put away.  When beginning and established coaches over-focus on the specificity and well publicized effectiveness of tools, they may very well forget that original solutions and new perspectives emerge primarily out of the quality of the relationship with their clients.

• Caution: Paradoxically and step by step, the first section of this text proposes to drop the habitual focus on tools and techniques in order to access a different level of mastery, completely focused on the coaching space or void.  Whether we are considering individual, team or organizational coaching, this text suggests that all proven coaching methods and all effective coaching strategies must volunttarily be put aside.

Only when they accept to totally loose control and develop a truly minimalist approach will masterful coaches and their accompanied clients be able to welcome the mysterious, let underlying forms emerge and reveal new perspectives within a new form of all-encompassing reality.  In this way, coaches and their clients can begin to serve another dimension of coaching reality This dimension naturally eliminates or bypasses over-structured logic, prefabricated mental forms, tried and tested habits. Then, the true depth and power of the art of masterful coaching can begin to become manifest.

In the most precise way possible, the second section of this article will make explicit the essential quality of master coaching presence and being that is indispensable when creating a systemic coaching context.  The objective here is for coaches to willingly enter into an intimate interpersonal resonance with their clients and create the necessary conditions that will allow the surfacing of original emerging solutions.

Indeed, the exceptional quality of masterful coach presence first creates alignment with the client, allows the partnering pair to tune in together and harmoniously vibrate together.  Coaching presence thus becomes shared resonance.  This resonance creates a collective context that serves as a receptacle for new forms, solutions and perspectives to literally surface and almost propel the coaching partners into new realms of conscience.  Most often, humble, simple, whole and attentive coaching presence is totally sufficient to embark willing clients into this totally unexpected new dimension. True deep presence and attention allows the relationship between the coach and individual or collective client to literally become an aspiring, inspiring and inspiriting vacuum waiting to be filled with novel forms.  It is often surprising how an empty, free and transparent receptacle facilitates the emergence of truly new, unexpected, liberating perspectives.

In order to implement and accompany this fundamentally pure and intuitively creative process, the second section of the text below will precisely delve into the particularly difficult yet central coaching skill of true listening.  In systemic coaching, this skill is taken farther than what is habitually experienced by other professionals.  Indeed, true listening fully participates in creating the deep attentive presence without intention specific to masterful systemic coaching.

The competency of systemic presence is essential in all coaching contexts, whether it be face to face, when coaching partners, teams, or teams of interacting teams such as organizations.  In fact all the different contexts within which master coaches practice their art have but little influence on the necessary quality of personal presence: the masterful coaching posture.

• Caution: Systemic coaching is based on the single competency of attentive presence.  It considers that listening is an art of being.  It is the single foundational skill in systemic coaching. 

Again, when this quality of being is truly embodied by coaches in intimate presence with their clients, it can become central in transforming very short coaching sequences into extraordinarily complete client and coach transformational experiences.  Again, profound presence is absolutely necessary to create the conditions that permit masterful emerging changes in both client and coach perspective.

Then, much in the same way as going through the proverbial mirror, suddenly space and time fade out and new perspectives come forth to impose themselves into shared consciousness. 

An undeniable evidence will be explored in the course of this text: whenever a coaching session or sequence does not rest on an open, deep, respectful, systemic and attentive presence and focused listening on the part of the coach and with the client, powerful questions loose their edge, contracts and agreements veer off track, seemingly effective action plans get bogged down, individual and team client progression becomes more laborious, solutions remain more superficial.  In the absence of a fine, deep, focused attentive presence, a respecting minimalist approach, a subtle and extraordinary art of shared relationship, other practical coaching skills invariably loose their potential power.  When, however, coaches profoundly rest their presence on deep listening and true attention without particularly directing their intention in any way, reasonably competent professionals can rapidly and almost automatically achieve masterful if not magical results with their clients.

The third section of this text presents a practical conclusion to the former two: How can coaches and clients practically understand, define, recognize, welcome and accompany the new perspectives that emerge or surface almost magically.  What can they do when new perspectives impose themselves in their obvious and just pertinence, in their coherency?  How can coaches and clients accept and welcome the flow of essentially sustainable and ecological emerging solutions?

For systemic coaches and their individual and team clients, new organizations of reality often present themselves in the form of coincidences and synchronicities.  New perspectives always carry new and enlarged meaning.  When original, sustainable and fundamentally right solutions impose themselves, the motivation to see them through is immediate, action plans fold out as if they participated in the natural flow of the universe and generally just enthrall all the concerned actors. These action plans often seem to unroll with fluid and esthetic ease.  There appears to be an inherent beauty in individual or collective client action plans.  This whole development is in total coherency with the spirit of the transformational process permitted by masterful systemic coaching.

The last part of this text therefore describes with as much precision as possible the key steps that follow systemic emerging or surfacing forms and solutions.  This section details how action plans and other practical implementations seem to just happen without effort, apparently surfing on partnering environmental energy, in synch with a conniving universe.  During this follow-up, the whole transformational and self-organizing process comes to a natural conclusion.  This last part of the process is the one most often referred to as the magical dimension of coaching.

• Caution: The concepts of attentive presence and listening are neither easy to define nor to describe in writing.  Everyday words do not readily convey the subtleties of the quality of listening that is central to coaching mastery. Common language does not easily lend itself to describe the subtler and fundamentally innovating dimensions of systemic coaching.

In order to express the spirit of a master coach’s being skills, and of  how to just be present, the text below will sometimes offer uncommon principles, propose surprising analogies and original metaphors.  This will in fact serve to illustrate how indirect paths and conceptual leaps offered by language and modern science can help think, feel and act very differently.

• Caution: Notice, in fact, that words and concepts are most often used as noise to disturb real listening and fill the void offered by silence, to disrupt the intimacy of true presence to oneself and with others.

In social and professional contexts, words are too easily offered to fill in the more important blanks, hide a necessary solitude or escape from real attention to oneself, to others and to the surrounding universe.  This is particularly true in groups and other collective environments such as teams and organizations where it has become extremely rare to find a profound appreciation of the beauty and truth that can be found in the depth and warmth of shared silence.

When language and words generally pretend to communicate and inform, they more often serve as protective noise or as shields.  Too often they are used to avoid, divert, convince and impose, to protect one or others, to reassure and put to sleep.  Silence however, can often be the best way to accept, to receive and to welcome.  Silence makes true space for diversity.  Real attentive listening and the respect of diversity come together and nest in hollows, they blossom in meandering paths. Real respectful attention without attention grows in the empty spaces and volumes created by shared silence.

Consequently, writing an article on general attentive presence through deep listening as one of the particular qualities of a master coach’s posture is a truly paradoxical adventure.  One would better be silent, provide a blank page, and let the reader expand in an open and fertile space for personal exploration within the volumes of their own reflection. That would be the one most congruent way to help the reader consider that only silence can permit the understanding of attentive presence and listening, and consequently of masterful systemic coaching. Unfortunately for many readers, blank pages generally face the writer, not their public.  So in order to progress in the direction of learning to tame emptiness and fully partner with silence, we 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, contemplation and meditation.

Note that this text can both serve as a general introduction to coaching, and as a way to delve deeper into the art of masterful systemic coaching.  Indeed, it can read to get introduced to the profession or studied when one has leaned all the tricks of the trade.  Some very practical introductory texts are presented on this website, and other very popular introductory writings on coaching are extensively presented on the market.  Most of these articles and writings present complete, very practical sets of professional coaching tools, techniques, skills, and know-how.  Again, these will not be repeated here.

To summarize, rather than focusing on how to do coaching, the text below presents how to truly be a masterful coach.  It will attempt to demonstrate that only this quality of being resting on 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. In short, rather than focused on how to do coaching, the question approached throughout the text below is how to be a truly systemic master coach. 

• Example: It is indeed difficult to constantly live with a truly systemic perspective in our everyday lives, observing coherent patterns between personal and collective behavioral sequences over seconds, minutes, hours, months and years.  

• Caution: More than in any other individual or collective accompanying approach, coaching aims to implement systemic strategies that are totally respectful of client autonomy in order to permit their own dynamic and emerging forms and solutions.

First measure that in most professional coach communities, listening is one of the least publicized coaching skills.  Listening is indeed rarely the key subject in advanced theory and practice-related articles. Listening is only very occasionally the central focus of deliveries by keynote speakers or the subject of round tables in major conferences.  It could consequently seem that just simply keeping quiet and listening is an obvious and acquired competency in all professional coaching circles.

Observe indeed that articles and conferences on more complex, intellectual and apparently dynamic tools and techniques are much more commonly exposed and that these attract much more attention from the public at large.  Asking smart and powerful questions, restating or reformulating client statements with precision, clarifying client agreements and expected outcomes, co-designing effective and very structured action plans, etc. all seem to be much richer, more noble and more usefully active coaching concepts.  They do indeed attract much more attention and are much more developed in numerous and extensive professional writings and texts.

As a matter of fact, note that in the business world in general, all complex theoretical models that are accompanied by proposals for affirmative action are much more appreciated than simple, humble, light and effective approaches.  Let us not forget that in  occidental cultures, simplicity is too often synonymous with stupidity.  Between simple and simplistic, the boundary is surprisingly thin.  In coaching too, the general accent is often stressed on more masculine skills such as powerful questions and very performing action plans.  This may be to underline that the field is very serious and professional, focused on achieving probing and performing results.

In this choice of focus, there is surely a marketing and sales imperative.  It is difficult to sell to organizational top dogs a minimalist method that rests on respect, warm silence and deep listening.  To impress a potential client, it may indeed be difficult to brag that a coach is a professional that practices the art of respectful attention without undue intentions.  It may not appear very serious to sustain that coaches are fundamental witnesses and listeners, and that they very consciously choose to leave all the available space wide open to allow for a creative unfolding of client potential. 

Also, a minimalist approach based on listening does not lend itself to exclusive and complex theoretical constructs that will attract the top theoreticians in the field of relationships.  Silence and listening will not give presenters matter to elaborate numerous slides and impressive power-pointing shows in international conferences and conventions. So it is definitely not easy to turn attentive listening and coaching presence into a really sexy selling concept.  Putting forward other apparently more consistent competencies such as elaborating client agreements and triangular contracts and action plans and really-really powerful questions, and follow up gimmicks, etc. can indeed serve to better differentiate coach professional identities.

• Caution: Unfortunately, even in sales situations, this attention given to sometimes over-active coach competencies is often detrimental to simple, patient, humble and respectful listening, permitted by an attentive presence that alone will allow the natural emerging of real client needs and issues.

Consider also that most individuals consider that listening and attentive presence is relatively easy.  It simply means keeping quiet long enough to catch the essence of the subject and understand what it is all about.  Listening is being with another person just enough time to establish the beginings of a trustful relationship.  After that, we can move quickly on to more serious discussions focused on action.  In reality, listening is perceived as such an inactive competency that it is perceived as passive.  So, to feel better, we develop the concept of active listening, soon to become hyperactive.

In fact, the larger public too often gives listening skills a rather negative connotation. To be perceived as a competent winner, one should rather know how to debate, to convince, to argue, to push and to sell.  One should demonstrate that they know where they stand, that they have opinions, and that they know where they want to go.  Listening is indeed too often assimilated with the fact that one doesn’t know.  It demonstrates lack of reassurance or excess doubt. 

Technically, listening is often defined as just not doing anything else. Consequently, when one is quiet or just remains silent, when one does not intervene nor answer, if one is not impatient and agitated, then, one is just listening.  Simply assimilated to not doing something else, real listening is one of the life competencies that may be the least studied, the least taught.  Paradoxically, it is also the skill that most appreciated by those who like to talk, and don’t know how to listen.

The result is obvious in numerous 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 for them, than knowing how to listen to another in order to respond intelligently?  All through our different phases of life, we have all apparently 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 attempt to negotiate the possibility of skipping the few and short 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, etc. 

Sometimes the beginner is also very impatient to fill their pouch with numerous rich and complex techniques.  They are behaving in the same way as beginning salespeople who want sales techniques, tools, methods, procedures and other skills that will give them some elements of predictability and control., when they just need to learn how to listen to clients and respect them.   The tools are in fact sometimes useful and can be reassuring.  However this need for tools may motivate the beginning coach to integrate into their coaching toolbox numerous theoretical and technical techniques that have strictly nothing to do with the profession and that very rapidly leave all too little space for listening to the client.

• Caution: If coaching is reputed to be an open and non-directive approach that offers clients all the available space in order to allow them to develop their own autonomous searching process, it would be paradoxical to do this while asking them to respect methods, follow procedures, participate in exercises and adapt themselves to theories and other preconceptions brought in by the coach.

For the beginner in the field, nonetheless, active competencies and all well argued and complex theoretical constructs are all too often very seriously considered at the expense of listening.  Consequently, in their impatience to learn what they believe to be the more important skills of the trade, neophytes do not wish to waste too much of their precious time on the one most central competency of coaching: that of attentive, respecting, silent listening without any intention whatsoever on the client process nor on the object of their quest.

• Caution: As a consequence, rather than considering that coaching is a fundamentally new and original profession, experts from other relation-oriented fields come to coaching simply expecting to add a few secondary practical techniques to their already firmly established frame of reference and skill set. 
  

• Caution: Newcomers to coaching need to stop and consider that it is the newest most dynamic profession of the third millennium, that it could bring numerous experts in diverse fields to totally question their deeply rooted personal and professional foundations.  The original frame of reference of coaching could truly transform their perception of reality and fundamentally change their way of being in their everyday environment.
  

• Caution: This purified frame of reference that rests on a simple humble presence also means that a coach does not listen to clients in the same way as other professionals.  In numerous cases, coaches do not listen at all to everything that experts in other fields dearly hold in focus and then attentively analyze.

The real capacity to listen as a master coach represents the essential foundation on which rest the correct use of all this profession's other tools and techniques.  Only profoundly respectful listening and attentive presence allows the other coach competencies to unfold the power that makes more than superficial behavioral and linguistic tools to make them participate in the creation of a formidable transformational space. 

When training coaches, one can observe that this particular form of attentive presence without intention is very difficult for most to understand, almost painful for all to learn and implement.

Consequently, developing attentive presence is not learning how to pull out an occasional superficial technique, it concerns changing the way one is built, modifying the equilibrium of the way one is.  Truly, acquiring attentive presence cannot be improvised.  One needs practice and then more practice.

• Caution: to acquire mastery, one needs personal discipline.  To acquire a discipline one needs personal mastery.  Obviously, when successful, this process ends by transforming the apprentice.  This is what makes coaching a trade that is practically an alchemical quest.  It has very important lasting consequences in terms of personal transformations, especially for the coach.

Given that listening is the least active coaching skill, the one that least calls for talking and doing, it is naturally the one that is most revealing of a coach’s way of being.

• When coaches are silent and inactive, they cannot hide behind their verb, their knowledge, their hyperactivity and their tools.
• Listening without interfering or manifesting oneself, remaining open and in silence, peacefully present to the relationship is almost synonymous to relinquish all control and baring one’s soul.
• Unconditionally offering another person the space to grow, receiving their expression as it is, accepting their presence as it comes forth calls or a fundamental capacity to accept if not to unconditionally welcome diversity.
• Listening is also simply being present to another and to oneself without artifice, without restraints, without fear of the intimacy that regularly emerges from relationships that unfold in unhindered shared volumes.
• Listening is learning to trust the pertinence and coherence of what others offer, and trusting the beauty of all that is bound to emerge from client dialogue and from the much larger, mysterious, almost universal shared context.

Knowing how to listen like a master coach can therefore open numerous doors and windows to new environments.  It can lead to very unconventional perspectives.  Often, with some practice, profound listening can give coaches and their clients regular access to spaces and dimensions accessible only through meditative practice and spiritual quests.

The truly listening coach will reach a form of transparency to personal ego.  There may emerge a feeling of loss of self, to the benefit of client context, of the coaching relationship and of a larger shared context.  Through attentive presence truly free of all intentions, coaches can suddenly be part of an active development process that almost totally escapes their control.

Take heed that this type of coaching work is not limited to life coaching, individual coaching, professional or executive coaching or team and organizational coaching.  In master coaching, all these illusionary boundaries disappear one after the other.  Real mastery in coaching does not rest on a world-view by which the human dimension is sliced and diced in so many exclusive marketiing fields.  Master coaches are simply centered on their clients in all their personal, social, professional and divine dimensions.

• Example: A CEO of a service company asked for coaching during a difficult transition period to ensure her effectiveness in business while she also accompanied her husband who was dying of terminal cancer.  The coaching sessions quickly slipped into also dealing with her home and children, each painfully working through their mourning process at different speeds.

As different issues come up in the course of coaching sessions and sequences, a master coach is totally available to all the facets their clients want to and need to cover.  All client themes are intricately meshed to form one large undivided area of concern.  By intensely listening to their clients, coaches can feel they are gradually becoming transparent to themselves and that they forget or erase their personal concerns to the benefit of whatever the client needs to achieve, in a shared context that is much larger than the partners at work.  This free attention can sometimes resemble a transparence of identity, in which all the interactive space is totally left available to the client’s undivided quest.

With an attentive intention-free presence, master coaches actively participate in creating a developmental space or volume.  This space is what mainly permits the development process that will embark both the client and the coach.  By letting go of the coaching process, coaches in fact accept that the process can start including them.  In the final analysis, the coaching process escapes the control of the coach to become the one true coaching tool.

Evidently, in coaching, profound listening and its underlying attentive presence become key competencies that supplant, facilitate and support all the other coaching skills.  Listening is the skill that most embodies the fundamental coaching philosophy.  It permits:

Below are presented and detailed numerous facets of attentive presence and listening without intention and of how these systemic coaching competencies permit subsequent emerging perspectives that can fundamentally transform both coaches and their clients.

If  listening is different for a master coach than for other professionals, that is because it subtly and directly rests on the fundamental frame of reference of coaching.  To really understand how to listen as a master coach, one must always keep in mind that coaching firmly stands on a number of fundamental principles that have almost existential consequences.

• First, in coaching, the client is a priori considered as a unique, intelligent, capable, powerful, honest and truly motivated being.  The sole fact that clients initiate a collaborative process with coaches to improve their personal or professional capacities and context is in itself an obvious proof of their motivation and capacity to take responsibility[1].
• Secondly, coaching clients are a priori considered as very well informed as far as their issues are concerned.  They know their issues as no other person ever can.  Each client indeed has a complete and intimate knowledge of personal projects, goals, problems, vision and ambitions in a way that no coach can ever fathom.  

These two essential principles are foundational to any active coaching process.  Consequently, coaches can consider that detailed listening and analysis of any individual or collective client’s words, focused on the detailed description of the subject of their issues and concerns is of very little benefit for either the coach or the client.

• Caution: In fact, clients can only relate to their coaches what they already know.  Consequently, the detailed and often reiterative client description of any situation already known to them can only reinforce their acquired frame of reference and inventoried perspectives.

When an individual or team client calls on a coach, it is precisely because all they already know and understand has not frankly helped them achieve their goals nor realize their ambitions. To be sure, their restrictive acquired frame of reference and their inventoried perspectives have generally not led clients to any positive outcome.  That is precisely why they feel they need a coach.

Consequently, one can assume that accompanying clients on an already beaten track that has been studied and revisited numerous times will not likely bring extraordinarily new solutions. Unless of course, if the experts who are accompanying theses clients consider that they are much better informed, or more intelligent than the latter.

• Caution:  For a coach, what indeed could be the use of accompanying clients up the same avenues they have explored time and again to the point of calling on another party, specifically to get out of those dead ends?

To be sure, some clients may sometimes lack knowledge, competencies, strategy or information.  Some clients may not have all the needed means to alone fully analyze and understand the intricate details of their issues.  They may not have the technical and intellectual capacities to achieve their ambitions. Those clients could surely benefit from acquiring the services of a trainer, a consultant, an expert or a specialist.   But surely, they would not need (only) the competencies of a coach.

• Example: Consider a coaching situation concerning Olympic sports champions.  These world-class winners often feel the need to be accompanied by coaches.  If these coaches knew more about each of the specific sports, however, they should then be winning the medals in the place of the champions.

Top-level performers are generally not limited by a lack of technical knowledge in their chosen fields.   When they need coaches, it is to be accompanied to achieve even better results in their own performance, in their own way, and fully using the hight level of expertise they have already achieved.

• Example: An project leader engineer works with a coach to find solutions to put a limit to constant interventions from her larger work environment.  This environment is endlessly asking for complementary information, studies and analyses on all the risks that may be inherent to the project the engineer is leading.  Of course, these excessive demands are having a very negative effect on the client team’s capacity to meet project deadlines, and may significantly increase its final cost.
  

As this engineer works with the coach, she cannot refrain from detailing and over-detailing all the information she has about the nature project, the environment, the types of demands, the deadlines, the organizational structure, the team's reactions.  In effect the engineer is almost embarking into a form of training, telling the coach all about the complex mechanics of project management in a high-risk endeavor.  If we observe the relational process in the coaching relationship, we can notice that the client is repeating with the coach what the environment has been imposing on her.

It becomes more and more obvious that to limit demands for complementary analyses and information in the project-management situation, the engineer will have to assume a number of relational risks.  In as much as she doesn’t feel ready to do so, the engineering is over-analyzing the problem and repeating the process with the coach.  The project manager is put in a situation to learn how to better manage her boundaries and set limits with an anxious and excessively controling, informative environment. 

The coach proceeds to first focus on how to set limits within the coaching relationship, in order  to model how the client could go about doing the same, considering that all options contain some political risks and that the client is not readily willing to take them.

• Note: In almost all coaching situations, the answers to the client issue will not emerge from the content of the problem that the client is reiterating in lavish details.  The process by which the client is approaching the issue in the relationship with the coach reveals much more pertinent information about the client’s limits on the one hand, and about solutions that could be conducive to solving the client issues, on the other.

In the above real situation, to look for solutions where the engineer has been searching is useless.  That engineer technically knows more than enough about the situation to conclude the project to full satisfaction and within the political reality of the context.  Coaches can surely accompany this type of situation if they stay out of the technical and relational context that the clients know all too well, to the point of completely adapting to it’s ineffectiveness, and to the point of repeating the process in the relationship with the coach.

The same type of paradox will occur when accompanying teams and organizations.  In the course of these collective coaching processes, detailed objectives and the means to achieve them are usually carefully laid out and proposed to coaches by organization leaders and their representatives.  These same leaders and representatives then want to analyze and over-define the coaching process to determine a procedure, as if a coaching process was the equivalent of a training rollout or of a solution-oriented consulting procedure.  To be sure, in each case, the prefered client approach is the only one the client knows.

These leaders and their privileged representatives are little accustomed to implementing an emerging process when they would rather have a very controlled, efficient and well-planned action plan determinately focused on achieving their stated goals.  Much as in individual coaching, however, team and organization coaching needs to leave ample room for the unexpected emerging perspectives and solutions to surface once the process has started.  Much like in individual coaching, if the head absolutely needs and wants to control and direct, the results will rarely be ones that rests on new perspectives that permit the achievement of innovating results. 

Consequently, it is important for both individual and team coaches not to hurry down a path that has been predetermined by client reasoning, without listening beyond these well though-out words that describe what the system knows and has always known.  In coaching, the obvious and logical initial objectives stated by individual and collective clients  are there to reveal the limits of a restraining frame of reference.  What clients are really trying to achieve generally lies outside of the way they tend to define the shape of their problems or the form of their ambitions.  Most often, to achieve their goals, clients first need to liberate themselves from the constraints of how they state their issues.

• Caution:  For a systemic coach, if a client could indeed define a problem, ambition or goal in an appropriate way, then they would just as well know how to achieve results in a more than satisfactory manner.  They would not need coaching.
  

If rather than immediately proceeding down their predefined tracks, organizations choose to call on a coach; it is precisely to be heard beyond their words and installed convictions, to be understood beyond their definitions and to be accompanied beyond their usual ways of perceiving, understanding and implementing.  It often seems that in master coaching, differences between individuals, teams and organizations in the way they state their issues and ambitions very quickly disappear.

[1] Of course, this particularly applies to self-designated clients.

• the external boundaries of the field explored by the client,
• beyond the implicit frame of reference and around the client’s words,
• focusing on the underlying perceptual architecture that supports the client’s existence,

• 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. 
  

• Example: In team and organization coaching contexts, clients almost systematically expect coaches to make at least a dozen preliminary individual interviews, in order to fully understand their organizational context, before they initiate any collective process.
  

• 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 creative opportunities. 
  

• Example: In team and organization coaching, the coach can immediately avoid preliminary interviews with the pretext that if the work is to develop collective collaboration and team work, individual perceptions do not count.  Indeed, meaning within a collective system is never composed of added meaning, originating from the parts.
  

• Example: What could be the meaning when organizations expect coaches to carry out individual interviews before working with an individual or collective internal client?  Does that illustrate that all collective work within that organization is first well prepared and finalized in one-on-one preliminary meetings?  How much does the organization know how to work in collective collaboration and transparency? 
  

• 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.

• Caution:  If what coaching clients define as problems today were in fact very good past solutions?  In that case what were their original problems, and what could be other creative solutions today?

• Caution: Systemic coaching listening is a skill that is addressed to an expanded client frame of reference, beyond the limits conveyed through client dialogue.  It focuses on the punctuation, the landscape, the context and issues that are much larger and deeper than the ones offered by the initial client descriptive and emotional state.

Consequently, to effectively listen and accompany clients, coaches need neither to analyze nor to understand the detailed content of client concerns. This affirmation may seem to be paradoxical.  It may even surprise all those who have not experienced the specific nature of a masterful coaching process where the importance of listening to the content of a client's dialogue is quite relative. In reality, master coaches regularly confirm that it is very realistically possible to accompany clients in fields totally foreign to a specific coach’s knowledge and background.  Indeed, clients definitely don't need to train their coaches into understanding the mechanics of their issues or ambitions.

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 each client's dialogue.  Client issues and problems presented in a specific session 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.

• Caution: In a way, it would be more precise or correct to say that master coaches don't listen to clients.  Master coaches listen with clients. 

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 simply explaining things to the coach, simply aiming to get the latter to understand.  When clients begin to speak to themselves, their coaches gain in transparency.  Consequently, the real coaching process begins when coaches attentively listen with clients rather than to them and when clients start to follow their coaches, by listening to themselves. 

• Caution: An appropriate masterful listening relationshiip in the coaching can generally be perceived in client eyes.  When clients are searching within themselves, their eyes are looking inwardly or elsewhere than at their coach.

In fact, 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.  A coaching sequence first focused on short-term objectives, concrete projects or urgent problems can indeed often be perceived as preliminary warm-ups for a workout or entrées to a more copious meal.  They indeed need to be perceived as mere invitations or simple doors that give access to much larger landscapes, small windows that open to views of much vaster horizons. With these introductions, individual or collective clients are often actually searching for accesses to much more important internal dimensions within which they will gradually wish to expand, through a personal dialogue, with their coach simply posing as a respectful witness.

• Caution: In fact, in systemic and masterful coaching, the initial client dialogues focused on any particular subject are to be perceived as mere client introductions or invitations.  These issues or subjects are doors that open to much larger lanscapes or windows that invite into much more important client universes.  Why then, remain on the threshold of these invitations and simply focus on the shape of the door or window?
  

Consequently, in order to discover and explore the much larger or more fundamental  individual or collective client issues, coach and client face-to-face conversations first need to evolve into internal dialogues where coaches are essentially listening with clients, while they seriously begin to listen to themselves.

• Caution: To understand means to  seize or to apprehend, much as when the police apprehend a criminal.  These words underline that wanting to understand really means to want to seize, to hold or to control.

• Caution: Let us keep in mind that in coaching, this control is entirely under the client’s responsibility. 

• Caution: Master coaches will not attempt to understand, nor classify, nor lighten, nor structure, nor remodel client dialogues. 

Ideally, coaches welcome client words by leaving the coaching relational space and context wide open for client expression, without any other form of receptacle than the coach presence.  In this way, coach listening and presence is completely free of intention. 

• Caution: 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 favored methodology rather than just focusing on clients as they are, free of classifications and categories.

Also, when coaches want to differentiate themselves on their professional market, they maneuver to build themselves a strong identity or brand.  To do this, they often design and market a personalized and attractively packaged coaching approach related to a specific set of exclusive skills and tools.  These tools are often complicated when not complex.  the result is that a number of coaches present theoretical niches or expertise, put forward seductive tools, and become systematic in their way to approach clients. Often, they simply elaborate a slightly innovative personal twist on an existing theoretical model or they add numerous behavioral details to a presence that would gain in remaining simple, humble and transparent. 

Superficially, this marketing strategy helps seduce individual and organizational clients with personalized products that help differentiate one coach from the mass of others.  Very paradoxically, this marketing strategy to attract clients to a personal product is instrumental to cut coaches from a frank, simple and direct relationship with their clients.   Subtly, the seductive tool steps in between the client and the coach.  It becomes a shield that protects from the possibility of a simple transparent relationship between one and another, one and a group. 

Furthermore, identity building by adding fancy intellectual twists to coaching is generally conducive to coach ego development rather than to the attention given to clients.  This is also done at client expense in as much as they are very subtly asked to admire a tool or concept at the expense of focusing on their own objectives and ambitions.  The partners are to focus on the accompanying professional and their knowledge rather than on the accompanied and their paramount quest.

• Caution: 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, at the expense of learning to develop in their personal way. 

• Caution: Numerous coaches expect their sessions to finish successfully, that their clients be satisfied, that their results be measurable, that their action plans be solid and quantifiable... 

• Caution: 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 the systemic coaching process to move to success.

• Caution: In all therapies, the quality of the therapist's attentive presence to therapeutic clients is the real cure, much more than the often over-publicized therapeutic method.  On this subject, consult the article by Carlo Mittendorf: Best practices in psychotherapy, coaching and counseling http://www.mittendorff.net

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 the coaching profession drive its members to undertake a deep and committing personal quest.  Consequently, learning how to be a coach is unquestionably transformational for the coach.

Rather than focus on a specific client theme or issue, a particular problem, a punctual situation during a session, coach listening is an intention-free and simple, ample attentive presence, open to the much larger or global client context.  In effect, no matter the subject of client dialoque, master coaches accompany clients by staying focused on each one's total, intrinsic way of being. This comprehensive approach that consists in listening to  clients rather than to their issues permits a surprising economy of means to achieve an extraordinary potential of results.

• Caution: This section will demonstrate how a coach goes beyond just perceiving  given clients at a precise moment in their lives, facing specific situations. to achieve defined goals.  Whatever the subject or issue of a coaching sequence, session or relationship, the concerned client is perceived as a being in continuous evolution, moving forward in a comprehensive and coherent quest, endlessly becoming whatever is essential to their whole existence.
  

To achieve this presence to total client being, a coach does not only listen with two ears but with their heart, their soul and all their other available senses.  To become masterful,  these senses need to be focused and sharpened

When approached in this comprehensive perspective all coaching concerning varied and apparently segmented client subjects begin to benefit from the momentum of a life quest, the energy of a lasting motivation to develop, the emerging alignment of a fundamental existential longing.  If client issues are perceived as superficial, temporal or technical without the deeper personal meaning they convey, all problem solving and all client goals will require much more energy to come to fruitful resolutions.  All client concerns must be perceived as limited expressions of the much larger fundamental meaning of each client's existential and essential aspirations.

With this much more global approach of clients, vital energy gets liberated, motivations multiply, the fundamental client power deploys and the coaching process suddenly seems to allow miracles.  When clients are accompanied in this larger masterful perspective, new potentials emerge out of the blue and solutions seem to surface and get implemented with surprisingly natural ease.  This type of approach to coaching seems to effortlessly float or surf on underlying energies with a fundamental economy of means.

To define what caracterizes master coach listening and silence, it is necessary to be more precise about all that concerns the whole context to which they are attentively present before, during and after coaching relationships.  Of course, this presence includes all that goes on within the coach and the coach's life.  Consequently, a coach doesn't only listen with two ears but also with all the other senses.  In this sense, totally present, coaches feel, and perceive all that concerns the mental, emotional and environmental client context and all that transpires from that context into the client-coach relationship. 

To reduce this quality of attentive presence without intentions to the notions of  silence and listening is almost criminally misleading and the root of much confusion.  It leads to the misunderstanding of this fundamental competency of coaching mastery.  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 verbal expressions suddenly becomes almost insignificant.  Attentive presence to the whole mental, emotional, physical, energetic, relational, social, professional, economic, etc. context of the client is obviously much more significant.  In general, the first practical result of this fundamental presence to the client and to the coach is the creation a form of coach-client resonance.

• Caution: Resonance is not a simple agreement focused on client expected outcomes as expressed in the initial steps of a coaching sequence, session or relationship.  It rather concerns the way systemic coaches tune in to client rhythm, how coach and clients harmoniously breathe together into a common inspiration, how they operate together in open heart soul-searching, each on the edge of their very being.

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 internal rhythm does the client  heart beat? 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 are the limits of the client's internal and external universes? What are the client beauties, boundaries, aspirations and fears? This list can indeed be infinite.

• Caution: This master coach systemic listening, the profound, undivided coach attention to the globallity of each client's whole system, the unified coach presence to the ecology of client existance also includes the coach as a very pertinent partner in their shared transformational quest.

This attention could be considered very complex if master coaches rest on the principle that the ensemble to which they pay attention is divided, attempting to separate the coach, the client, the environment, the time of their conversation, etc.  Much the contrary, master coaches observe all these dimensions as if they were absolutely undifferentiated nor separated from the coach and the client.  True systemic listening make total abstraction of the very existence of separations or boundaries.  A systemic presence indeed rests on the essential principle that boundaries are illusions, that one whole, undivided reality exists and beats to the same unified pulse, in total resonance and singular harmony.

Practiclly speaking, master coaches are totally present to a contextual unified whole that has no internal or external boundary whatsoever.  This is much like listening to an orchestra playing a symphony within which the client and the coach were two instruments at the service of a much larger purpose.  It is therefore paramount that the coach also accepts to be an integral part of this harmonic ensemble, and to then attribute the integrality of all perceived meaning to the client and the client quest.

• Caution: With a systemic perception of reality, the word individual can define clients and coaches with a slightly different slant.  Both are not only undivided from themselves, but they are undivided from their environment.  They can both be perceived as undivided parts of the much larger context within which they exist.

The pages below invite coaches to seriously consider this unitary, integral or integrated perception of client contexts, erasing all illusionary boundaries between coach, client and the larger context in which they actively participate in developing meaning.  This will allow for a very different exploration of some common phenomena that occur during coaching conversations and accompanying quests, that are rarely approached when begining coaches embark on their professional adventure in the field.

• Example:  On a friday just before Easter, a coach leaves for a scheduled meeting taking place in a borrowed office, arranged by an expatriated client visiting company headquarters.  Considering the security procedures in place, the coach is to call the client on his cell phone when she arrrives on location.  With the address in hand, the coach is in the underground train when she suddenly realizes that she has forgotten to take the client's phone number.  She trusfully settles down in the train, feeling that somehow or other, all will turn out very well.  At the next stop, the train doors open, and her client walks in, just in front of her seat.

The objective chances that in a big capital city, the coach and client take the same train, on the same line, in the same car and come to the same door at the same time are rather slim.  But the partners in this coincidence smiled as if the situation was in fact normal and well deserved, and proceeded to enter into their planned conversation, on the way to the meeting that in fact had come to them.  Isn't life a charm?

Systemic master coaches welcome this type of experience of synchronicity with humility and recognize the deep interpersonal resonance on which it rests.  Synchronicity is indeed known to occur between people who have strong bonds with each other.  But beyond listing these occurences with grantitude, and wonder at how the marvellous regularly seeps into our daily lives, the purpose of this section is also to offer reflections and some method as to how to use interpersonal and systemic resonance in masterful coaching.  In the last part of this article, we will then approach the links between resonance and significative emerging coincidences for clients and for their master coaches.

The chapters below propose to consider that resonance between coaches and clients, emerging solutions and patterns, and synchronicity will regularly occur when these partners are in the right state of reception.  As presented above, this state first rests on all that a master coach doesn't do, abandons, lets go of, and stops identifying with.  Fundamentally, a master coach is to be in a peaceful, almost meditative state of mind and heart, without anxiety, intention, procedure, plan or need.  Master coaches are simply and trustfully there as witnesses, in deep listening and presence, in a state of receptive welcome of all that the environing universe will choose to offer to the partners in the accompanying process. 

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 clients and how these interface with their immediate environment.  In this perspective, the coach must also imperatively consider they are an integral part of that client environment.  Indeed, far from being a neutral external observer, 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 does the client look at or observe the coach? How much does the client trust 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? How is the client focused on achieving results? How does the client accept and work with personal silences and coach silences?  How does the client accept positive feedback and direct confrontation?  How does the client search, find, build, and assume personal responsibility or commit? How does the client interface and partner with the coach?  How does the client accept proximity, intimacy or distance with the coach?  How indeed does the client live with and relate in the presence of the coach?

• On the one hand, all the above indicators can illustrate the way clients refer to themselves, see themselves, question themselves and find their answers, respect themselves, explore and accept their own intimate dimensions.
• On the other hand, these same indicators reveal how clients establish relationships with close personal and professional partners and their much larger environments

In this perspective, it is paramount that coaches consider that they are an integral part of the client personal if not intimate environment.  Far from being neutral occasional partners in a strictly professional undertaking, coaches are very personal and significant actors in client patterns.  Systemic coaches and their clients are indeed perceived to be integral parts of a shared, undivided larger ensemble within which they participate as active members.

In the coaching relationship, all coach feeling, emotions, reactions, thoughts, intuitions, etc can provide the coach with a large number of relatively precise information on the quality and nature of interfaces established by clients in other contexts.

• Example:  During an individual coaching coaching session, a CEO approached her coach with her immense difficulty with delegation.  Her coaching goal was to develop a number of means by which she could allow more space for others in her immediate work environment to take more initiatives, responsibilities and develop as professionals.

As she described the situation and work environment, her goals and her difficulties in implementing practical changes, she spoke rapidly, her presentation was well structured, detailed and complete with numerous illustrative examples, her tone of voice was assertive and she regularly looked at the coach to check if she had his undivided attention.  The coach attentively listened the client expose the whole presentation without interruption.

As this is going on, however, the coach is feeling that something particular is going on in the relationship with the client.  In fact, the client is expressing herself and presenting her problem in the same way she would in any other context, with any other willing listener whatsoever.   She uninterruptedly follows her own thoughts, just occasionally checking to see if the coach is still present, The coach gradually feels relatively passive and rather useless, just a pawn in an unfulfilling relationship.

Coaches gain to be attentive to the quality of the space they occupy in the relationships and interfaces with each one of their clients.  As illustrated in the above situation, the space offered by the client illustrates the quality of space she offers herself in her own life on the one hand, and the space she offers her partners in general in personal and professional environments on the other.  Of course, this includes the people in her organization to which she says she would like to delegate.  In fact, the coach perceives the client monologue as almost suffocating.  Much like the coach, other client partners can probably feel that she is monopolizing all the vital space in their relationship.  The client can herself feel that she is lacking vital time, silence and space in her own life, all of which would allow her to really exist.

• Caution: When coaches are attentive to their client relationships, they will notice that the quality of their client interfaces during a coaching sequence illustrate the quality of interfaces clients entertain with themselves and with their personal and professional environments,

In the above real situation, the client paradoxically keeps the floor for ten uninterrupted minutes while talking about her will to delegate.  She has lost her silence and fills all the space while paradoxically saying she needs more space in her life.  She illustrates how she lacks distance, to change perspective in her management position.  The consequence of her interactive patterns with all including with her coach, of course, is that there is little space for others, and no room for delegation.  If her true ambition is to delegate more, and develop more vital space for her own existence, the behavior she illustrates with her coach is totally opposite to this aspiration.

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

In this sense, almost as chemical revelators or attentive receptors, coaches can consider themselves an integral part of each of their client’s universes.  Coach client relationships serve to reveal client relationships to themselves and to others. If coaches succeed to 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.

• Example:  Recurrently,  a relatively silent client very briefly answers  all coach questions and then waits in attentive silence, patiently observing the coach, expecting another question. 

Rapidly, most non-systemic coaches in such situations could start feeling the pressure of being invited to have to produce, think, question, and carry the coaching relationship with a slow and passive client.  This situation could indeed indicate that the client is delegating the whole accompanying process and all development initiatives to the coach, demonstrating very little direct responsibility in any personal quest.   The coach could perceive being an actor in a relationship within which the client position is of relatively low energy, slow and passive.  The questions for the coach could then be : how is this indicating what the client initiates in other personal and professional relationships, in other environments, with other people?  What is the common pattern between the coach-client relationship and whatever issue the client may be wanting to solve or ambition the client may be wanting to achieve?

• Example:  A Young coach once explained she carefully observed her new clients and personal partners.  If these persons had a tendency to lean on nearby furniture, walls and other objects in the environment, she would immediately become very cautious.  She knew that sooner or later, these same people would attempt to lean on her.

Consequently, when coaches feel they are carrying too much responsibility in their client relationships, that they are invited to direct them, that they feel pressure to become responsible for client progress, that they get weary or tired during or after coaching sequences, etc. it is useful for them to immediately take these feelings into account.   If these feelings and sensations belong to the coach client relationship, they can give excellent leads as to both the coach’s and the client’s dynamics in their own personal relationship to themselves and in their interactions with other personal and professional partners in their environments.

Likewise 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, a need to breathe, step back and get perspective, change positions, or again if they suddenly have an unusual though, they can often assume that their personal reaction is pertinent to the common context developed between them and the client.

• Attention: In a truly systemic perception, it is always useful to harbor the principle that when facing a client, nothing the coach is feeling happens by chance.

If systemic thinking stipulates that there are no real boundaries between entities we perceive as separate, then coaches can start perceiving their client relationships with a with totally new perspective.  >How does a sad child in a family express the real unexpressed feelings of other family members, or of the whole family system?  How does a resistant or distrusting member of a team express the underlying resistance or distrust of other team members or of the whole system?  How does a very vocal disgruntled employee in a professional context express the dissatisfaction of a much larger segment employee population?

• Caution:  When an emotion appears, manifested by one or several members of a couple, a family, a team or an organization, a systemic coach can always toy with the principle that the emotion belongs to all the members that do not openly express it.

All apparently individual emotions, thoughts, behaviors, etc. can be perceived as manifestations or expressions of a much larger undivided ensemble to which that individual belongs.  In this systemic perception, all personal manifestations from each individual can be perceived as a partial bit of collective expression simply voiced by a designated speaker or emissary.   And systemic coaches always remember that individual clients are integral parts of much larger collective entities.

• Example:  In the course of a team-coaching process of a system belonging to a much larger dynamic organization, the team was taking a well deserved after lunch break, around the pool of a hosting hotel.  The participants started to let off steam in a noisy and virile game, sometimes trying to include the coach in their horsing around.  In the process, three of the participants ended up thrown into the pool, and one of them was superficially wounded.

It turns out that within that organization, one of the important collective issues is the amount of collective pressure exerted on individuals that are often pushed to conform to the intensely stressful environment, in a rhythm that often made little case on individual needs, expecting long work hours that left little space for personal life.  In this professional context, there were numerous leaves for sicknesses and an abnormally high accident rate compared to their benchmark competition.

For the attentive systemic master coach, all that takes place during, before and after a coaching context, during work, breaks, lunches, preparation and follow-ups, all situations are arenas for the indirect expression of fundamental client issues.  Everything that happens in the individual or collective client-coach relationship can illustrate the rhythms, the energies, the passion, the limits, etc. of other client interfaces in their other personal and professional contexts.  Coaches are naturally invited to become integral parts of client dynamics.  They can take all these invitations into account and use this consciousness of client dynamics to better accompany their clients in their personal and professional transformational quest.

Consequently,  in the systemic sense of the word, a true and totally integrative attentive presence to client contexts includes being present to all the spontaneous coach reactions when facing a client.  Totally are in fact totally integrated into client interactive systems, In fact, complete attentive presence in masterful 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 all-inclusive presence to this whole ensemble, a deep listening to that inseparable system is the foundation for systemic coaching.  When this precise intention-free attentive presence transcends all the illusionary boundaries between coaches and their clients, then can emerge original forms and patterns that can offer new perspectives and original systemic solutions that will truly be pertinent to client needs and ambitions.

When in a peer relationship such as within systemic coaching as it is described in this text and within all other relational systems that display non-hierarchical flat or network type of relationships and operational interfaces, there is a direct link between:

• Spontaneous or natural resonance between the interacting members of the systems,
• Spontaneous surfacing or emergence, from the bottom up, of new forms and perspectives,
• Spontaneous apparition of pertinent coincidences, or separate events that appear to be linked by their common significance, or again what are commonly called occurrences of synchronicity.

One of the principal characteristics of flat or peer relational architectures such as those existing in a truly masterful coaching process is the very low or inexistent level of centralized control, of over-structuring programs and processes, of imposed methodologies and of rigid procedures.  A master coach’s intention-free attentive presence intentionally serves to create to create this type of interfacing with clients if not with the whole larger coaching context and client environment.

In this type of relational system, the interacting partners all have the possibility to act both as free electrons and together as a unit.  This interface characteristic permits a form of interactivity that will gradually allow for a natural resonance between the partners, much in the same way as when improvising in a spontaneous jazz session.  The participating partners let go to produce a common expression that emerges out reciprocal influences without any prior planning, and without any one of the band members taking the lead on the others.  In fact, in the course of identical peer and resonant relationships, what takes the lead or structures the ensemble is a common bond or cement that seems to just emerge out of the collective interacting system.

The question is how can systemic master coaches enter into resonance with their clients in order to regularly if not systematically allow the same type of emerging processes within the relationship.  The answer, once more, is simply to be silent, and intensely attentive and present, without any intention on the client process, in order to welcome the essential nature of client existence through their issues, preoccupations and ambitions.    Beyond simply being silent or paying all their attention to client words or content, being fully presence concerns attending  or witnessing clients in their process of being and becoming.

In this type of profound attention to the other, the physical emergence of resonance between the partners becomes measurable:  little by little, the respiratory rhythms get in synch as seem to participate to the same breath, the heartbeats get in unison, as if carried by the voice vibrations of the expressing partners sharing thoughts through dialogue.  As the relationship installs itself, the arterial pressure and brainwaves also start oscillating to the same common patterns.  These basic physical phenomena indicating two closely related persons partaking in intensive presence to each other are measurable and well known for a long time.

What has been less explored are the effects that interpersonal resonance can have when the concerned partners are so deeply in tune with each other that they start behaving as if they were one and the same, within a common pattern, often also in synch with their environment.  When the partners are intimately linked, such as a mother and child, twins, long standing friends, a person and their household pet, etc. the results surpass a simple interpersonal understanding to become a long lasting bond that seems to ignore the effects of time or distance, to unite the in a much more fundamental way.  The common vibration or profound resonance that unites them is the vehicle for emerging phenomena that can be repeatedly experience in a masterful coaching relationship.

It seems that resonances between two or more people also vibrate to include corresponding forms and rhythms in the larger environment.  This allows for the creation of harmonic correlations with neighboring systems that have corresponding vibrations.  In that way, researchers working separately in the same direction within a same scientific field would participate in creating together new forms of common solutions, even when they ignore each other’s existence.

These reflections concerning morphic fields of mind or of implicate order in the larger environment have recently been researched by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake and others such as the physicist David Bohm.  Knowing that reality only corresponds to the frame of reference of those that attempt to observe it, it ay be useful to carefully study these approaches to lay the foundations of all relational processes that facilitates emerging solutions in masterful coaching.

• Example: A team coaching is undertaken for an international restaurant chain in a hosting hotel in the center of a European capital.  The hotel makes an excellent effort to offer a welcome drink, proposes a blind wine-tasting exercise during one of the dinners, several entertaining events at the bar in the evenings…

It so happens that the international, national, regional and property meetings in this company are also often the occasion for copious drinking bouts, during and after work hours, and that rampant alcoholism is stated as one of the important social issues that the company is facing in most of its properties.  The very meaningful coincidence that an unrelated hosting hotel spontaneously proposes a number or drinking events to the company executive team, under different very good pretexts, brings the issue up quite naturally in the coaching conversation.

In this particular case, being attentive to the larger context within which the executive team is accidentally inserted gives the systemic team coach the opportunity to perceive a synchronic theme that also intimately belongs to the team.  All the coach had to do is ask the team if all these coincidental social events that systematically concerned the consumption of alcohol had any meaning for their organization.  The ensuing team discussion and reflection helped that executive team decide to model a much more ethical behavior in all their meetings in order to actively participate in changing the company culture, favoring a much more sustainable approach to their personnel’s health.

• Example:  During a one on one coaching session in a restaurant, the initially rapid and focused service at the onset of the meal gradually slowed down and lost constancy.  To top off the gradual disintegrating quality of service, the check was finally brought after several requests, an displayed a number of important errors.

This coaching session incidentally concerned an executive client who was very concerned about the quality of sales, after-sales follow up and the viability of client invoicing in the distribution system of his organization.  When the coach shared perceptions on the parallels between the client’s organizational concerns and the occurrences in their immediate environment during the meal, the subject became very real.  The client and coach worked on all the details of the local situation in the restaurant to cover the more global issues that needed to be approached in the client’s organization.  The coach also made a mental note to verify the exactitude of her own invoice for the coaching process, in order to send it a way that would respect the precise contractual conditions agreed with that client.

These occurrences where the client theme, the coach’s own issues, the setting for the coaching process and the much larger environment all seem to converge or synchronize to express variations of the same partition are not rare in systemic coaching, much the contrary.  It is even possible that these phenomena that illustrate the existence of correlations and resonances between systems that are apparently disconnected and autonomous are the rule rather than the exception.  The fact that many people are simply not trained to observe these occurrences is not a proof of their non-existence.   Systemic coaching suggests that attentive presence not only be focused on client content, nor even only on client, but also to all the possible environment correlations and resonances that can be perceived both by the coach and the client.

In the same line of thought, note also that work dedicated to defining organizational vision and mission can serve to create company-wide resonance with all the personnel adding to a common purpose through a form of shared vibration focused on the same collective outcome, or can to the contrary, such as the reinforcement of a routine laden and passive organization.   When the process to define a company vision is very well piloted by the top executive system in an attempt to align all the personnel in a controlled, responsible and expert approach, this can only reinforce the limits of centralized system.  When the process is undertaken in a bottom-up open process in order to imply all the pertinent actors in the search for a shared emerging vision, then real collective resonance can surface.

Achieving collective resonance can often be considered much more important than simply agreeing to the formulation of a shared vision.  Consequently, it is resonance that ensures that a vision is fully shared by all the personnel of an organization, and not a well-formulated vision that ensures the emergence of company-wide resonance.  True collective resonance allows a real multiplication of all the personal energies and creates the ideal conditions for the surfacing of ownership, creativity and emerging solutions.  Organizational coaching is a process that begins by achieving shared organizational resonance to allow for emerging processes that will allow new sustainable, active solutions to surface from the bottom up that are completely in keeping with the larger environment.

This process is identical in individual systemic coaching.  The more a coach and client are present to their interpersonal resonance and with their environment, the more they will be in a position to perceive an welcome emerging forms, alternative realities, original perspectives.   From these new forms, realities and perspectives will surface an original range of fundamentally sustainable solutions that will naturally be in total coherence with the larger personal and professional client and context.  This approach will be developed more deeply in the pages below.

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.