(interview blurb)
2: I educate clients around presence and coming home and that actually is the place of change, that’s the place of power, for you to be in your full self.
(intro)
1: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a leadership coach and consultant integrating family business experience with psychotherapy to support leaders, groups, and organizations. She’s the principal of Presence-Based Coaching. She developed its curriculum and continues to teach the ICF-approved coach training program. Please welcome Bebe Hansen.
(Interview)
1: Hi, Bebe.
2: Hi there, Alex.
1: It’s nice to have you on this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. Thank you for joining me.
2: Thank you for having me.
1: Let’s start where we always start, what are we drinking today?
2: Well, I am drinking an interesting blend of caff and decaf, I just want to let you know that already, and it works because I really like coffee so I try and do two to maybe three cups in the morning and that’s the only time I drink it but the half caff makes it much more tolerable for my system and I am drinking coffee from a local Black Mountain North Carolina roaster, organic, fair trade, all that good stuff, and it’s called Dynamite Roasting. I drink their darkest blend right before espresso and I have this thing about frothed milk. So a friend of mine many years ago told me about this frother for milk and it just makes it like I’m going to a Starbucks or something so I really enjoy that.
1: That’s funny you say that, I just bought a frother the other week.
2: Really?
1: Yeah, and the only color they had at Williams-Sonoma was like this red one so nothing in my kitchen goes with red but I have it over there and it’s great. I’ve used it a couple times. I couldn’t find my matcha whisk the other day and I just used the frother, it was great. So, yeah, it’s awesome.
2: It’s great. There’s something about comforting, I think this is my personal theory about why lattes are so popular, something about warm milk and humans.
1: No, totally. I’m trying not to drink a lot of milk, maybe once every couple of weeks. I love cheese, I’ll never give cheese up, but I haven’t been drinking milk at all lately but there’s nothing like real milk. I make my own almond milk sometimes and —
2: That works.
1: — and sometimes when I do like not a lot of water and you put like a cup of almonds and then you get like half a cup of almond milk and it tastes delicious but it takes a lot to do that every day and organic almonds are pretty expensive so it ends up being $12 for half a glass of almond milk and I don’t like store bought almond milk so I have to figure out my milk situation. You know what I ended up doing? I just do Americanos all the time.
2: Yeah, perfect. That works.
1: You were actually in the coffee business before, right? I mean, it’s clear you have a passion for coffee.
2: Yeah, definitely. My former husband and I bought an existing coffee bean business. So let’s be clear, it wasn’t a Starbucks, Starbucks was never even on the horizon back then in the early 80s, at least not in Texas where we were. And so, yeah, we bought this existing coffee bean, we had a roaster in San Francisco who is outstanding and they did a lot of wholesale beans. It’s a little tiny shop, a 1,000-square-foot retail and people were really loving that coffee. So, of course, I myself who loves coffee.
1: That’s awesome. Love your passion for coffee. Really cool. Yeah, it sounds good. So, take me through your journey. You do a lot of really cool work in the coaching space and I’m always fascinated by people’s journey in this coaching profession, industry, whatever we want to call it, and for those that have been listening to our episodes, we always start there, just with people’s journey, but I find it particularly interesting with coaches because of the emergent nature of coaching. So, most people that got into coaching 10, 20, 30 years ago, they had very unique journeys that took them in that direction. Now, you’re blasted with ads on Instagram to go and get certified as a coach. I mean, it’s a whole thing, right? But back then it wasn’t so I’m really excited to listen to your story and your journey and how you ended up here on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee at some point in your life.
2: Yeah, I’m really glad to tell some parts of it. It definitely, it was a surprise, I didn’t actually know what coaching was when I found coaching. As you may remember from reading some of my bio, I came from a long-term entrepreneurial family, so we had a family business for 30 years. It was a flea market business and so I kind of cut my teeth on entrepreneurship so that is part of my journey. And then I decided to get a master’s in social work in the early 90s and so I wanted to become a clinical therapist in Texas and I did that. And so I did that for about five years, I had sort of a private practice. And, looking back, of course, you can see a lot more with hindsight, I was doing more coaching than therapy but I didn’t really know that at the time. My kind of style was that I assigned homework, things like that, like we do in coaching, but I didn’t really know most therapists didn’t do things like that. And so, some long-term relationship counselors of mine, the Hendricks, Gay and Katie Hendricks, were offering, I’ve been through their training with my new husband, and we wanted to have a different kind of relationship so we went through their training and they were offering, this is all their coaching material for leadership coaches in businesses, they didn’t want to do that anymore, they’re really relationship coaches and they wanted to give all that information away and I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity. I love their approach, it’s about consciousness, I love their approach. So we went and I had this epiphany in the training. It was like, “Coaching, oh, coaching,” because I had been to their sort of therapist sort of relationship training and it just was this, I remember sitting in a cafe with my husband in Boulder where the training was and it was like, “Oh, my gosh, I could be a coach. I can combine this business experience and coaching, my therapy experience in coaching, this is,” I just felt this heart awareness. I mean, you might even say it’s like a soul recognition of this is the path that opened up for me. So I was very, very enlivened about that. And when I got home, I talked to a friend of mine, a long-term friend also from the anagram community who had been through training with Doug Silsbee in Asheville, I was living in DC at the time, and she said, “If you’re gonna go to coach training, you need to go to Presence-Based Coaching and meet Doug Silsbee. He’s a wonderful teacher and I think you’ll like him.” And so I did that. There we are. The rest, I never left. I commuted for many, many years and I never left because Doug was amazing and then he asked me to teach with them and it was all from there.
1: So the next question is what is Presence-Based Coaching?
2: Well, it’s definitely unique.
1: And why were you so excited about it?
2: Yeah, it’s definitely unique. I think I was excited from the title, from the idea of incorporating presence into coaching so that was what grabbed me.
1: Because you practiced meditation.
2: That’s right.
1: Right, so the meditation is, ultimately, it’s like connecting with that ultimate presence so like, “Hmm, that and coaching, kinda sounds fun,” right?
2: It did. So it’s another level, another layer on top of helping people through therapy grow and change and solve their problems too. “Oh, I could be actually a coach in the business world. This is really an interesting layer,” which was about presence. So I had been in the diamond approach, virtual path, I’m still in it, from 2001 so in that timeframe, it was 2008, 2009. I thought presence and coaching? This is like a bonus. This is wonderful. And so that already attracted me to it. And I went on faith. In fact, many, most, I’d say, or many of our students come now through word of mouth, because we’re sort of this small little boutique coach training program and it was all organized around Doug and his passions, which are many. So I came into the training. And then when Doug started speaking, I knew right away that it was a fit for me. I felt in alignment with what he was talking about. He comes from a lot of different backgrounds, including experiential education. He was a Buddhist kind of thinker and just — and also a physicist kind of thinker so very science oriented. Just an amazing blend of what we do. We have lots of parts and lots of streams of wisdom and knowledge and some scientifically backed research streams as well like neuroscience. The thing I liked was the mindfulness practices, which his first book was The Mindful Coach. And I also really appreciated the embodiment piece. So, part of our stream is really about somatic and embodiment so including the body, and when I look back over my history of any kind of therapists or any kind of support, even the Hendricks relationships support folks, very body oriented. I’ve always loved to dance, I’ve always been athletic in high school and college, always really felt attuned in my body, and yet, now I look back and I see every practitioner that I was involved with had a body-centered approach and so it was such a fit for me in the Presence-Based Coaching to have the body included. And, of course, then I found out later that a lot of coach training does not have that. We don’t include the body, they’re emphasizing other things, which is fine, of course, but, for me, it’s like a personal alignment with using the body, in and through the body. And that includes emotions. So it was a fit from the beginning. And then I got, once Doug asked me to teach in 2010, I got to collaborate with him for all those years in terms of designing new body things, new somatic practices, to using coaching and a whole bunch of other tools that we added into the training.
1: I believe in holistic coaching. Not every coach training needs to have all facets of human existence and prepare coaches to deal with them in coaching. It’s okay, some of the training, most coach trainings don’t really include the somatic component but I think it’s cool as a coach to go and get maybe some other training to kind of combine everything together because you’re going to be working with a lot of different people and some of your clients will need a focus on sometimes even like diet and things like that, like I’m pretty conscious of what I eat and caffeine intake and the kind of foods that I eat throughout the day so sometimes I kind of get a sense if I’m working with a client that perhaps their level of stress could be ameliorated in some way by maybe drinking less caffeine or something, so really kind of starting to connect some of your own experience and your own training with what you’re saying. It’s just nice as a coach to have a lot of tools. But as you were mentioning kind of the lack of somatic training in coach training, it just makes me think how we always kind of have to be upskilled as coaches and learn new methodologies. That’s part of why I love what I do because we sit in a position where we can think about, okay, what do we bring to coaches? What kind of program would be interesting? How do we round out different approaches? So, yeah. And the somatic work, I think it’s so interesting and it’s easy to get bypassed when you’re dealing with issues around communication and influence and all these different things that you address in coaching. So interesting.
2: Yeah. Can I riff on what you’re saying?
1: Yes.
2: What I want to connect here is presence to that. So we also have streams, like, as I said, neuroscience and adult development, other streams that make us unique, it’s all underpinned by presence. So I think that presence is kind of the secret sauce of what we do and we are actually, and there’s lots of facets to that but particularly around the body, I want to say that, actually, presence is an internal state and it’s also located in our body. So a lot of folks talk about presence externally, like what it looks like, leadership presence looks like this, the leader is calm under stress, or whatever and I agree with that. So there’s external markers. And there’s also an internal space that we do the work of presence. And so I think people are surprised, our participants are surprised, our students and even our clients are surprised that, oh, I can cultivate this. I can actually cultivate a sense of presence, which we might call home or the true self, there’s lots of words for it. I can actually cultivate a contact with my inner world, my inner self of ground, of centeredness, of reliably connected to what matters to me to be able to express from that point and that’s a body thing. It starts in the body. It’s not like presence is only in the belly or lower dantian or cough center, that’s what we study in the diamond approach, and it’s also in the heart center, it’s also in the head center so it’s not like presence is just in some sort of compartment or something. And there’s a place where we have presence practices that include the mind in meditation, as you said, attention training practice also includes the heart, a gratitude practice that also includes the belly, like moving your body in a mindful way. Body mind practices like qigong, there’s lots of different ways to cultivate your ability to come back to yourself. I’m going to get on a soapbox for a second. We are so distracted. I was reading this book, Stolen Focus, recently, I don’t know if you’ve read it. I can’t remember the author but he’s wonderful. And it’s just all the ways that our attention, including technology, is pulled away from this present moment. And so these practices really help us come home. It’s sort of a core, like attention practice. It’s really our executive control of attention that comes home to us, to come back to where we’re actually at choice. We’re actually in the present moment. And we also say that’s where change happens is in the moment. It doesn’t happen in the past or the future.
1: So many things —
2: I said a lot.
1: I mean, so many things that I want to talk to you about related to what you were just saying because there’s so much, there’s so much around presence and just the flow of time. You’re right, everything happens in the present and it escapes you at every single moment and our relationships with being present says a lot about who we are as people and what we’re looking for in life and what we’re able to accomplish. And even beyond accomplishments, some people don’t feel accomplished when they are. I think a lot of that comes back to like being in the moment. Most people that I see, obviously, I’m seeing a lot of zombies out there just walking with their phones, not really paying attention to anything out there, and we’re all guilty of that, to an extent. You can see when someone really is guilty to that to a greater extent, you see it, like the typical kind of date where the two people are on their phone or I see some people walking around, how are they not looking that they just got run over by a car. That’s never happened to me, I’m not doing that. So, I think we can sense a little bit of judgment here, the way I’m describing that, but presence, the more you’re able to — I think breath is important.
2: Oh, totally.
1: Very, very important to kind of center you. As you were talking about, the importance of breath. We need to be more present in our lives to be able to enjoy it. It’s very hard to find fulfilment and that’s where I was headed. It’s very hard to find fulfillment if you can’t be in the present. I have a lot of people that I know, like my dad, he can’t just be working on his computer and he’s working at home without having the TV on as a distraction. There’s so many things we do to kind of go away from just being, “I am right here right now, I’m going to be very aware and present.” Why do you think — well, first, let me know, do you agree that a lot of people kind of run away from that presence? Okay, cool.
2: 100 percent.
1: And why do you think that is? Why are we running away? Because when we become present, there’s this shift, and we become kind of like obsessed with being present. Once you know and you get into these practices, you realize the power of being in the moment. So, why do we run away from something that gives us so much joy and pleasure once you’re actually connected with it?
2: Yeah, why and then what to do with that? So, yeah, definitely the why, I think there’s lots of different answers to that or I’ll say hypothesis to that. I do think it’s what Doug would call our context. So, it’s the environment that we’re in, the organizations that we’re working in, the pressure of the profit margin and the bottom line and to perform. There’s a lot of pressure these days and that’s just inside, say, organizational life. And also outside of that, there is a lot going on in this world. We can acknowledge that without naming all of the things that are happening around us right now, especially in the US, and also globally. I mean, there’s a war going on globally. It’s just so many. I mean, I won’t name, many others, so it’s just, I mean, in our news feeds so really interesting how the environment is like impinging on our attention, not to mention technology, which is a mixed blessing. I mean, it’s giving us information we never had before in an instant, all that’s beautiful, and on the other side of that, it’s designed to pull our attention. And so it’s very easy because of human habit nature to be pulled away from what we’re doing right now. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old grandchild who loves Disney movies, she’s allowed to see three, I think, the whole series so far, her parents are — my daughter, very, very particular and rightly so. Because she’s easily scared and when she wants, she can’t wait to watch the movie and we watched one movie with her, they were here for about a month this summer, every time I’ve watched a movie with her, she has such a reaction to stopping it. After the movie is over, she doesn’t want to take her bath, she doesn’t want to — she gets very upset and angry about having to end the movie, and, to me, that’s just a symptom of how we’re wired inside. We’re very easily pulled into things that are important to us. Back then, in the early, early days of humaneness, it was survival. Well, those still things are there too, I’m not making a really good connection here but you can get the gist of what I’m saying. So, her attention is pulled so easily and then she doesn’t want to stop. So it just tells you about the sort of addictive qualities that can happen for us as humans. So that’s one thing. Think the other piece really is what we call habit nature, about the why. This is why people come to coaching, because they don’t understand why they’re not making progress, why they’re not getting the promotion, why their strategies they were using no longer work for them, all those kinds of things. Plus, we have this thing we call habit nature which is basically we call it a bell jar so it’s what we have created around ourselves. It’s our personality, you could call it. You could call it ego. It’s the way we’re built from the inside. It’s our conditioning. The very base of it, we move toward what we want and we move away from what we don’t want. And this I think is a core to why our attention goes everywhere or gets pulled or manipulated, if you want to use that word, everywhere else but in us, because there is a lot of uncomfortableness in us from undigested experiences, from past things that didn’t really work out that well, and humans, I mean, let’s go toward what we want, let’s go toward looking at that, whatever it is, on social media, let’s move toward the extreme vacation that gets me out of my situation, because there’s a lot going on. And this is not to mention culturally, socially, family, all of those things that we’re involved with, our personal relationships, there’s some old stuff there that needs — old beliefs, old assumptions, and old pain. And I’m not saying we’re taking that out but I’m saying that that is a reason why we go out.
1: The power of attention. And when you’re thinking about therapy, it’s about placing attention to certain aspects. There’s so much of our lives that we do because we run away from facing something.
2: Exactly.