You're listening to a special episode of the Everything Life Coaching Podcast, Coaching Mastery with Noelle Cordeaux, CEO of Lumia. Explore transformative coaching concepts, tried and true methodologies, and powerful insights from the front lines of the professional coaching field. Whether you're an established coach seeking fresh perspectives,
or looking to begin your coach training education, welcome to your one-stop resource for all things life coaching. This is Coaching Mastery. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Everything Life Coaching. Noelle here, and today we're going to continue with our ICF Core Competency series and hit on a topic. that represents a truly embodied aspect of coaching. And it's one that I love to talk about, which is maintains presence.
So I'm tucked away here in my little home office. I have a beverage. I'd invite you to get one too. And we'll dive in to exploring this world. The ICF definition of maintains presence is to fully be conscious and present with a client. That's part one. That's the embodied part. And then there's a performance aspect, which is employing a style that is open, flexible, grounded, and confident.
And then following that, there are six subcategories. So we're going to unpack them together to get into how we really do this. So up first is taking a look at that embodied piece. which is remaining focused, observant, empathetic, and responsive to the client. So the work of remaining focused, observant, and empathetic. is all about harnessing our attention as coaches.
And this is work because building a relationship with attention is like building any other muscle or skill. It requires practice and commitment. Attention is just something that simply exists. We follow it when something captures our attention, but we don't often think about what it is and what it does for us. So the simple acts of beginning to notice.
that your attention exists and can be holds away from you and also notice that you can direct it and control it is the foundational part of diving into what is required to maintain presence as a coach. and it is paying attention to your attention. I like to think of this as attention hacking. And it relies on gaining control over what you focus on, as well as gaining control over what is required of you to sustain focus. In modern life our attention is constantly under attack.
Now, pre-pandemic, thinking about the book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny O'Dell reported that the average human has a four-minute attention. Now, post-pandemic, things have really escalated and productivity experts are now estimating that adults maintain an attention span that's closer to 45 seconds. I learned about the 45 seconds piece from a productivity podcast.
that was recommending that people write their emails and then time them out to make sure that the email can be read within 45 seconds, else your point might be lost to the reader. Now, thinking about A coaching conversation that lasts a half hour to an hour. What do you think is required of you to sustain your own focus and attention for that period of time? That is a question that only you can answer.
And step one here is to simply begin to notice how much control you can harness over where you direct your attention. And likewise, notice when your attention is getting pulled away from you. And this includes your coaching environment itself. One of the reasons that I choose to work by phone versus in-person or video is to limit the distractions that I know that I experience as a human. If I'm on video, I'm going to be thinking about what I look like.
I'm going to be thinking about the background or what my client looks like. And the same thing for in-person coaching. I want my attention, my active listening to be almost exclusively verbally focused because of who I am as a human so that I can be listening to my client. really deeply. So think about yourself. Think about the environments in which you coach. What might have the capacity to pull your attention away at any given moment?
taking time to tend to your space and make sure that kids, dogs, Anything that dings, is away, and accounted for is central to setting yourself up for success in maintaining your presence with a client. And this doesn't have to feel scary. I like to think of the time that I spend with my clients as truly taking a vacation from my own life with no distractions or alerts. And this applies to the mindset that we bring to coaching as well.
Building muscles in a mindset of presence requires us to be aware of the extent to which we are attending to our clients. And this is demonstrated through active listening, harnessing our own powers of observation, really tuning in on that vacation in our client's life. and harnessing our empathy to really attend to that client. As we're moving along, subcategory number two of maintaining presence is all about the role of curiosity in the coaching process.
Just as I described my time with clients as taking a vacation from my own life. Space with clients can be that, and it can also be so much more. because clients take us with them on the journey of their lifetimes. And tuning into somebody else's life journey can be absolutely fascinating. As coaches, when we turn our dial to curiosity. We're met with the potential for endless wonder in the exploration of someone else's world.
someone else's ways of thinking, things that we can learn about the way that our clients approach life, milestones to celebrate, emotions, hope. There's rainy days. There's puddles that our clients may step into or that we may help them avoid stepping into. And just as with any fantastic novel or movie, our clients will also bring with them a cast of characters. that we're going to get to know and that we're going to be continually surprised by.
Our clients' lives are rich. And if we allow ourselves to approach... these gorgeous and complex lived experiences as any novel or movie and to let ourselves get curious. about what's going to happen and what could happen. As coaches, we can truly attach to a transcendent experience that allows us to join with our clients in anticipation. of what they will say, what they will do and what they will dream into with their one precious life.
So working in this way, centering curiosity, centering the majesty of existence. helps us as coaches to really limit our own performance anxiety and to detach from our natural desire to deliver performance. And this is really grounded in our own sense of ourselves. offers us the opportunity to engage with freedom from performance as coaches. And it's something that we can work for and work on if it doesn't come naturally to us. in order to really build this muscle of curiosity.
I like to turn to a term that I learned from the Urban Dictionary, and it's called Sonder, S-O-N-D-E-R. Longtime listeners have heard me talk about this before because it's one of my favorite. concepts and I find it to be strikingly beautiful. It was coined by American author John Coen in 2012. And John's project was the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. where he aimed to come up with new words for emotions that lack words. So the definition of Sonder is the profound feeling.
of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing on the street, has a life as complex as one's own. And everyone is simultaneously, constantly living into this complex existence despite our personal awareness of what's going on for every other person around. Everyone, all of us have a universe inside of us. completely different from each other and equally complex and deep. And yet we don't notice, we don't know what each one of us carries inside.
So when I started looking at the people around me and saying, my God, every single person has a novel inside of them. Every single person has a depth. that I can't possibly understand. I was able to get in touch with my capacity for curiosity about other people. And this is what our clients bring to us. Our clients contain multitudes and it's up to us as coaches to draw out that gold and to really cherish the adventure of the journey.
The work of coaching is deeply human, and as coaches, we cannot divorce ourselves from our own humanity and from the complex beauty of our clients' humanity. The third subcategory for maintaining presence is part and parcel of that human experience. And it's managing one's emotions to stay present with a client. So this aspect of coaching also requires self-awareness, just as it does require us to harness our own attention and observation of the self.
If we as a coach are having a very bad, no good day and everything is going to hell in our own lives and we cannot get it together to stay present and curious with our clients in session. Congratulations, you're Norm. And when that inevitable event happens, as it will to all coaches, we need to recuse ourselves from the session. Coaches get sick days too. And sometimes those sick days are emotional.
This is so important to consider and to really internalize that you don't want to show up to work as a coach if you're not in control of your emotions, that it is enshrined in the ICF code of ethics. and that you have the ethical responsibility to say, nope, I can't do it today. I'm so sorry. I'm feeling sick. I'm going to have to reschedule with you.
Sometimes strong emotions can come up smack in the middle of a session. This is another inevitable aspect of coaching. Every coach experiences this. No one is immune from it. And no one can anticipate getting triggered, not even the most seasoned coach in the land. Coaching is a live action adventure and we never know where our clients will take us. Sometimes this means that we're going to go into territory that hits really close to home.
This might mean that memories are sparked. It might mean that emotions that we haven't felt in a really long time come up. And it can inspire big feelings for reasons that we never could have anticipated because our sensory memory is pretty random. In coaching, this is normal. And we need to embody professionalism and professional standards when our own triggers flare. There are several ways that we can do that. One is to pause in session and to ask for a minute to recruit.
It is super okay to be honest with our clients that we've accessed a memory or an emotion of our own and we need space to redirect focus back to the client. If you feel that you're really truly jostled and you can't get that focus back, your own emotions are overwhelming you. That's okay. You're human. The ethical and professional standard here. is to acknowledge this to your client and end the session. This also takes place if you begin to experience really harsh judgment.
towards your client. And you cannot give your client a fair or non-judgmental stance. You don't need to say what's up, but ethically you have the responsibility to pause the session or end the session. And here I would like to invite you to go back and use the competency of coaching mindset. to harness awareness of the client's autonomy. So even if we're experiencing really strong emotions on our end, it is our responsibility as a coach to seek professional support.
or supervision, and then to redirect back to our client as a whole unique individual that has their own autonomy, that is the best knowledge holder and stakeholder in their own life. As we're rolling right along to number four, we're also looking at strong emotions that might come up. And these are on the part of the client.
Strong emotions come up during the coaching process. This is another thing that is absolutely inevitable. Coach and client will likely experience strong emotions throughout the coaching process. It is a normal part of goal accomplishment because there are a lot of things that go into gaining awareness, planning, action steps.
taking up space in the world, learning new ways of being. And so the emotions that our clients... pop up with really run the gamut from fear to anger, regret, joy, excitement, anxiety, or disappointment. The presence of these emotions. doesn't negate a topic as coachable in any way. And strong emotions should be anticipated. When clients are really doing the heavy lifting of changing the trajectory of their lives, that list of emotions that I just mentioned, regret.
Fear at doing something new. Anger. at the way things are, joy, excitement when things go well, anxiety about change, disappointment about how something went. This is what it's like to walk with someone. on the journey of their lives. So as coaches, we want to allow for these emotions to exist freely in the container of a session. We don't need to process them with our clients.
However, we do want to ask our clients, to tell us about what they are experiencing emotionally so that we don't make assumptions about what... the client is experiencing and why. Because everyone presents with their emotions differently and everybody has a different relationship with their emotions. So we want to hear directly from our clients what they're experiencing and what it means to them.
And gaining comfort of asking these questions and then sitting with our clients as they're experiencing these strong emotions isn't a skill that comes to us naturally. Some people are naturally really good at holding that space, but most of us are not. And so coaching supervision or seeking outside professional support to work with our own emotional experience in witnessing strong emotions can be really supportive. for coach practitioners to grow in their craft.
And this is part of the awareness piece in maintaining presence is noticing. When you have the desire to get in there and fix things, if somebody's presenting with a really strong emotion, that's negative, right? So this is a space that we can kind of... squish the accordion of awareness between the self and client and say, all right. What am I experiencing? What is my client experiencing? Where are my blockers in letting emotions flow freely? And what kind of support?
Do I need to get in touch with my own capacity to be a container for emotions and to allow space for those emotions to really flow? It's important to acknowledge that building the muscles in sitting with the emotional experience of others is something that you will grow into the more that you coach. And it can feel very uncomfortable at times. category that can feel uncomfortable in growing towards coaching mastery is our fifth subcategory in this topic of maintaining presence.
That is working in the space of not knowing. So our whole society is based on the amplification of people with expertise, knowing things, telling things, giving advice. And so much of this is positive from our favorite grammar school teacher to our doctor, to the plumber who knows how to fix your toilet. And coaching is a relatively new discipline that's very much based in a skill that's the opposite of knowing.
Coaching is actually based in the skill of exploring, and the role of exploration in coaching sits in the strategic partnership. that we hold with our clients. And at the core of that experience is the fact that as a coach, We cannot possibly know what's best for a client when we cannot possibly hold the information that the client holds. about their own life or feel what the client feels inside of themselves in relationship to their own march of progress towards goal accomplishment.
So for this reason, as coaches, when we work in a space of not knowing our best practice, is to meet a client where they're at and to allow the client to direct the process of goal accomplishment at their own pace. So here we want to also get in touch with what our own sense of rightness is.
in order to lean into exploration and combat what it feels like when we want to perform, when we want to show up, when we want to be that expert and say, no, we need to undo this in order to really turn our dial. towards questioning and exploration. So building on the idea of what rightness feels like in the delivery of coaching, another skill that we're required to develop is allowing for the space of silence. And this is our final competency in exploring how we wield presence as a coach.
So many of us have been conditioned that showing up professionally involves taking up space, involves talking, involves telling. And in the space of a coaching session, the opposite of true. Our job is to hold a container for the client to explore, admit, reason, feel, decide, plan, and commit. And in order for a client to do any of these things, there must be a decent amount of pause, thinking, and reflection that takes place.
When silence occurs in the coaching session, as a coach, what we're typically witnessing is someone grappling. with the thought and feeling that is necessary in order to decide what to do next or really to come to terms with something. And in our society, silence and reflection is often a lost art because everything is on demand. And part of the value of a coaching session is that space.
That's free of distractions for the client to really reason and think their way through the logistics of what they must. see, hear, learn, say, or do in order to create change in their own lives. holding that silence that applies to our work as coaches. And it's also a skill in harnessing reflection that can benefit us as humans in an ever-changing and ever more complex world. And upon reflection, I think that the entire competency of maintaining presence is true in that way.
that we don't often in today's world take enough. time to be aware of where our attention is going, of how our own emotions might be impacting the environment of a conversation, how someone else's emotions might be showing up. And then really getting curious about what does exist and then holding that space. for silence and reflection. And if we can do that, not just for our clients, but for ourselves, we will create richer lives.
and tap into all sorts of different ways of being that are slower and more authentic than the daily grind that so many of us experience on a regular basis. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope we keep going together as we explore all of the ICF core conversations. Thanks for listening to Everything Live Coaching.