Yesterday we completed the first five-day residential Transformational Presence Coach Training. It took place in the middle of The Netherlands in a small family-run hotel in the Dutch countryside. It was hard for me to imagine how it was going to be–putting what we do in 7 months in a teleclass program into a 5-day learning experience. In planning the 5 days, I knew that the focus had to be on experience. What I didn’t realize was how powerful the experience itself would be.
Transformational Presence Coaching starts with recognizing that all of life and leadership is energy in motion. We work from potential rather than focus on solving problems. That means that we are always paying attention to “what wants to happen” next in situations, circumstances, projects, and in our lives. It isn’t that we aren’t working in the present. In fact, we are totally working from the present. From the present moment we peer intuitively into the future to recognize the direction and focus that is wanting to unfold next, and then identify the next step that wants to be taken in order to accomplish our goal, bring the project to life, or reach a personal/organizational potential.
We spent our five days exploring tools and concepts for further understanding leadership and coaching as energy in motion. We started out with looking at how we engage with life, finding ways of working that cut through to the essence of situations and projects quickly, and then moving this forward. Each day built on the learning and understanding about working with energy from the day before. The participants came into this program in order to take their coaching to a new level. Indeed that happened. And the bonus was the extraordinary shifts that happened within them each personally. The energy in the group increased exponentially each day. By the last day they were at the same time more grounded than perhaps ever before, yet flying high in their work with each other. They had discovered that when you approach life and leadership as potential waiting to unfold rather than problems waiting to be solved, and that when you work from the intuitive mind rather than only the intellectual mind, things move very quickly. Transformation happens. And transformation automatically leads to doing things differently. And because the process is organic, those changes are lasting.
What we did together in these days was not magic. It was simply working with energy and following what wanted to happen anyway if we would just get out of the way and let it unfold. Trust and surrender are required, and a willingness to sense what is next and act on it.
In 5 days, 15 people found a new way of working–a way of working and leading and coaching that can sweep us into a whole new way of being and creating and taking action in the world. It was thrilling to be in that space and a part of what was happening. A new paradigm of leadership and coaching is coming into being.