Coach As Instrument: Every Moment Met

 This Week's Attunement 

The present moments that interest us most are those that arise when two people make a special kind of contact – namely, inter-subjective contact. This involves the mutual interpenetration of minds that permits us to say, “I know that you know that I know” or “I feel that you feel that I feel.
 

— Daniel Stern

What would it be like for you to feel safe and fully attended to?

What would it be like for you to be able to be fully, unabashedly, and organically yourself with someone? To have your gestures, words, emotions, thoughts, desires, and needs noticed, allowed, accepted, affirmed, and attuned with?

If you could allow yourself to envision this and its effect on you, you'd get a sense of what it means to have every moment met.

When we are met in each moment by someone, somehow, magically, we become more fully ourselves. It is as if we need someone to hear, see, feel, and know us before we can fully become ourselves.
This is the gift that we can give our clients. To meet them in every moment.

So often, we coaches can feel we need to "make something happen;" to go into our heads and formulate a "powerful question" or to "add value."

I contend that we coaches (often) need to do a LOT LESS than we think. Because most of us attended ICF-accredited coach training, we learned coaching within the context of the ICF and its core competencies. Core competencies were created to give some form to what development, growth and the coaching of it looks like so that it could be evaluated for credentialing.

And while I support that, it can lead us coaches to feel like we need to be "demonstrating coaching" in lieu of meeting each moment with our clients.

When we are consistently meeting our clients in every moment, our clients often reflect, discover, shift and identify actions to sustain the shift, all on their own.

While we humans benefit and grow from being met by another, our growth doesn't need to be led or instigated by anyone other than ourselves.