MASTERFUL SYSTEMIC COACHING
Systemic Life Coaching and Systemic Executive Coaching with Attentive Presence and Resonance

What?  Another text on systemic coaching? What can be the real added value of one more article on the subject (and what's more a long one) ?  There are already numerous easily available volumes and articles 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 definition of coaching, the inventory of its specific tools, and the extensive descriptions of habitual coaching strategies used in different personal and professional contexts such as executive or life coaching. A number of important dimensions of the field, however, still remain relatively mysterious, even for confirmed executive and life coaches.  This is particularly true if one considers what really defines true systemic coaching mastery.

To be sure, beyond the texts on the art and science of executive and life coaching, beyond the numerous writings on techniques and exposés on the specific dialogue process that defines coaching, there are still very few articles and books on the art of how to be a true systemic master executive and life coach. Indeed, not much precision is readily available on the specific posture or way of being of systemic master coaches and very little is said about their powerfully minimalist attitude when they seem to do almost nothing but just be there, to successfully accompany clients towards their different forms of success.

Yes, the history of the development of executive and life coaching is well researched. Yes, the different schools of thought and traditions are somewhat being inventoried, in order to keep track of the complexity gradually influencing the field.  Yes, cultural differences between national traditions and style differences between individual preferences can be reasonably well pinpointed.  But how many of us really understand systemic coaching’s more mysterious folds and the magical dimension of its deep transformational processes?  How many know how executive and life systemic coaching can naturally meander into the profound and essential nature of a successful personal or professional quest, to the outer limits of our existential or spiritual nature?

This text proposes to explore beyond the basic definitions of executive and life coaching as they are usually presented, beyond a practical presentation of its originality and effectiveness, and beyond the range of its widely known tools. In the art of accompanying individuals and teams truly focused on achieving ambitious goals, this text offers an in-depth reflection on some essential questions concerning the fundamental posture of systemic masterful coaching:

• How can we precisely define executive, individual, team and organizational coaching mastery, the one that rests on simple presence with deep attention without any precise intention on the nature of client results?
• How can we define with precision the paradoxical and fundamentally minimalist systemic master coach skill set that permits huge measurable breakthroughs in client transformation and results?
• How does masterful executive coaching and life coaching attentive presence clearly participate in creating coach-client systemic resonance, and how does that resonance facilitate the surfacing of new emerging forms and solutions?
• How can we define, expect and routinely provoke the surprises, accelerations, breakthroughs, and other perspective landslides that emerge in the course of a systemic masterful coaching process?

For both clients and executive or life master coaches, alchemical sequences routinely precipitate personal mutations and provoke deep and seemingly unpredictable transformations.  These commonly surface as if by accident.  During large group sessions that include over fifty people and during more personal and intimate one-on-one executive and life coaching meetings, masterful magical instants are legion to the point of being an integral part of a very precise emerging process.  Paradoxically, however, these results rest on something other than the coaching skill set routinely mentioned in texts describing the profession.

Note indeed that executive and life coaching is commonly defined as an accompanying process that provides ample room for emerging solutions.  This definition can be taken lightly, simply signifying that the profession offers spaces and volumes for unexpected surprises, that an executive or life coach should be ready to welcome the unexpected.  That would be excessively underestimating the systemic importance of a key element in the art of masterful coaching. New patterns and profoundly original solutions emerge or surface in masterful coaching much in the same way as when new life forms routinely emerge in nature. The process is identical to the most recent artificial intelligence discoveries in modern software design and much deeper worldwide social changes provoked by the web.  In fact it is conceivable that systemic masterful coaching exactly reproduces the inherent creativity that naturally emerges in all complex forms of decentralized network systems.

Indeed, to simply say that executive and life coaching makes room for emerging solutions is to state in a banal way that the very philosophical and practical foundations of systemic coaching are in total opposition to our normal western perspective.  The statement very simply says that executive and life systemic coaching is in complete contradiction with a Cartesian foundation, our materialistic perspective, our linear time and centralized structures, our usual expert approaches.

• Synthesis: Much as within other environments, the emerging nature of systemic masterful coaching underlines that new perspectives and solutions surface from the bottom up, from the local to the global. 

Emerging processes in executive and life coaching are complete opposites to those that occur in centralized structures where shapes, forms and solutions are proposed if not imposed from the top down.   So very practically, what should this mean when we consider systemic masterful coaching relationships?

In keeping with many other statements concerning the profession, this seemingly simple definition of executive and life coaching merits careful reflection and an appropriate skill set to be put in to practice by all systemic professionals.  Throughout this text, we will review some fundamental systemic coaching principles, those very principles that are often formulated through apparently simple definitions and then unfortunately immediately put aside.

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

The first section of this text suggests we start from scratch. It suggests we question all we think we know about executive and life coaching.  It invites all who want to access true systemic mastery in the field to forget everything about the doing tools and techniques commonly put forth in texts and training programs on executive and life coaching.  This section shows that to truly become a systemic masterful coach, one must first very simply get liberated from the generalized obsession focused on learning behavioral tools and skills and acquiring effective techniques and strategies.  Consequently, if the executive and life coaching process is often described by listing its precise and useful tools to actively accompany clients while these focus on achieving their goals, the first section of this text will suggest that all these apparently useful methods be firmly put away. 

Indeed, when beginning and established executive and life coaches focus on well-publicized superficially effective tools, they may very well never become masterful systemic professionals.  They may very well forget that truly original solutions and surprisingly new perspectives emerge primarily out of the quality of the relationship with their clients, if not more essentially out of the relationship clients create with themselves, the executive and life coach simply acting as a transparent and humble witness.

• Synthesis: 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 the power of empty space, the transparency of vacuums, the essence of void. 

Consequently, if we are considering systemic mastery in  executive, individual, team or organizational coaching, this text suggests that all proven coaching methods and all effective coaching strategies must first voluntarily be put aside.

One must let go of all reassuring ramps and crutches. We need to totally loose control and develop a truly minimalist approach.  Only then will masterful systemic coaches and their accompanied clients be able to welcome the mysterious, to let underlying forms emerge and reveal new perspectives within a new form of all-encompassing reality.  Only in this way can systemic coaches begin to serve another dimension of reality that naturally eliminates or bypasses over-structured logic, prefabricated mental forms, tried and tested habits. Only then can the true depth and power of the art of masterful systemic coaching begin to become manifest.

Consequently, the first section of this text is centered on the many facets of the one essential executive and life coaching technique, the one main skill for master coaches: listening.  But beware, that is not the habitual type of listening common to all professional humanist approaches.  This is the art of listening that is specific to a masterful systemic coaching posture, which can take years and years to truly understand and develop.

The second section of this text will make explicit the essential quality of systemic master coaching presence and being that is indispensable when creating a systemic coaching context.  A systemic approach is indeed the conceptual frame of reference that most leaves ample space for the apparition of truly spontaneous emerging solutions.  This section presents how masterful executive and life coaching is almost naturally a resolutely systemic approach.

The objective here is to demonstrate how systemic master coaches willingly enter into an intimate form of interpersonal resonance with their clients and create the necessary conditions that will allow original emerging solutions to naturally and magically surface.

Indeed, the exceptional quality of a masterful systemic coach’s presence first creates alignment with the client in order to allow the partnering pair to tune in together and harmoniously vibrate as one.  In effect, systemic 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 executive and life coaching partners into new realms of conscience. 

Most often, humble, simple, whole and attentive executive and life coaching presence is totally sufficient to embark willing systemic coaches and 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 both humbling and surprising how a simple 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 executive and life coaching process, this 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 executive and life coaching contexts, whether it be face to face, when coaching partners, when coaching teams, or teams of interacting teams such as organizations.  In fact all the different contexts within which systemic master coaches practice their art have but little influence on the necessary quality of personal presence: the systemic masterful coaching posture.

• Synthesis: Masterful systemic coaching is based on the single competency of attentive presence.  It considers that this type of listening is an art of being.  True presence can consequently be considered the single foundational skill in systemic coaching.

An undeniable evidence will be explored in the course of this text: whenever an executive or life 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, a number of consequences can be measured: 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, all other practical executive and life coaching skills invariably loose most of their potential magical power. 

When, however, systemic 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.  Masterful ease influences the relationship and the client development process. These quickly start to flow forward with the same minimalist elegance.  In short, systemic coaching is often amazingly effortless for the client and for the executive and life coach.

The third section of this text details the practical consequences of the former two: How can systemic coaches and clients practically understand, define, recognize, welcome and accompany the new perspectives that naturally emerge or surface, almost magically?  What can they do when new perspectives impose themselves in their obvious and just pertinence, in their overwhelming coherency?  How can systemic executive and life coaches and clients 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 present 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. This systemic executive and life coaching process often seems to unroll with fluid and esthetic ease.  There appears to be an inherent beauty in client implementation, an esthetic quality in all the ensuing personal and collective actions. 

The third 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 synchrony 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 systemic masterful coaching.

Finally, without the fourth and final section, this text would be incomplete.  It is focused on the art of coaching more complex systems, large groups, teams, networks and organizations

• Caution: The first mistake concerning the profession would be to believe that systemic coaching only concerns accompanying collective ensembles and not individual clients.

The first three sections of the text below will clearly demonstrate that is not the case.  Individual executive and life coaching clients are integrally part of their surrounding universe and cannot be truly accompanied without taking into account the complexity and connectivity of the larger systemic context that nourishes, supports and includes them.  Consequently, true individual coaching is necessarily systemic.

• Caution: The second illusion concerning team and organization coaching would be to believe that accompanying such collective systems is much more difficult and would need a particular type of specialized coach training, special expertise and specific tools that do not concern executive and life coaches who accompany individuals.

Granted, coaching collective ensembles is different in as much as one needs to co-manage the complexity of client group, family, network, team or organizational interfaces.  But this type of executive and life coaching calls for exactly the same type of simple, transparent, intention-free,  systemic attentive presence as when coaching individuals.  Furthermore, anyone who has been raised in a family, that was educated in schools, that has participated in collective sports, that has belonged to associations and has a collective life experience already has a long practice of social and professional system complexity.   For each systemic executive and life coach, a deep awareness of the collective dimensions of their personal past is the best way for them to open up to the complexity of the world, to the connectivity of their rapport to the universe.

Our past, present and future, our education and training, everything is systemic in our existence.   Systemic reality is as common as it is discounted by linear logic and simplistic causal perspective.  Consequently, developing an intimate awareness of systemic reality is an equally foundational skill to accompany individuals, teams and organizations in executive and life coaching.  To coach on all these levels, nothing is needed other than an open consciousness of all that has made us become who we are. 

Much as in individual coaching, there no need to amass tools, skill, techniques, theories, strategies and other accessories to accompany teams and organizations.  It is just useful to be totally present and attentive to the present moment and the beautiful complexity of the interfacing ensemble within its environment, and accompany the executive and life coaching client to question known processes and explore original perspectives.

• Synthesis: In as much as man is a social being, a collective animal, accompanying the development of teams and organizations can be considered completely identical to coaching individuals.

A word of caution is useful concerning the text below: 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 executive and life coaching mastery. Common language does not easily lend itself to describe the subtler and fundamentally innovating dimensions of masterful systemic coaching.  As in any new field, executive and life coaching desperately needs new terminology.

In order to express the spirit of a systemic master coach’s being skills, and to describe how to be essentially present and usefully transparent, the text below will sometimes offer uncommon principles, propose surprising analogies and original metaphors.  To wander into new territories, it becomes indeed necessary to invent a new poetry of space. A new imagery of language is needed to describe a different form of time and an uncommon flow of energy, in order to convey what masterful executive and life coaching is all about. This search for the right words may hopefully also serve to illustrate how the 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, to fill the void offered by silence, to disrupt the intimacy of true presence to oneself and with others.

Indeed, 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 witness a profound appreciation of the beauty and truth that can be found in the depth and warmth of shared silence.

Where 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 attentive presence through deep listening as one of the particular qualities of a systemic 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. 

• Synthesis: So in order to progress in the direction of learning to tame emptiness and fully partner with silence, we suggest useful homework: once this text is put aside and on a regular basis, the reader is invited to indulge in long spells of attentive silence, solitary contemplation and collective meditation.

Note that some very practical introductory texts on executive and life coaching are presented in books and on the web. Most of these articles and writings present complete, very practical sets of professional executive and life coaching tools, techniques, skills, and know-how.  Again, these will not be repeated here. But note that this text can both serve as a general introduction to executive and life coaching, and as a way to delve deeper into the art of masterful systemic coaching.  Indeed, it can serve as an introduction to the profession, or it can be studied to go deeper, when one has leaned all the tricks of the trade. 

To summarize, rather than focusing on how to do executive and life coaching, the text below presents how to truly be a systemic 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 executive or life 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.

Systems Theory or systems analysis is a theoretical approach that has numerous obvious applications in all modern sciences.  More than just a conceptual ensemble, systems analysis has become a coherent new frame of reference that can be applied to all facets both of scientific reality and of everyday life.  It is even possible to affirm that if linear, logical Cartesian thinking has immensely influenced the development of sciences until the middle of the last century, it is systems thinking that is taking the lead today as a foundational perspective in the complexity of modern research in biology, physics, meteorology, medicine, psychology, economy, etc.

Of course, this pervasive influence of systems thinking is not altogether conscious.  This new perspective on reality has been slowly developing over time and has been insidiously permeating modern thinking, at least in the western world.  We don’t learn about systems thinking in school but the twenty first century is undeniably global, sustainable, ecological, both materialist and spiritual.  It has therefore become systemic, whether we like it or not. And in as much as executive and life coaching is one of the most recent professions in human sciences, it should also be considered as fundamentally, intrinsically rooted in a resolutely systemic way of thinking.

Indeed, considering that systems approach is omnipresent today, it should be obvious that it serves as a foundation to executive and life coaching, the most rapidly developing profession of the twenty-first century.  As a matter of fact, simply mentioning that executive or life coaching is systemic should be a redundancy, considering that as a perspective on life and human development, coaching is naturally, intrinsically and structurally systemic.

Formally, systemic thinking is a relatively elaborated theoretical approach.  It is possible to consult numerous well-documented books and articles that present its take, for example on complexity and fractal resonance, macro-economy, etc. It has numerous applications in a very wide range of very complex fields.

Paradoxically, however, the reality of systemic perspectives is much more difficult to experience in the humdrum of our everyday lives.  Indeed, if systemic thinking is often applied to understand and attempt to explain very complex fields and world-wide phenomena, it is much less applied in the comprehension of minute micro-details of everyday executive and life coaching behavioral patterns, our interpersonal relationships and collective processes that regularly emerge within our teams and organizations.

• Example: Fractal theory stipulates that identical patterns infinitely repeat themselves, like Russian dolls, at different levels of hierarchy of a same system.  This is quite observable in nature and there are numerous well publicized scientific examples of the notion.

But it is extremely difficult to constantly live with a truly systemic perspective of our everyday lives, observing coherent, repetitious patterns between personal and collective behavioral sequences over seconds, minutes, hours, months and years.  A systemic perspective can be continuously used to better seize coherent patterns between almost all aspects of our personal and professional lives. In fact, accrued systemic consciousness could help us perceive and modify individual and collective patterns that are key to our growth and development.

Examples: It is regularly possible to observe:

• That couples and teams do not form by chance.  Their members meet and develop within a shared systemic resonance that often escapes simple Cartesian understanding.
• That individuals unknowingly and very precisely repeat simple and complex behavioral patterns in very different contexts such as in the way they drive their cars, play their sports, manage their teams, move within a given environment, behave within their families, formulate their phrases, etc.
• That processes and results of all team meetings within a same organization can be perceived as strikingly identical, no matter who is present as participants, no matter what the subjects are in each of these meetings and no matter how the desired outcomes may be stated.
• That patterns observed over a few hours during the initial planning of any given executive or life project can provide very detailed information on the probable one-year processes and results of that same project.
• That the quality of interfaces between executive or life partners in a given relationship can give very precise indications on the interface patterns each of the partners create in other unrelated personal and professional partnerships.
• Etc.

To be sure, the undeniable fractal reality of our daily existence is proven and measurable. This type of systemic phenomena is studied and has been integrated in all modern fields that are concerned with individual, team and organization development.  So for now, let us just assume that the executive and life coaching profession rests on systemic foundations. Again, the coaching profession is the most recent among all those that provide services specializing in accompanying people and collective social and professional entities.  As such, in its resolutely modern existence, it could be obvious that in a fundamental way, executive and life coaching inherits most naturally of a systemic perspective.

Example:

• More than in any other individual or collective accompanying approach, systemic coaching aims to implement strategies that are totally respectful of an executive or life coaching client autonomy in order to allow the surfacing of their own dynamic and emerging forms and solutions.
• More than in any other approach focused on people and system development, executive and life coaching rests on a philosophy and a skill set of non-intervention and non-control. Coaching lets underlying systemic self-organizing, natural capacities surface and do the job, through both individual and collective dialogues.

In order to really understand and implement the specific systemic difference executive and life coaching offers, the first step is to fully comprehend the minimalist art and science of creating a particular type of coaching space within which client self-organization becomes naturally possible.  Indeed, in executive and life coaching, one must simply stop intervening, thinking, proposing, and driving solutions to let creative client patterns emerge, in their systemic coherency.

First measure that in the professional executive and life coaching community, listening is one of the least developed coaching skills.  Listening is indeed rarely the key subject in advanced theory and practice-related articles. Listening is almost never the central focus of deliveries by keynote speakers or the subject of round tables in major conferences. It could consequently seem that listening is an obvious and acquired competency in almost all professional executive and life 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 executive and life coaching concepts.  These concepts 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 for many people.  In executive and life coaching too, the general accent is often stressed on more obviously masculine skills such as powerful questions and very performing action plans.  This may be to underline that the field is seriously professional, focused on achieving very probing and highly ambitious results.

Surely a marketing and sales imperative underlies this willfully active focus in executive and life coaching.  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 displaying undue intentions.  It may not appear very serious to sustain that coaches are fundamental witnesses and listeners, kin to horse whisperers, and that they very consciously choose to leave all the available space wide open to allow for the creative unfolding of executive and life coaching client inner potential. Although profoundly true and quite precise, the argument is not convincing, to say the least.

Also, a minimalist approach based on listening does not lend itself to exclusive and complex theoretical constructs that will attract 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 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 undeniably serves to better differentiate executive and life coach professional identities.

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

It seems 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 silent with another person just enough time to establish the foundations of a trustful relationship.  After that, the executive or life coach can move quickly on to more affirmative tools focused on action and results.  In reality, listening is perceived as such an inactive competency that it is perceived as passive.  To feel better about listening, we even 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 excessive 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 valued, the least studied, the least taught.  Paradoxically, it may also be the skill that is 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 become an executive or life coach.  One can often observe that young apprentices to the profession firmly believe 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 executive and life coach training programs are so certain of their competency in the field of listening that they attempt to negotiate the possibility of skipping the few short training sequences allocated to developing that foundational skill.  Generally, these beginners are 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.   Tools are in fact sometimes useful and can be reassuring.  However this need for tools may motivate the beginning executive and life 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.

• Synthesis: If executive and life 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, all brought by the coach.

For the executive and life coaching beginner in the field, nonetheless, active competencies and well argued and uselessly complex theoretical constructs are all too often seriously considered at the expense of learning how to listen.  Consequently, in their impatience to learn what they believe to be the more important skills of the trade, neophytes do not take the time to develop the one most central competency of coaching: that of attentive, respecting, silent listening to clients without any intention whatsoever on the object of their quest.

By definition in executive and life coaching, clients are considered competent in their fields. When working with a coach, it is principally to be accompanied off their known and beaten tracks, to be lured off their mental freeways, to be aspired out of their usual perspectives and to be provoked out of the limits of their routines. To be effective, an executive and life coach’s listening skills needs to hear what the client is not saying, to imagine the growing edge of their development patterns, to feel potential beyond the constraints of their beliefs and habits, to perceive the outer limits of their perception of reality to wander beyond their known shapes and patterns.

This original listening to who the client is and around what the client is saying is what is suggested when it is affirmed that a executive and life coach listens to the form of a client’s dialogue rather than to its content. A coach can ultimately accompany clients to new and unforeseen realms and possibilities through listening and attentive presence to:

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

Consequently, one can often observe that executive and life coaching processes rest on a subtle and creative interactive game.

• On the one hand and very naturally, clients attempt to expose the minute details of their issues, the complexity of the context of their projects. They explain to their executive and life 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 preliminary individual interviews in order to fully understand the specific organizational context, before any collective process can be initiated.

It is likewise often stressed that an individual executive coach should interview prescribers who designate the coaching client, as well as client hierarchy and any other pertinent actor, within complex triangular contracting processes.  This is allegedly done to allow executive  coaches to really understand the organizational context before they meet and work with their final client.  Now if all these perceptions were to be valid, one could ask: “why has the issue not been solved by those same well-informed internal actors?”

Obviously, if individual, executive and life coaches or team and organization coaches follow their clients too closely, taking heed of their detailed information; they may unwittingly adopt the same perspectives or world-view as these people and organizations. They may rapidly experience a very similar perceptual perimeter, and come to the same client conclusions.  They may also become equally locked in the same quagmire, with too few positive creative options.

Indeed, if executive, team and organization coaches follow too closely processes that are designed and piloted by the organizations within which they come to work, they may well end up cornered within the same limits of perceived reality.

• On the other hand, executive and life coaches listen outside, 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, a coach can immediately avoid preliminary interviews with the pretext that if the work is to develop collective collaboration and teamwork, individual perceptions do not really matter.  Indeed, meaning within a collective system is never composed of the added meaning of each of the parts.  It emerges from the whole system taken an indivisible entity.

At any rate, systemic executive and life coaches don't center their attention on the content of client dialogues.  This content is invariably focused on client knowledge that has already led to unsatisfactory results.  Systemic coaches listen beyond the veil of these words to hear the hidden or non expressed underlying forms and shapes of client meaning.  Consequently, systemic executive and life coaching attention is necessarily focused beyond what is perceived and expressed by the client.

Example

What indeed could be the underlying meaning, when organizations expect coaches to carry out individual interviews before working with an individual or collective internal client?  Does that process convey the possibility that all collective work within that organization is first well-prepared and finalized in one-on-one preliminary meetings? Does that illustrate that the organization avoids collective collaboration and transparency by organizing behind-the-scenes prep meetings that may limit creative outcomes?  Is this an indication of overly tight risk management? What are underlying control or political strategies involved in the process?  At any rate, one can question the real function of these preliminary meetings.

In executive and life coaching, masterful systemic coach attention and listening skills are obviously not that of a competent expert, pointedly focused on the problem, goal or field as the client may define it.  Coach attentive presence attempts to imagine executive and life coaching clients within a much larger, limit-free, global or universal context.  This listening skill will permit the emergence of a much more ambitious and unexpected outcome.  In order to illustrate, consider the following coaching situation.

• Example: After immigrating to a far-off country for the larger part of his adult life, a client decides to return to his country and 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.

The client defines a personal evolution process abroad as the principal factor at the origin of his relational difficulties with his relatives.  Totally immersed within a very different culture for much too long, he has totally changed and cannot adapt back to fit into his original context.  The facts he relates help him explain the gap between his frame of reference and that of his parents and friends.  According to the client, his lengthy stay in a far-off land and in a very liberal culture has permanently changed his outlook on life.  There is no returning to his previous younger self.  There is no possibility to unlearn what he has become in order to please both his parents and their social environment. That impossibility provokes the present clash with his parents.

If one follows the client chain of thought, there is indeed not much one can do.  If the coach listens to the client definition as if it were a reality, then the coach will become equally stuck.  With a little bit of perspective, however, it is possible to imagine a relatively different situation to reposition the relationship between the client and his family. 

It is conceivable, for example that the client had in fact left his country because of a pre-existing gap between the life he wanted to live and the one his original environment and tradition reserved him.  To develop in the way he wished to grow, the client may have decided to leave, and put great distances between him and a family that was burdened by very heavy traditions.  Consequently, what the client currently perceives as a present-day problem could very well have been, years ago, a very creative youthful solution.

• Synthesis: What if problems defined by executive and life coaching clients at one point in time were in fact very good solutions to other situations in their pasts?   In that case what is their original problem, and what could be other creative solutions today?

The type of logic conveyed by the above masterful coaching questions could both create confusion and be conducive to a general reorganization of the mental patterns of all the partners in the client environment.  Granted, this type of reframing strategy only has value if it helps clients reconsider their present situation with a completely different perspective, and then proceed to find original satisfactory solutions.  Also, this type of logic needs to be discovered by the client through the use of powerful questioning, restatement or reframing techniques. The sole purpose of this illustration here is to illustrate the type of unexpected directions masterful listening can help unveil in executive and life coaching.

• Synthesis: Systemic coach 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 executive and life coaching client descriptive and emotional state.

For the moment, simply consider that the listening skill resting on attentive presence is not so much focused on the immediate content elaborated by a client. The executive or life coach attempts to simply be present and attentive both to the client and to the more general frame of reference conveyed, within which the client positions a problem or an issue. To implement this specific type of listening skill, it is useful for asystemic coach to very simply be attentively present to the whole client and situation.  This type of presence is much more important than to display numerous other behavioral and linguistic competencies.  Masterful systemic coaching simply concerns a very attentive way of being and listening in the presence of one’s self and of others.

Some more experienced participants to executive and life coach training have background in psychological or humanist techniques such as NLP, TA, Gestalt therapy, Jungian analysis or are coming from corporate human resource environments.  These candidates to the executive and life coaching profession also often consider that for them, the fundamental arts of attentive presence and profound listening hold no secrets.  They do not want to revisit obvious skills that are so commonly and indifferently practiced in all their professions.  These experts wish to quickly move on to what they believe really differentiates executive and life coaching from other more traditional therapeutic methods, consulting approaches and communication theories.

For most these professionals, executive and life coaching is merely another technique to accompany clients towards good health and smashing success.  They usually perceive that coaching is a close cousin to other pre-existing methods. For them, the profession follows clear tracks previously laid out in the human development field.  They perceive that the foundation of executive and life coaching is the same as that of all other psychological and communication methodologies, and that common foundation obviously includes the capacity to listen to clients.  Beyond this common foundation, these professionals may perceive that some other original coaching techniques may add a few new behavioral skills that may sometimes makes a measurable difference in client progress, but that's about it.

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

These professionals do not imagine that learning how to become a master coach could question their established expertise, their historically installed successful practice, maybe even totally disrupt their deeply rooted professional identity.  Their aim is just to add a few more useful options to their known professional vehicle, to add original tools to renew interest in their clearly defined field of expertise, and often to simply add the very popular name of executive or life coaching on their business card or plaque in an attempt to boost revenue.

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

But to really seize what makes coaching an extraordinarily powerful approach, one must refrain from immediately wanting to improve it, add to it, make it more complex and laden it with accessories.  On the contrary, one must consider that if executive and life coaching is original and very performing, it is first because it is minimalist, pure, light and simple, in the noble sense of these words.

Coaching is in fact so extremely purified in its modernity that its essence is much closer to a recent artist’s feather-like sketch made with three or four caressing strokes of a brush than to a crusty, elaborate oil painting.  Compared to other more historical methods in the human and relational field, executive and life coaching more often rests on essential distribution of silences and empty space served by a confirmed artist.  Coaching can indeed be identical to an extremely light and delighting melody played with spiritual perfection by a master musician.  In masterful coaching, simple is beautiful, and less is more.

In this light, executive and life coaching inherits more from the paper-free and office-free principles of the information revolution based on speed, mobility, lightness and immediacy.  Systemic coaching needs no time and is not impressed by distance.  It doesn’t care for heavy investments, packages, frills and other superfluous gadgets.  It is commonly implemented on the move, through the phone, on internet and through Skype, making the whole planet an immediate potential market.  Go try to explain this to a therapist or a consultant.

Child of the just-do-it-now generation, executive and life coaching is born in the 90’s, matured with the turn of the century and it is blossoming in the third millenary.  Consequently, coaching simply does not need to rest on all the older tools and methods inherited from the industrial revolution (“coaching is not an expert approach”) nor from the humanist revolution (“coaching is not a psychological approach”).  It has surely profited and learned from these, but it has moved on forward at lightning speed.

Consequently, when first introduced to executive and life coaching in workshops, numerous professionals from other fields are disappointed by the apparent simplicity of its methods and tools.  Some quickly scoff, missing the esthetic effectiveness, the subtle exactitude that routinely makes a silence much more effective than a powerful question.  They do not perceive that the simple repetition of one client key word is much more pertinent than a long theoretical explanation.  For some chosen few, becoming truly conscious of executive and life coaching’s intrinsic minimalist beauty may come much later, after years of practice.

It takes time, sometimes years, before the professional master coach will come to an obvious conclusion: to preserve the originality and power of executive and life coaching, it must remain extremely pure, simple and light as a feather.  Consequently and by definition, coaching doesn’t add up to other historical approaches and is not cumulative with more elaborate methods.  To achieve a true coaching attitude one must first peel off, subtract, eliminate and discard. Paradoxically, it is by its qualities of purity, lightness, centered on essentials that the profession becomes extraordinarily performing and often magical.  Utmost simplicity is the true essence of executive and life coaching's originality.

• Caution: This purified frame of reference that rests on a simple humble presence also means that an executive or life 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.

We can systematically observe that in executive and life coach training workshops focused on the fundamental skills of listening, no matter their origin, all trainees to the coaching profession face an enormous difficulty when they begin to learn how to coach.  They all stumble on the difficulty to reposition their personal attention and presence in order to really listen from an executive and life coaching standpoint.

This most difficult skill for all to learn is profoundly attentive coaching presence, free of control and of all possible intentions on client process and outcome.  That very capacity is the essential foundation on which rests the mastery of all other executive and life coaching skills and tools.  Indeed, only profound listening and attentive presence will allow the other coaching tools to expand beyond their initial existence as simple behavioral techniques to become truly powerful transformational vehicles.

Beyond the listening pitfalls specific to preferences for theoretical grids and attraction to specific tools and methodologies, executive and life coaches also may listen to solve, to be useful, to understand, to feel involved, to help others, to act and react, to discuss and convince, to compare and evaluate, to be close or to dissect, to interrupt, etc.  If one listens for something, however, chances are one doesn't really listen.  In systemic coaching, one needs to simply listen for nothing at all. Indeed, systemic coaches just need to be present for nothing, and listen to their executive and life coaching clients as they are.

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

That is their raison d'être.  This motivation is fundamentally positive and it can be completely counterproductive.  The measurable danger is that these very committed executive and life coaches can often end up more motivated than their clients or may be too impatient to provoke decisions, design action plans and accompany measurable results whenallowing a little more time and reflection may be imperative for client development.  Indeed, it is sometimes urgent for pressured clients to take their time, slow down and patiently mature.

Consequently, systemic coach listening is very particular.  Without any intentions, systemic coach attentive presence represents an empty and shapeless receptacle or chalice simply offered for clients to fill, in the way they each please.  This very malleable receptacle is offered to do nothing, and for nothing other than to just permit client expression.

For the listening systemic coach, there is nothing to look for or to find when listening to client dialogue.  The provided space or volume is just there to let client mind and meaning totally permeate the whole executive or life coaching context and relationship.  Only in that way will attentive presence just allow clients to proceed with their quest unhindered, to freely expose and meander with their issue until emerging forms and solutions surface to allow them to reach their destination.

• Synthesis: The particular quality of this systemic attentive listening relationship between coaches and clients gradually becomes the central vehicle for client development, the principle factor that will ensure the systemi executive and life coaching process to move towards success.

This underlines that attention focused on client issues supported by problem-solving techniques are not the most important success factors for client development.  In this way, executive and life coaching is quite similar to all other forms of help and therapeutic relationships:  In all therapies, it is the particular rapport that is established between the master therapist and a patient that is the principal success factor in recovery and healing. Indeed, specific therapeutic methods or psychological theories used by different therapists do not influence more than ten percent of the healing process.

• Synthesis: In all therapies, studies seem to prove that 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 same holds for systemic executive and life coaching.  In fact, the first service a client acquires from a coach is an empty free space, a personal growth environment.  Coaches only supply clients with a receptacle, a specific type of open learning architecture free of all possible clutter.  In our modern times, such an open space to freely think, feel, envision, grow and expand is so rare that it can even be considered an exceptional luxury.  The privileged posture internal to the executive and life coach that best allows profound listening is also an immense personal silence, unconditionally offered to the client.

This explains why the fundamental hurdle for most beginning coaches as well as for numerous established professionals is nothing short of an identity crisis.  If executive and life coaches cannot link their personal, social and professional identities with their expert training, their deep knowledge, their warm capacity to help, their long experience, their sharp analytical edge, their exceptionally creative solutions, then who are they?  How indeed can they express their professional existence and personal difference? 

When coaches really leave the total executive and life coaching space to the client, then they may quickly have the impression they no longer have room to exist.  If all they have identified themselves with in the past is useless, what makes each coach different from another?  What makes systemic coaching different from other professions?  Paradoxically, the true most profound answer to that question should be “nothing” or total transparency. 

• Synthesis: The greatest hurdle in learning to become a systemic master coach is that one first needs to literally unlearn all previously learned behavioral reflexes, thought patterns and all other historically determined identity supports.

Consequently, in the accompanying relationship characteristic of masterful systemic coaching, there is practically no room left for coach ego.  The more one learns to be simply and attentively present to the client and coaching relationship, the more one becomes conscious that there is no room for the executive and life coach self as it would exist in other normal social or professional contexts.

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

As coaches progress and develop systemic mastership, they often totally question their professional positioning.  Their marketing and sales strategies are less and less based on differentiating techniques and tools, and they do not put forth preferred packaged methodologies nor propose exclusive distributorship of illusionary techniques.  Worldwide, executive and life master coaches seem to just start inhabiting a simple presence characterized by humility and transparence.

• Synthesis: The paradox of master coach marketing is very clear: How can systemic master coaches differentiate between themselves when all are conscious that there cannot be a difference?  Indeed, in their capacity to accept emptiness and silence, how can one underline the difference between the quality of an example of emptiness and the quality of another?

“To effectively listen and accompany clients, coaches do not need 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 systemic executive or life 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.  Consequently, clients definitely don't need to train their coaches to understand the mechanics of their issues and ambitions.

• Example: Many executive and life coaching situations are intimate client dialogues that proceed with prude allusions and general statements where the coach in fact understands very little of what the client is really saying.

Remember that when masterful systemic 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 executive and life coaching session are always part of a much larger ensemble. This concerns the more global client context including the imprint of their history, the aspiration of their future, the fuel of their motivations, the implicit forms of their perspective and frame of reference, the depth of their knowledge, the strength of their relationship with family and friends, the precision of their expected outcomes, the weight of their experience, the energy of their deepest desires and ambitions, etc.

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

Attentive presence to everything about the client that exists beyond client words would be a much more correct definition of masterful listening. This type of listening has a very precise although indirect effect on the client's attention.  When systemic coaches listen with executive and life coaching clients, clients gradually learn to listen to themselves. They begin to search within.  When clients listen to themselves more attentively, the focus of their personal or collective dialogue gradually shifts and deepens. Rather than explain things to the coach and simply aim to get the latter to understand, clients begin talking about themselves to themselves, in the presence of the coach. 

When clients begin to speak to themselves, their executive and life coaches become more and more transparent in the relationship.  Then the true accompanying process really begins.  Consequently, a real masterful systemic coaching process begins when coaches attentively listen with clients rather than to them and when clients follow their coaches in this listening process, and also start really listening to themselves.  In fact, master systemic coaches know how to immediately position themselves as simple witnesses of their client’s work and quest.

• Example: An appropriate masterful listening relationship in executive and life coaching can generally be perceived in client eyes.  When clients are searching within themselves, their eyes are looking inwardly for a new intimate horizon.  They are elsewhere, not at all attentive to their coach.

When, however, clients are explaining themselves to their coaches by carefully relating their story, they attentively observe all coach reactions.  They want to see firsthand the effects of their tales.  In those cases, clients are not working for themselves but for the reactions they can provoke on their public, personified by the coach.  After richly detailing their story, of course, these clients generally expect their environment or their coach to clap, react, participate or offer solutions.  In this type of relationship, clients expect their coaches to get involved.

In fact, when clients initially present themes or issues at the onset of a given executive or life coaching session, these need to be considered as timid invitations to a much deeper listening relationship that needs to develop much beyond.  

• Synthesis: In fact, in systemic and masterful coaching, the initial client dialogues focused on any particular subject are to be merely perceived as client introductions or invitations.  These issues or subjects are doors that open to much larger landscapes, 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 much larger or more fundamental personal or collective client issues, coach and client face-to-face conversations first need to evolve into internal dialogues where executive and life coaches are essentially listening with clients, while the latter seriously begin to listen to themselves.

When listening with a client, systemic coaches do not necessarily try to understand their words.  Consider the following question: Why should a coach need to fully understand client descriptions and explanations?

• Caution: To understand means to comprehend, 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.

These expressions indicate that if one were focused on having a very clear understanding of anything, this would be kin to wanting to control it.  Comprehending also means to include such as when comprehensive agreements are all-inclusive.  To want to understand is often the equivalent of wanting to include and to predict all possible details.  It is a control issue.

Even for experimented executive and life coaches, this hurdle can become overwhelming when the subject presented by a client is intimately related to a similar experience in the coach’s life.  The coach can then inadvertently become empathetic if not sympathetic or emotionally involved, immediately loosing necessary personal distance.

• Caution: Let us keep in mind that by definition in executive and life coaching, all control is to be entirely considered as the client’s sole responsibility. 

Indeed, clients understand their own contexts, their own issues, their own ambitions, their own history, their own objectives, their own motivations, their own fears, etc. as never any coach will ever understand.  What's more the executive and life coaching relationship is much larger than the story of the client's issue.  It also includes the coach, both their common environments and their separate personal and professional contexts.  It is impossible for the coach to understand it all, to entirely control this all-encompassing ensemble.

• Synthesis: Consider that it is impossible to understand that which understands us.  We cannot include nor control that of which we are a part. 

Even if one of the declared objectives of modern science is to understand life, for example, this ambition is out of human reach, by definition.  We are part of life.  It includes or comprehends us.  We are understood by life. At best, we can attempt to respectfully welcome and cherish life with the humble attentive presence it surely deserves. Consequently, rather than try to understand the mystery of life, it would be much more natural to simply abandon ourselves to its wisdom in order to better participate in its grand scheme.  That attitude would be conducive to implementing true sustainable development and much deeper respect, both of humanity and of our natural environment.

The same attitude is present in our approach to time management.  In this dimension too, we could consider that it is fundamentally impossible to manage time, in as much as it is time that manages us, as it well pleases.

The same holds with clients in systemic coaching relationships.  Executive and life coaches are an integral part of the coaching relationship and process.  Coaches and clients participate in being part of a larger context that includes them both.  Consequently systemic coaches cannot attempt to control the process that includes them, the client and the client issue.  At best, systemic coaches can humbly accept the common or shared accompanying process, welcome it the much larger interactive context, flow with it and trust it. But never is a coach in position to seize it nor control that larger ensemble.  This posture is fundamental to systemic executive and life coaching.

Consequently in systemic coaching, it is rarely useful to want to fully comprehend the issues that belong to their clients, nor whatever gradually surfaces in the context of the executive or life coaching relationship.  It is for clients to keep their bearings, decide on their direction, choose their battles, work through their issues and select their solutions.  Coaches are only there to accompany clients with attentive presence unhindered by any intention.  That posture presupposes letting go of their imperative to understand and nurture the feeling they're in control.

• Caution: Within the executive and life coaching community, the importance of this trustful attitude and posture consisting in trusting client capacities to move forward at their pace and in their direction is very often repeated in the way of a religious litany.  But it is and just as often misunderstood or forgotten to the profit of the illusion of understanding and control.

The consequence to this specific humble trustful and respectful posture is difficult to achieve for most apprentice executive and life coaches. They first need to learn how to let go of their imperative need to comprehend, understand and actively manage both the client issue and the coaching situation.  They must accept to forget years of training to develop listening skills focused on understanding content, to demonstrate knowledge in dimensions that are actually considered as almost peripheral for systemic masterful coaching.

Naturally, if it will be useful for the systemic coach to pay much less attention to the content of client issues, it will be just as useful to be present to all the rest.  But then to what does a coach pay attention?  The search for answers to this question will help master systemic executive and life coaches develop a deeper listening capacity, a fundamental type of attentive presence that includes no intention on client process or results. A fundamental form of letting go is the first necessary step.

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Rumi

The real capacity to listen as a master systemic coach represents the essential foundation on which rests the correct use of all the profession's other tools and techniques.  Only profoundly respectful listening and attentive presence allows other executive and life coach competencies to unfold with their true power.  Without profound attention, other tools are no more than superficial behavioral and linguistic techniques.  With respectful listening, systemic coaches suddenly participate in the creation of a formidable transformational space.

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

• The first surprise for beginners is that listening without becoming simply engrossed or intellectually taken by the content of another’s dialogue is an almost impossible challenge.  
• Then, learning to be totally quiet, profoundly present both to the executive or life coaching process itself and to one’s own senses and intuitions seems to take a few more light-years of focused training.
• Ultimately accepting to let oneself be surprised by a much larger resonant systemic consciousness that includes the coach, the client, and the whole context that brings them together will need a still deeper and more intimate level of attentive presence.

Indeed, for many, the steps to truly develop the particular deep attentive presence and listening stance characteristic of masterful executive and life coaching is almost as esoteric and inaccessible as learning how to meditate, maybe even to levitate.

In reality, learning attentive presence rests on daily, sustained, rigorous and disciplined behavioral training.  Indeed, for most, this particular listening skill can only be developed with the same voluntary approach as when one decides to regularly pump iron to develop muscle or daily practice chords to learn to play piano. In the etymological sense of the word, learning to listen is a real discipline such as when learning a martial art, a musical instrument, a high-precision profession, or meditation.

Consequently, developing true listening though attentive presence is far from just learning how to pull out an occasional superficial technique.  It concerns changing the way one is built or modifying the equilibrium of the way one is.  Truly, acquiring attentive presence cannot be improvised.  One needs practice, practice again, and then more practice.

• Caution: To acquire mastery in any field, one needs personal discipline.  To acquire any discipline, one needs personal mastery.  And obviously, when successful, this process ends by transforming the apprentice.  The process of learning attentive presence is at the heart of what can take executive and life coaching to an art that is kin to an alchemical quest.

Learning how to be totally and profoundly attentive to clients and their context has very important and lasting consequences in terms of personal transformation, primarily for the systemic coach.  Given that listening is the least active executive and life coaching skill, the one that least calls for thinking, talking and doing, it is naturally the one that is most revealing of a coach’s most intimate way of being.

• When executive and life 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 client relationship is almost synonymous to relinquishing all control and totally baring one’s soul.
• Unconditionally offering executive and life coaching clients all the space they may need 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 totally welcome diversity.
• Really listening is 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 coherency 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 systemic coach can open numerous new doors and windows to shared environments, perceptions, and fields of experience.  It can lead to very unconventional perspectives.  Often, profound attentive presence and listening can give coaches and clients sudden access to spaces and dimensions that are usually reached through regular meditative practice or other types of contemplative spiritual quests.

To be sure, this is not particular to or limited either to personalor executive coaching, or life coaching, professional coaching, team or organizational coaching.  For a systemic master coach, all these illusionary boundaries and categories disappear one after the other.  True mastery in coaching does not presuppose segmenting client lives in neat mutually exclusive manageable parts. Master systemic coaches do not harbor a world-view by which human experience is sliced and diced in so many exclusive fields of expertise.  True systemic executive and lifecoaching is simply focused on clients in all their personal, social, professional, collective and divine dimensions.  Then can emerge a truly comprehensive conscience of the shared process.

• 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 painfully dying of terminal cancer.  The coaching sessions quickly included helping the client face real challenges at home and with her children, each of them working through their personal mourning processes at very different speeds.

When any issue is approached in the course of an executive or life coaching sessions and sequences, a master coach is totally available to all the facets their clients may want and need to cover. Even apparently superficial issues can be indirect invitations to plunge in very personal and deep valleys of personal consciousness. All seemingly different client themes and issues, no matter how trite, are intricately meshed to form one large undivided area of existential concern. 

Regularly, the truly listening systemic coach reaches a form of transparency to boundaries, limits and territories.  In the practice of attentive presence regularly emerges a feeling of loss of self.  This temporary form of personal identity dissolution occurs to the benefit of a deeper presence to the whole client context, to the executive or life coaching relationship and to a larger shared common field within which the partners seem to exist in true reciprocity or resonance.  Through attentive presence truly free of all intentions, coaches can thus progressively be part of an active development process that almost totally escapes their personal control.

• Synthesis: Through attentive presence without intention, systemic master coaches actively participate in creating a totally inclusive and shared development environment.

By intensely listening to clients, systemic coaches can also feel they are gradually becoming transparent to themselves, that they forget or erase their personal concerns to the benefit of whatever the client needs to achieve.  Both the executive or life coach and client participate in a shared context that is much larger than the partners at work.  This free attention can sometimes resemble a transparency of identity, in which all the interactive space is totally left open and available to the client’s undivided quest, and sometimes to more.

Evidently, in systemic coaching, profound listening and its underlying attentive presence become key competencies that supplant, facilitate and support all the other executive and life coaching skills.  They are the skills that most embody the fundamental coaching philosophy. They permit:

• Clients a to gradually take over all the provided space and volume, in order to expand, deploy, and soar,
• Coaches to adopt the unique letting-go attitude or posture that allows for an intimate, comprehensive perception of clients as they proceed within their total potential.

Below are presented and detailed numerous facets of attentive presence and of true listening without directive coach intentions, and of how these systemic executive and life coaching competencies permit the subsequent surfacing of new perspectives that can fundamentally transform both systemic coaches and their clients.

The art of listening is different for a systemic master coach than it is for other professionals.  It subtly but very firmly rests on the fundamental frame of reference of executive and life coaching.  To really understand how to listen as a master coach, one must always keep in mind that all the skills of profession stand on a number of fundamental principles that have almost existential consequences.

• First, in executive and life 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, context and results is in itself an obvious proof of their motivation and commitment to take responsibility.  Consequently, executive and life coaching clients are not perceived as people who need to be cured or as professionals in difficulty, as ineffective teams that need to be helped.  Executive and life coaching clients are to be perceived as inspired people or systems that aspire to achieve a project and fully develop their inherent potential.

• Secondly and a priori, executive and life coaches consider their clients to be very well informed, as far as the detailed content of their issues are concerned. 

They intimately know all the characteristics of 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.  They are undeniable experts in the knowledge of their fields.  These two essential principles are foundational to any active systemic coaching process, and preempt the use of any other executive or life coaching tool or technique.  

• Synthesis: Taking these principles into account, systemic coaches can consider that careful listening and analysis of any individual or collective client’s words, focused on the detailed description of the content of their issues and concerns is of very little benefit for either the coach or the client.

In fact, executive and life coaching clients can spontaneously only relate what they already know.  Consequently, the detailed and often reiterative client description of any situation of their concern can only serve to 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 or realize their ambitions. To be sure, their restrictive acquired frame of reference and their inventoried perspectives have generally not led clients to the positive outcome they would like to achieve.  As a matter of fact, that is precisely why they have come to seek the competencies of an executive or life coach.

• Synthesis: For a systemic coach, what indeed could be the use of accompanying clients up the same avenues these have explored time and again to the point of calling on another party, specifically to get out of their all too familiar perspective?

Consequently, one can assume that accompanying clients on their already beaten track, listening to what they have already studied and revisited numerous times will not likely help them discover extraordinarily new solutions. Unless of course, if the experts who are accompanying these clients consider that these are not very informed on their own issue, or not intelligent enough to understand the context of their own ambitions.

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 ambitious goals. 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 executive or life coach.

• Example: Consider coaching situations concerning Olympic sports champions.  These world-class winners often feel they 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.

In all fields, top-level performers are generally not limited by a lack of technical knowledge in their chosen area of specialization.   When they need executive and life coaches, it is to be accompanied to achieve even better results in their field, within their own capacity to perform, in their own way, by fully exploiting the very high level of expertise they have already achieved.

• Example: A project-leader engineer works with a coach to find ways to put a limit to constant interruptive 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 she is leading.  Of course, these excessive demands are having a very negative effect on her team’s capacity to meet the project’s deadlines, and will significantly increase the final cost.

In the course of her work with the coach, this engineer cannot refrain from detailing and over-detailing all the information she has about the nature of her project. She continues searching where time and again she has already searched, and is turning around in circles in her endless analysis.  A systemic observation of the coaching relationship reveals that in a fractal way, the client is repeating with her coach exactly what her environment has been imposing on her and on her team.  The informative and analytical approach that is keeping the project from moving forward is the same as the one that is keeping the coaching process from progressing.  The coach can therefore quickly feel the same disempowerment as the client.

The coaching process proceeds to first focus on how to set limits on analysis within the coaching relationship in order to model how the client could do the same within her work environment. 

• Synthesis: Much like in the case above, in almost all systemic coaching situations, the answers to the client issue do 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 executive and life coach reveals much more pertinent information about the client’s process limits on the one hand, and about solutions that could be conducive to solving the issues, on the other.

To look for solutions where the client is focused can often be of very little use.  Clients technically know more than enough about their issues to achieve their goals to full satisfaction within the reality of their contexts.  Coaches can surely accompany their clients if they stay out of the technical and relational context that the executive and life coaching 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 collective or system-coaching processes, organization leaders and their representatives tend to very carefully explain to coaches their issues, detailed objectives and the means to achieve them.  These same leaders and representatives often also want to analyze and over-define the possible coaching process to determine a procedure that will be sure to achieve their goal. 

These leaders and representatives often repeat with their coaches the exact same processes they tend to implement within their organizations. They are little accustomed to letting go to facilitate an emerging process when they would rather roll out, or roll down very controlled, efficient and well-planned action plans determinately focused on achieving their stated goals.  Much as in individual systemic coaching, team and organizational coaches need to be attentive to the type of relationship that is established with them, And make ample space for unexpected or emerging solutions before the process even begins.

• Synthesis: Whether in individual, team or organizational coaching, much as in high level sports performance, if the head imperatively needs to direct and control everything, the results will rarely be innovative, nor will they provoke a radical change of perspective.

Consequently, it is important for both individual and team coaches not to hurry down a path that has been predetermined by client reasoning. The systemic coach needs to listen beyond the well though-out words that serve to confirm what the system already knows all too well.  In coaching, the obvious and logical initial diagnosis and 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 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 underlying constraints of how they state their issues.

• Synthesis: If rather than immediately proceeding down their defined 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 when a master systemic coach listens transparently with deep attentive presence, apparent differences between individual executive and life coaching, team coaching and organizational coaching in the way they state their issues and ambitions very quickly disappear.

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” Rumi

Along with the above developments on the essence of listening, it is also useful to be aware of the fundamental function of silence in the life coaching and executive coaching process.  For a systemic master coach, being silent is not only choosing to keep quiet at strategic moments.  The function of silence rests on a fundamental attitude that should impregnate coaching sequences if not all the sessions throughout any life coaching or executive coaching relationship.  

• Synthesis: In order to understand the essential function of silence in a masterful coaching relationship, it could well be compared to the vacuum that is created in a common pump in order to have it fill with an appropriate liquid or gas.

Unconditional listening, coach presence and the silent attentive environment offered to clients provide a space similar to the one that exists inside a running household vacuum cleaner. In as much as empty space aspires to be filled, the relational vacuum created by a silent coach will gradually aspire the deepest client thoughts, emotions, motivations, intuitions, inspirations and ambitions.

In this welcoming vacuum, clients can search, develop and blossom by themselves and for themselves. Consequently, when clients come to life coaching and executive coaching, they unknowingly come to find a space created by a specific coaching skill: the capacity to create and maintain a truly empty space or volume, a universe free of all possible influences.

Within this truly infinite environment, clients will be able to question, search, find, define, deploy, and conjugate themselves totally and freely.  To offer this free environment, this relational vacuum, coaches obviously first need to clean up the clutter from their own internal space.  They need to refrain from filling it with their own frameworks and limits, their own thoughts, emotions, knowledge, projects or solutions. Much like in outer space, this void is free of taste, smell, noise, without distinctions, with no ups or downs, no inside or outside, no inclusion or exclusion.  Simply welcoming, this space is totally virgin of any influential information.

For a beginning coach, the notion of silence or void is usually very simply used as an occasional technique.  At different times during a life coaching and executive coaching process the neophyte will leave a little more space or volume for the client to search, wonder and question. 

• Synthesis: For systemic master coaches, the whole relationship with clients if not with themselves rests on a form of permanent underlying silence, a constant aspiration.  This function is almost a key definition of a masterful coaching relationship. Silence and the emptiness it provokes is not a technique but an integral part of attentive life coaching and executive coaching presence.  Its powerful effect is only occasionally, minimally, respectful interrupted.

Let us stress here that almost all other essential life coaching and executive coaching competencies – asking powerful questions, appropriately reformulating, knowing how to simply repeat a key word – all are measured by their capacity to create silence within the client. A truly powerful systemic coach question therefore invariably provokes clients to suddenly become quiet and engage in internal exploration, questioning, thinking, feeling and soul-searching. This client silence is needed.  Once created, it should never be interrupted.

A truly powerful question therefore provokes client silence.  The more powerful a question, the longer and deeper will be the ensuing client silence. This is so true that it is possible to assert that when clients immediately respond to a question without hesitation, the question is of no real importance to them.  They just serve the purpose to inform the coach on content: in as much as the client already knows the answer to any question, its fundamental added value is dangerously close to zero.

• Synthesis: When clients immediately know the answer to a coach question, the question is merely informative or incremental.  If rather than respond to a coach question, a client suddenly plunges into a deep inner silence and reflects, then the systemic coach really needs to focus and intimately listen to the client's quality of silence.   

Consequently, systemic coaches should be even quieter and more present when their clients are quiet.  That is precisely when life coaching and executive coaching clients are working.  In silence, clients are inwardly searching much more deeply than when they are filling the coaching relationship with analysis and descriptions.  The more silent the client, the more the true systemic coaching relationship is happening, and the more silent the coach.  And vice versa.

In the same line of thought, when systemic coaches occasionally restate a client phrase, when they repeat a key client word with interrogation, when they underline an expression, that is not so much to elicit more information but more to help clients interrupt themselves to listen a little more deeply to who they really are in what they just said.

• Synthesis: Fundamentally, systemic coaching interventions in client dialogues serve more to create silences than to provoke it to be filled, more to interrupt than to direct, more to stop clients in their reassuring flow than to support them in making too quick decisions or build premature and reassuring action plans.

We could conclude that all life coaching and executive coaching techniques can be perceived to essentially serve one purpose: to interrupt clients and bring them back to exploring their inner silence. When clients are talking, they are often only expressing what they already know.  They are explaining themselves to the coach.  When clients are searching inwardly, they are looking for new images and uncommon words, they are off their automatic pilot, adventuring out of their known universes and creating new forms and patterns.  Only during intense silences are life coaching and executive coaching clients really struggling to create new synapses.

• Synthesis: Coaching can often be defined as an essentially interruptive process that functions by aspiration.  That may be what is meant when it is said that coaches never push clients to help them move forward.  Fundamentally life coaching and executive coaching works by traction rather than by propulsion.

Likewise in team and organizational coaching contexts.  Systemic coaches often accompany these collective entities by strategic silences in order to provoke collective inspiration or conspiration.  As a matter of fact, the etymology of the word conspiration clearly indicates that when a group defines a collective ambition or motivating collective inspiration, it invariably conspires towards an ideal objective rather than work against an established order.
In this way, the observable result of masterful systemic coaching process may resemble the effect of a Zen koan much more than that of an apparently more effective short-term problem solving or project-management undertaking.

To resume, professional systemic masterful coaches are attentively present in order to offer clients totally open or limitless, warm and intimate empty spaces or voids.  This space is free from all coach thoughts, emotions, intentions, ambitions, knowledge and impatience.  This empty space permits client personal internal exploration and discovery, deployment and transformation.  In these client growth conditions, everything gradually and sometimes suddenly becomes new possibility.

When systemic coaches deliver their undivided silent and attentive presence to clients, when they abandon all their own identity supports and joint the whole client context to warmly and impartially welcome it, they develop a much more comprehensive access to the totality of each client’s context.  This access permits a much larger, systemic, ecological acceptance of each life coaching and executive coaching client’s undivided human nature.

The preceding section of this text essentially covered all that systemic master coaches do not attempt to do, what they do not focus on, where they avoid to direct their thoughts and emotions.  In order to proceed further and define the coaching process that spontaneously permits major changes in client perspective, it is now useful to define to what coaches specifically do pay attention in order to access a larger systemic awareness, with attentive listening and presence. 

Rather than listen to a specific client theme or issue, a particular problem or a punctual situation during a session, masterful life coaching and executive coaching attention is an intention-free, ample presence, open to the much larger or global client context.  In effect, no matter the subject of client dialogue, master coaches accompany clients by staying focused on their total, intrinsic way of being. This comprehensive global client approach consists in listening to the client’s being rather than to their issues.  This type of presence permits a surprising economy of means to achieve extraordinary potential 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.  In effect, whatever the subject or issue of a life coaching and executive 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.

When approached with this comprehensive perspective, a life coaching and executive coaching process concerning a variety of apparently segmented client subjects begins 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.  When, however, client issues are merely 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.  Consequently in this section, specific client concerns will be generally perceived as very limited expressions of much larger fundamental meaning, specific to each client's existential and essential aspirations.

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

To define what characterizes master coach listening and silence, it is necessary to be more precise about all that concerns the context to which they are attentively present before, during and after the life coaching and executive coaching relationships.  Of course, this presence also includes all that goes on within the coach and within the coach's life.  Consequently, coaches don’t only listen with their two ears but also with their hearts and with all their 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 to affect the client-coach relationship.

To reduce this quality of attentive presence without any intention to the art of silence and listening is almost criminally misleading. This simplification is 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 unfolding with the client is obviously much more important.  In general, the first practical result of this fundamental presence to the client and coach shared context is the creation a form of coach-client resonance.

• Synthesis: Coach-client 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, it concerns how coaches and clients harmoniously breathe together into a common inspiration, how they operate together in open heart and soul-searching, each growing on the edge of their very being.

What is the range of client energies? What are the client’s 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 or avoid? To what internal rhythm does the client heart beat? What are the client’s speech patterns and 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.

• Synthesis: Profound and undivided master life coaching and executive coaching systemic listening is a form of floating awareness of each client's whole or global system.  What’s more, a unified coach presence to the ecology of client existence 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 into segments. They would then attempt to separate the coach, the client, the environment, the time of their conversation, the gestures, the tone of voice, 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 makes total abstraction of the very existence of separations or boundaries.  In effect, master coaches do not perceive clients as from the outside or from a safe distance.  Systemic life coaching and executive coaching presence rests on the essential principle that all boundaries are illusions, that one whole, undivided reality exists and beats to the same unified pulse, in total resonance and singular harmony.

Practically speaking, systemic 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 then to attribute the integrality of all perceived meaning to the client and the client quest.

• Caution: Within a systemic perception of reality, the word individual or undivided can define clients and coaches with a significantly different slant.  Both are not only undivided from themselves, but they are undivided from their environment.  They can both be perceived as indivisible parts of the much larger context within which they exist.  In this way, the individual is the whole, and vice versa.

The pages below invite life coaching and executive coaching professionals to seriously consider this unitary, integral or integrated perception of client contexts, erasing all illusionary boundaries between coach, client and the larger universe in which they actively participate to develop new meanings.  This will allow for a very different exploration of some phenomena that habitually occur during coaching conversations and accompanying quests.

• 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 exceptionally visiting company headquarters.  Considering the security procedures in place, the coach is to call the client on his cell phone when she arrives 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 trustfully settles down on her seat, feeling that somehow or other, all will turn out very well.  Surprisingly at the next stop, the train doors open, and her client walks in, just meters away, right in front of her.

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 rare coincidence smiled as if the situation was in fact normal and well deserved, and proceeded to begin their planned conversation, on the way to a meeting that in fact had come to them.  Now isn't life a charm?

Systemic master coaches often welcome similar experiences of synchronicity with humility and recognize the deep interpersonal resonance on which it rests.  Synchronicity is indeed known to occur between people who have developed strong and lasting bonds with each other.  In our privileged relationships, we can often observe this type of occurrence with gratitude and wonder at how the marvelous regularly seeps into our daily lives.

The purpose of this section is to offer reflections and some useful methodology as to how to use interpersonal and systemic resonance in masterful life coaching and executive coaching.

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 on how these interface with their immediate environment.  In this perspective, coaches must also imperatively consider they are an integral part of client environments.  Indeed, far from being a neutral external observer, coaches are very significant actors in each of their client systems.

Consequently, the life coaching and executive coaching 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 spontaneous is the client answering questions or reacting to all other coach input? How does the client participate in the co-creation of a respectful coach-client relationship? How intently is the client focused on achieving coaching results? How fundamentally does the client accept and work with personal silences and coach presence?  How does the client accept positive feedback and direct confrontation?  How does the client search, find, build, and assume personal responsibility and commit? How does the client interface with, and partner with the coach?  How does the client accept proximity, intimacy or distance with the coach?  How indeed does the client live with the coach and relate in the presence of the coach?

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

In this perspective, all coach feeling, emotions, reactions, thoughts, intuitions, etc. can provide the coach with a huge amount of relatively precise information on the quality and nature of interfaces established by clients in other contexts.

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

The client described her leadership situation and work environment, her goals and her difficulties in implementing practical changes.  She spoke rapidly and her presentation was well structured, 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 to the client while she exposed the whole presentation without leaving much space for interruption.

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

• Synthesis: As in this example, it is useful to always be attentive to the quality of the space occupied by the master coach in the relationship and interfaces with each client.

As illustrated in the above situation, the space offered by clients can illustrate the quality of space they offer themselves in their own lives on the one hand, and on the other hand, the space they offer their partners in all their personal and professional environments. 

In this precise example, this includes the people in the client’s organization to which she says she wants to delegate.  In fact in this situation, the coach perceives the client descriptive monologue as almost suffocating.  Much like the coach, her other partners can probably feel that she is monopolizing all the shared vital space in her relationships.  Like the coach, 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 begin to exist and expand.  She could be much more, by doing less.

• Caution: When life coaches and executive coaches are attentive to their relationships with any client, they will notice that the quality of their client interfaces during a coaching sequence illustrate the quality of interfaces clients establish with themselves and within 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 make space for others, or delegate.  She has lost her silence and fills all the space while paradoxically saying she needs more space in her life.  She illustrates in the coach-client relationship how she lacks distance in her own management position.  The consequence of her interactive patterns with all, including with her coach, 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 life coach and executive 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, coaches can perceive client reality almost in the same way as chemical revelators or attentive receptors.  They 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 into the coaching relationship, they can become aware that whatever they feel, think, emote, etc. provides very pertinent direct indications on client frame of reference, context, and type of interfacing with their environment.

• Example: Recurrently, a relatively silent client very briefly answers all coach questions and then expectantly waits in silence, patiently observing the coach, waiting for another coach input. 

Rapidly, most coaches in such situations could start feeling the pressure of being invited to have to produce, think, question, and carry the coaching relationship.  They are facing slow and relatively passive clients.  This situation could indeed indicate that these clients are delegating the whole accompanying process and all development initiatives to the coach, demonstrating very little direct responsibility in their personal quest.   Life coaches and executive coaches could perceive that they are invited to be active actors in a relationship within which the client position is of relatively low energy, wielding little responsibility. 

The questions for the coach could then be: How is this client-coach relationship 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 issues the client may be yearning to solve, or ambition the client may be wishing to achieve?

• Example: A young coach once explained that she carefully observed all her new clients and all her 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 the 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 a specific 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 in the course of a session, systemic coaches suddenly 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 thought, they can often assume that their personal reaction is pertinent to the common context developed between them and their client.

• Caution: In a truly systemic perception, it is always useful to harbor the principle that when facing a client, none of the coach sensations or feelings surface by chance.

If systemic thinking stipulates that there are no real boundaries between all entities we normally perceive as separate, then life coaching and executive coaching professionals can start perceiving client relationships with a 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 team system?  How does a very vocal disgruntled employee in an organization express the dissatisfaction of a much larger segment of the employee population?  With a systemic point of view, we should be thankful for these expressions.

• Synthesis: When thought or 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 thought or emotion belongs to some or all of the other members who do not openly express it.

With a systemic perspective, all apparently individual emotions, thoughts, behaviors, etc. can consequently be perceived as manifestations or expressions of a much larger undivided ensemble to which that individual belongs.  In this perspective, all personal manifestations from each individual can be perceived as a partial bit of collective expression simply voiced by a designated speaker or emissary.   In this way, systemic coaches should 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, very 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 partaking in noisy and rather virile games, 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 even superficially wounded.

It turns out that within the larger organization, one of the important collective issues was the amount of collective pressure exerted on individuals who felt they were forced to conform to the intensely stressful environment.  The collective rhythm often made little case of individual needs, expecting long work hours that left but little space for personal life.  In the larger organization, there were numerous leaves for sicknesses and an abnormally high accident rate, compared with 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.  In life coaching and executive coaching verything 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. Very naturally, systemic coaches are invited to become integral parts of client dynamics.  They can take all these invitations into account and use their consciousness of client dynamics to better accompany them in their personal and professional transformational quests.

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 clients.  Client contexts are in fact totally integrated into client interactive systems.  Consequently, complete attentive presence in masterful systemic coaching includes:

• Attention to the client
• Attention to the coach
• Attention to the quality of the coach-client environment surrounding the relationship
• Attention to the two partners operational interfaces 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 life coaching and executive 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.

The systemic life coaching and executive coaching process as it is described in this text fundamentally rests on a peer relationship.  It is the same relationship as within all other non-hierarchical, flat or network type of systems. In this form of relationship, there is a direct link between:

• Spontaneous or natural resonance between the interacting members of the systems,
• Spontaneous surfacing or emergence of new structures, forms and perspectives,
• Spontaneous apparition of pertinent coincidences, or separate events that appear to be linked by their common meaning.  These 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 rigid procedures.  A master coach’s intention-free attentive presence intentionally serves to create this type of free and agile relationship with life coaching and executive coaching clients if not with the larger coaching context and client environment.

In this type of informal relational system, all the interacting partners have the possibility to act both as free electrons and together as a partnering unit.  This characteristic relationship permits a form of interactivity that will gradually allow for natural resonance to emerge between the partners, much in the same way as when musicians are improvising in a spontaneous jazz session.  The participating partners let go of all control to produce a common expression that emerges out of truly reciprocal influences without any prior planning, and without any one of them taking the lead on the others.  In fact, in the course of such 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 for 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 present concerns totally attending or witnessing life coaching and executive coaching clients in their more fundamental 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 and seem to participate to the same breath, the partner’s heartbeats unite, 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 of the partners 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 have been well known in age-old traditions.

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.  They start behaving as if they were one and the same, evolving within a common pattern, often in synch with their shared 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.  Interpersonal resonance seems to unite partners in a much more fundamental way.  It seems that the common vibration or profound link that unites them is the vehicle for emerging phenomena that can be repeatedly experienced in a masterful life coaching and executive coaching relationship.

It appears 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 often corresponds to the frame of reference of those that attempt to observe it, it may be useful to carefully study these approaches to lay the foundations of all relational processes that facilitate emerging solutions in masterful coaching.

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

It so happens that the international, national, regional and property meetings in this restaurant chain are also often the occasion for copious eating and drinking bouts, during and after working hours, and that rampant alcoholism is officially stated as one of the important social issues that the company is facing.  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 significant 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.  This quickly favored a much more sustainable environment, illustrating deeper caring for the 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 disintegrating quality of service, the check was finally brought after several requests, and displayed a number of important errors.

Incidentally, the client in this coaching session was worried about the quality of 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 in a way that would respect the precise contractual conditions that had been 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 life coaching and executive coaching, much to the contrary.  It is even possible that 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 life coaching and executive 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.

• Example: Also note 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.  This work can create a form of shared vibration focused on the same collective outcome.  In some cases, it can contribute to developing the opposite form of energy, such as a top-down routine-laden and passive organizational culture.  

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 a centralized system.  When the process is undertaken with a bottom-up open process in order to involve all the pertinent actors to develop a shared emerging vision, then real delegated and collective resonance can surface.

Achieving true collective resonance can be considered much more important than superficially agreeing to the simple formulation of a statement describing a shared vision.  Consequently, it is collective resonance that ensures that a vision is fully shared by all the personnel of an organization, and not a well-formulated formula 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. 

This organizational process is identical in individual systemic life coaching and executive 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 and 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 sustainable coherence with the larger personal and professional client context.

Whenever we define a situation, an objective, a project or a problem, we tend to proceed in a way we believe to be objective.  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 much like we observe external objects from a distance or from above so as to better analyze and understand them. 

Very naturally, clients proceed in that way.  Naturally, also, coaches can listen to clients by placing themselves as if they are externally facing their issues, problems and ambitions with a similar perspective and distance.

• Synthesis: In order to approach client situations more systemically, life coaching and executive coaching professionals need to consider that neither they nor their clients are separated from client problems, issues or goals.  Even when they appear to be separate, neither the client, nor the coach nor the client issues are independent from each other.  All themes presented by clients are intimately linked to all the people concerned around them, and that intimately includes their coaches.

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 life coaching and executive coaching context.

• Synthesis: From the point of view of systems analysis, we are not exterior to our perceived reality.  To truly and effectively perceive a situation or problem, one must assume to do it from the inside.  One must assume that there is no out there, out there.

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 where the coach would just be applying behavioral tools and skills to a situation which is perceived as external to the concerned actors.  The coach and the client need to proceed in shared awareness, as one comprehensive entity, within the stated issue or the ambition.

Systemic life coaches and executive coaches are never neutral when facing clients.  They are always personally involved, sometimes to the point of becoming vulnerable.  Clients also, are never neutral when facing their problems, issues, projects and goals.  This makes shared vulnerability a key defining criteria of systemic coaching.  The systemic life coaching and executive 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.

• Synthesis: 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 to situations that are external to their identity or being, in space or time.  Systemic coaches listen to clients describe who they are through their perception of their issues.  When coach and client develop this type of attention, past, future and distance cease to exist.  They make room for a much larger inclusive perception of time-space.

• Example: A 28-year-old coaching client described her difficulty to re-establish a satisfying relationship with her mother in law, second wife to her father.  She said she wanted to get closer to her father, but that the “other woman” rebutted all her attempts to make things better.  Apparently, her mother in law did not want to forgive the client’s violently rebellious attitude as a teen-ager.  Consequently in all family meetings, her behavior was criticized first by her mother in law, then by her father.  She would leave these reunions distressed, feeling there was nothing she could do to please her parents.

The coach chose a very practical approach, accompanying the client in a search for new options that she could implement in future meetings with the older couple.  Unfortunately, this approach was unsuccessful.  The client could not find satisfactory ideas, the coach would insist, and the coaching relationship became heavier and heavier.

A zoom away from the life coaching process can reveal that it reproduces the same exact relationship as the one the client is experiencing in her family.  Indeed, not offering the right kind of support, the coach expects the client to find new options to a blocked situation in the exact same way as the client’s parents.  The client is gradually feeling more than responsible for her plight in a polarized two-way relationship within which the others, including the coach, offer but little support and understanding of her lack of options.

It so happens that at the time of this coaching process, the coach was personally going through a separation and divorce process that was gradually becoming more and more conflicting.  In all these resonating relationships, key partners were strongly standing on their positions, stubbornly expecting that the other would make supplementary efforts to save the relationship, or substantially pay for its destruction.

• Synthesis: With attentive presence, systemic coaches often observe that everything that clients describe as external phenomena and occurrences are actually present within the life coaching or executive coaching relationship, in the here and now of the coaching context. 

All client themes, issues and processes can take form or resonate within the coaching relationship.  To believe that the coach is external to this resonance is an illusion. When systemic coaches become aware, accept and voice their responsibility of the personal part they play in the client process, the shared resonance will offer possibilities for new emerging perspectives.

Consequently, clients describe who they are and what they do elsewhere in their lives while simultaneously enacting the same processes with their coaches. All client issues come alive in the life coaching and executive coaching context, with the coach generally enacting the roles of other preferred client partners.

One often hears that coaches are more present to the processes and patterns of client dialogues than to the content of their issues, problems or preoccupations. This affirmation merits exploration and clarification.  To coach effectively, it is not enough to merely avoid getting caught up in the content of client dialogue. One needs to become fully present to the numerous different and complementary underlying shapes and forms imbedded in client dialogue.  These patterns are intimately linked to client frame of reference.

• Synthesis: The underlying structures, implicit dynamics and invisible shapes of client perspective are innumerable.  When life coaches and executive coaches take into account these tacit architectures, they can perceive that the conscious content of client dialogue is a mere vehicle for a deeper perspective, for a subterranean frame of reference, for a much more important underlying world-view

An attentive presence resting on free, open, creative listening will often let the coach perceive underlying directive patterns that will reveal client frame of reference, their perceived social, personal, emotional, mental universe, their comprehensive synaptic organization of the surrounding world.  Free intuitive listening will allow the systemic coaching to perceive structures or organizing principles that each client applies almost indifferently to all his or her fields of interest, areas of expression or preoccupations.

• Example: It is useful to be attentive when a client regularly refers to coherent and mutually exclusive ensembles, clearly differentiated areas or fields.  This type of client may seem to live within a clearly parceled world, divided into secure silos, between which they divide the time of their lives.

Their personal and professional universe may then seem to be separated into numerous entities which each have their own characteristics and spaces with precise limits.  These areas never mix.  People and events each have their place, their function and their different identity.  This can concern circles of friends, spheres of influence, realms of interest, preferred territories, conceptual fields, areas of existence, professional contexts and arenas for play.  What stands out in their vision of the world is the clear differentiation between objects, individuals, ideas, groups, occupations, etc.  Most importantly for these clients, the distinct ensembles that make up their universe must never meet nor mix.

When perceived on a regular basis within a life coaching or executive coaching client’s dialogue, this particular type of personal world-view is very different from when a client is more preoccupied by interfaces, connections, links, exchanges and relationships.  Those clients would rather express what they perceive as pertinent bonds between entities, between, places, between people and between fields of interest.  They seem to explore potentials for connections, the nature of communications, the quality of give and take and of other in-betweens.  They focus their attention on the pertinence of exchange systems, the effectiveness of links and liaisons, the presence of, or need for interaction.  These life coaching and executive coaching clients are first and foremost preoccupied by the quantity and quality of interfaces between the distinct fields and territories first mentioned above.

Close to this type of directing schema, some other clients will rather present preoccupations that seem to mostly concern passages, roads, openings, doors and windows, bridges and tunnels that will enable them to go to the other side, go through, go beyond, go out or come in, pass a barrier or move beyond.

• Caution: Of course, within a client field of concerns, the presence of the first pattern or perceptual architecture does not exclude the simultaneous possibility for the second or third. This is also true for all the other examples of world-view structures.  However, careful attention without intention will allow the systemic coach to perceive each privileged and each secondary structure when they emerge in the course of an accompanied dialogue.

To propose a fourth example, the dialogues of other clients seem to display models and preoccupations that could be defined as boundary management themes.  As the work proceeds over time, the emotional and conceptual patterns revealed by those client preoccupations seem to often come back to issues around limits and constraints.

This is a theme of barriers and walls, of resistances, protections, limits, refusals, enclosures or shields, lack of space and sometimes, need for freedom.  Occasionally the dialogue will approach the subject by its opposite presented as excess space, too much opening, uncontrolled porosity, fear of invasion.  Depending on the client and issue, the expressed boundary will be firm, soft, like a sieve, comfortable, thick, desired, refused, under construction or demolished.

• Synthesis: What are the underlying recurrent forms revealed by each life coaching and executive coaching client’s dialogue?  When a coach abstracts from the content of a specific clients concerns themes that appear in different sequences, from one session to the next, what is the recurring directing pattern which may, as a fingerprint, characterize that client’s meta-preoccupation?

Still other clients seem to regularly verbalize face-to-face preoccupations that take place between doubles.  These themes concern confrontations, relationships between pairs, win-win or lose-lose bi-polarities or duels, oppositions in communication with a complement partner.  With or against, territories are double.  Often, this theme concerns a struggle within and/or, black or white, with and without, inside or outside, man and woman, you or me, cheese or desert.

These client universes are structured within interactive equilibriums, in a parity between twins, in balance, in opposition or in collaboration, in perpetual instable oscillation between fundamentally equal or identical opposites that are actually unified, each half justifying the presence of the other.  Within these pairs, it is always difficult to choose, or not to choose.

A relatively common extension of this binary model concerns triangular preoccupations that include infernal trios, the third party that divides to conquer, the conciliators or judges who insert themselves within the couple.  This theme includes all two-versus-one game and go-between strategies.  It may include infidelities and treasons where the pertinent third creates complexity, an opening, a good or bad angle into what was perceived as a stable polarity.  This includes the couple maker or trouble maker, the salesperson who plays with the space between the company and the client, the infernal Bermuda triangle, the absent tier, the ulterior motive, all indirect strategies that work by ricochet or by harboring hidden objectives.  By definition, the triangle often creates a complex interactive space where simple polarity permitted stability or conservatism.

• Example: During a first meeting with a coach, a new potential client spends half an hour criticizing another well-known coach, repeatedly trying to get approval from the new potential game partner.  What may this client be illustrating about personal preferential triangular strategies?

In another pattern, some clients seem to systematically privilege upward, forward and elating movement.  They want to take off, to aim for paradise, to shoot for the stars, to discover the Eldorado, to organize the ultimate voyage, to be as aspired by the vision of an idyllic heaven.  This may be a form of escape into future projection or reveal a dream that yearns to become reality.  To avoid growing roots or developing routine, these clients are avid for newness, futures, lofty objectives, mad adventures, exotic travels and uncharted destinations.

Much as in Don Juan’s romantic quest, such clients are attracted by what is new, better tomorrows, better results, farther destinations, higher goals, continuously on the move, in a motivated and motivating search towards a distant, vanishing horizon.  Truly interested by exploration, seduced by innovation, aspired by adventures of the unknown, they personify a perpetual idealist movement, endlessly becoming their ideal.

• Caution: In the course of life coaching and executive coaching sessions and sequences, recurrent client life patterns and underlying models can be perceived in the way they present their issues, goals and ambitions, in the way they relate and proceed during their coaching process, in the way they implement their actions.  This allows the attentive coach to perceive regular forms, repetitious patterns in client expression, characteristic ensembles that are specific to a client, and to their world-view structures.

If these models and patterns constitute or shape client frame of reference, it is also out of these models and patterns that new perspectives can emerge to provoke deep transformations.

Among other common patterns, let us not forget preoccupations that revolve around a controlling center, a venerated lion or sun king, a structuring DNA, a vital heart or core, often wielding a stable, conservative and reassuring presence.  This centralizing vision of the world often includes control exerted by the necessarily powerful center, a structuring supervision process, a form of ruling monarchy validated and protected by it’s subordinated vassals. Here, permanence is expected, communication and services are to be predictable.  Indeed, the wheel holds by its hub, the architecture in the form of a spider’s web positions the queen at the center.  This world-view calls for an autocrat, a deified leadership that represents, rules and defines to be the point of reference and ensure coherency.

Sometimes in a complementary way, habitual client patterns present complex organizational levels that concern systems within systems, circuits that include other circuits, infinite fractal perceptions such as those that illustrate endlessly inclusive Russian dolls.  In concentric circles, in systems, subsystems and meta-systems, in networks that fit into other networks that in turn belong to grids, these client patterns unfold into extreme complexity.  Intense interactivity is the often the main preoccupation for clients who present those complex perceptual patterns where each larger architectural level can bring a new complementary coherency or synthesis to the smaller, subordinate or implicit constitutive parts.

There are also client themes that revolve around a fundamental search characterized by themes of radical breakthroughs, piercing through the proverbial mirror, profoundly mutating by alchemical transformation from lead to gold.  This recurring theme is often represented by the phoenix that rises from its ashes or the salamander that will survive purifying flames, by the quantum leap that can transform the very nature of matter or by the worm that transforms to become a butterfly.  This theme is often present in coaching, when client are undertaking a spiritual, existential or other essential search.  Even when this underlying theme is not explicitly stated in any life coaching and executive coaching process nor made formal in most coaching contracts, it could be considered to be the real underlying motivation for most clients and coaches.

• Synthesis: These privileged models, personalized forms or underlying schemes are specific to each life coaching and executive coaching client.  They can organize client conscience and expression both in very simple and in extremely complex ways.  And remember that often, in the course of a life coaching or executive coaching relationship, a client will evolve from on theme to another, to yet another.

The list of organizing forms presented here is far from complete.  That would be much too simple and dangerous.  This presentation just aims to illustrate the fact that implicit architectures or invisible patterns are present in all client perception and expressions.  Of course, the same is true for the coach’s underlying structures. 

To fully understand different client frames of reference, these patterns need to be heard or felt by the systemic coach.  Once they are perceived, they can be challenged, expanded and transformed through pertinent questioning and reformulation.  This will help both the coach and client to discover new perspectives or original forms of reality.

While being attentive and present to the life coaching and executive coaching relationship and client context it is also useful for a coach 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 description of an issue, a problem or a project also positions them in dynamic relationships with desired outcomes situated sometime in the future and at the end of the coaching sequence. The client presence is stretched both by a personal or professional vision in time and by their expectations for coaching process results.

One way or another, life coaching and executive coaching presence exists within an aspiration created by client objectives in time and by their vision of possible results.  In fact, the quality of client presence and the intensity of their work are highly correlated with their commitment to expected results.  This client tension directed towards an expected end definitely gives coaching a directive dimension.  Consequently, it is clear that life coaching and executive coaching is not a relationship focused on a relationship.  It is a partnership focused on achieving an outcome that needs to be owned and defined by the client.

To achieve this goal-oriented client tension, 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 life coaching and executive coaching dialogues, coaches reputedly ask several questions and then rephrase and reformulate client answers to clarify client sequence or session objectives.

But some caution is useful concerning this outcome-focused 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 life coaching and executive 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 efficiently help them start their exploration process.

The purpose of clarifying all client 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, sometimes to radical changes in client objectives.  

• Synthesis: If the life coaching and executive coaching process is to allow for emerging solutions, one must always leave space for deeper emerging client meaning.  Consequently, a master coach should always allow for, or hope for, unexpected changes in client direction and other creative process modifications.

Systemic life coaching and executive coaching always leaves ample space for client meandering and sharp turns for new perspectives to emerge. New horizons and solutions can only come forth out of the folds of client dialogue and evolution, in relatively adaptable exploratory spaces.  Rather than absolutely want to achieve clearly set goals, it is imperatively necessary to allow for all that can emerge within a loosely defined client quest.  Creativity only happens within a desired outcome that can regularly be adjusted if not completely redefined by the client.

It could even be possible to consider that if a client doesn’t change goals within a given life coaching and executivecoaching process, that client hasn’t really learned anything new during that dialogue.  Indeed, if given clients and their goals are considered as intimately related, how can we consider they have evolved in a coaching process if they keep yearning for the same outcome?  If we don’t change our perspectives as we grow, how much have we really grown?

• Synthesis: Consequently, what is often called a life coaching or executive coaching session or coaching sequence contract could well be redefined as a relatively loose agreement to jointly begin to proceed together. 

The object of a life coaching and executive coaching agreement is just to have the coach and client tune in to each other, looking in the same direction, in order to advance in concert.  The more coaches privilege movement to acquire momentum in a loosely defined direction, the more fundamental client motivations will be likely to surface.

Indeed, we can imagine that if life coaching and executive coaching clients know exactly what they want to achieve at the onset of coaching sequences, they are capable of reaching these goals without much support.  When we have a very clear perception of our objectives, these generally elicit the necessary motivation to find the means to achieve our results.  It is consequently quite illusionary to insist that clients be truly clear about their deeper objectives at the onset of their quests, at the beginning of a coaching session or at the start of a coaching sequence.

In this light, objectives and expected outcomes are useful to just give clients an opportunity to give a general direction to their dialogue.  They serve to provide coaches with a rudimentary compass in order to witness and accompany client progress.  Much like when making music together, tuning in to the same chord in the beginning of a life coaching and executive coaching session or sequence merely serves to co-create a common foundation and sense of direction.  Much like in jazz improvisation, the rest of the coaching relationship needs to be open to all the positive surprises that emerging processes generally have to offer.

• Example:  At the onset of a coaching sequence, a client rapidly states that she does not really have a precise measurable goal.  She clearly states that she does not want to make any decisions nor have any action plan.  She just wants to express her frustrations about a negative relationship.  She just wants the coach to listen while she unloads.

Formally, the coach could answer that this expectation does not appropriately fit into a coaching context and relationship.  The coach could insist that the client formulate what could be a more precise operational and measurable outcome.  Indeed, the stated function of coaching is to accompany clients while they achieve tangible goals.  Just venting frustration in the presence of a willing ear can surely be satisfying for anyone under the influence of negative emotions, but is this really coaching?

In this situation, a more tolerant attitude could also lead a coach to reformulate the client’s expectation and accept the situation.  This could indeed permit an interactive context from which could emerge unexpected results both for the coach and the client.  After accepting to just listen to the client expose the situation and voice frustrations, a coach could also ask the client if coach interruptions, questions or perceptions were acceptable.   In other words, the coach can first welcome the client’s offer to have a place to express emotions and frustrations and also propose that this could lead to another type of dialogue.

In the real situation presented above, it so happens that the client dissatisfaction concerned her relationship with a friend with whom she perceived she had given a lot and received very little in return.  The client had helped her friend get started in a professional endeavor with a relatively open contract and numerous informal meetings.  A year later, she realized that she had really invested quite a lot of time and energy.  She also realized that whenever she needed something, her friend was too busy to respond.  The relationship that was initially positioned on an equal give and take basis turned out to be almost completely one way, to the client’s disadvantage.  This, she said was the cause for her frustration.

Now there exists an interesting systemic parallel: the coach can become aware that in the coaching agreement, the same client affirms that she is not expecting much more from the coach other than to just listen, or receive, and give nothing in return.  Indeed, the client is willing to pay for a session where she will give her perceptions, vent her feelings, share her perceptions, but she is not expecting anything concrete nor useful from the coach.  Attentive presence to the nature of the relationship proposed by the client in the coaching situation can offer interesting resonance indicators as to how she initially designs her relationships to be one way affairs, to her dissatisfaction on the longer term.

• Synthesis: On a regular basis, careful attention to parallels or resonating patterns between the initial coaching agreements or contracts and the issues clients wish to approach will offer extraordinary opportunities for masterful life coaching and executive coaching insights.

This case study illustrates that initial coaching agreements can present many different forms, shapes and patterns.  For one, it can be very detailed and precise or relatively open and unclear.  Whatever this initial agreement, it will be useful for the coach to use it as a contextual base from which the coaching relationship can begin to unfold.  That will allow the coach and client to first gain momentum and then discover resonating patterns, growth opportunities, more precise goals and unexpected perspectives.

Even when initially sketchy, this beginning coach-client agreement will help both the client and the coach remain attentively present to the general direction of the coaching process and client progress in time.  Whatever the agreement, it will allow the coach to listen to the client within a stated client direction and context.  This context includes, by common agreement, a tension or an aspiration towards an oftentimes relatively imprecise outcome.  Typically, that outcome will go through a number of unexpected creative modifications.

• Synthesis: In this way, clients define their intention and then begin their personal dialogue. Whatever the stated goal, coaches can 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, to become unclear or to loose 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 an emerging preferred course.  This allows for the surfacing of more fundamental directions, more essential aspirations and sometimes totally new forms of client existence.

Consequently, throughout the life coaching and executive coaching process, intention-free attentive presence is focused both on the general client context and on client aspirations, in a direction that is often gradually refined if not totally redefined.  In this way, clients can be 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 their emerging reality.

Systemic coaches need to perceive client environments as if these contexts were the reflection or the extension of who they are.  Client objects, tools, offices, cars, homes, clothes, sports, lifestyle, etc, everything from the way they dress to their behavior and language patters can be indicators of who they are or want to be.  In a way, the immediate universe around clients can be perceived as extensions of their being in a much larger space and volume.  This way to perceive clients can even include the spaces occupied by other people, the roles other people play.  “Show me your environment, and I will tell you who you are” is a saying that could illustrate this enlarged or systemic perception of client dynamic identity and being.

The client’s universe is indeed an extension of their persona in a much larger space, within a more consequential volume.  It is very useful for a systemic coach to know habitual life coaching and executive coaching client environments and be attentively present to the way they inhabit them and unfold within them.  This can be an excellent argument for the pertinence of shadow-coaching, when life coaching and executive coaching professionals follow or shadow their clients while these continue their day-to-day activities in their real work and life contexts, in their sports, within their families, inside their organizations.

• Synthesis: Systemic coaches can rest on the principle that clients occupy their environments in the same way as they inhabit themselves. Consequently, the list of client manifestations to which a systemic coach could be attentive and present is practically infinite. 

But note that if systemic coaches activate all their senses to be aware of their clients within their context, they do not focus on any one parameter at a particular time. Systemic presence is very loosely focused.  It is freely floating and all encompassing.  Coach awareness and attention is fleetingly present to all direct and environmental client manifestations, never really concentrating on any single client dimension or extension. This floating attentive presence may seem extremely complex if not outright complicated.  However, if there are no limits to all the client environmental facets, if the realm of life coaching and executive coaching attention is indeed extremely complex and apparently dispersed, the systemic coach’s focus holds in one word: the client, as perceived through the enlarged environment the client occupies.

• Example: Arriving at a client meeting, a coach suddenly learns that due to an emergency, the client must imperatively cancel the meeting and immediately drive to attend a meeting on the other side of town.  The adaptable coach spontaneously proposes to accompany the client during the car trip and have the session during that travel time.  Reactive clients indeed deserve reactive coaches.

While driving, the client approaches current issues initially planned for the session, punctuating the dialogue with flash comments on the upcoming urgent meeting and on the obviously limited skills of most neighboring drivers.  The coach sits back and listens with an enlarged floating attention, and starts to perceive numerous parallels between the client’s handling of traffic jams and crisis management, between the client’s general driving energy and professional emotional involvement, between the clutter thrown in the back seat of the client’s car and the client’s back office organization, etc.

• Synthesis: Simply put, life coaching and executive coaching listening and attentive presence concerns only one question: Who is this client, in his or her context, in her or his 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 related 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 during the accompanying process.  From the complexity of the whole client environment will emerge surprisingly pertinent patterns and forms, echoes and shadows, rhythms and structures.

Sometimes life and executive 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 fringes of client awareness.  Sometimes, the presence of a very pertinent partner or foe can physically be felt in the course of a client dialogue, within which the person was never mentioned.  In this way, presence to client context also includes an intuitive openness to the much larger client personal, social and professional environment.

• Synthesis: Consider that all subjects presented by life coaching and executive coaching clients at a given time, that all their defined issues or envisioned projects are merely offered as temporary vehicles to introduce much deeper issues and aspirations and patterns.  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 a point of focus for a life coaching or executive coaching session.

If coaches limit their listening and attention to the conscious perimeter offered by initial client goals or to the simple content of their dialogue, they will limit their work to a relatively restrained field of client consciousness, a superficial range of passing client interests. 

During each life coaching and executive coaching session and sequence, all expressed client preoccupations need to be considered as simple introductions that can give access to a much vaster and more significant client universe of being.  A systemic master coach’s attentive presence immediately needs to be listening all the indicators that are present in that much wider client reality.

In life coaching and executive coaching, like in all other professions, time is of the essence.  It is a key performance indicator. As a matter of fact, such common expressions as “here and now” and the relativity “time-space” concept reveal that if coaches fundamentally need to respect client space, they equally need to respect client time.

In order to be truly present in a creative listening mode, it is useful for coaches to imagine that time can be perceived otherwise than by visualizing a long straight and uninterrupted line that begins in a distant past and ends in a likewise infinite future.  Client time can alternately be perceived as an unoccupied space, a lived-in volume, a paralyzing vacuum, a rhythmic pace or wave, a depressing downward spiral, uplifting energy on which to surf, a repetitious cycle, a wildly accelerating vehicle, a cluttered or suffocating receptacle, etc.

Consequently, professional systemic coaches need to be attentively present to, and very respectful of, all individual and collective client time patterns and rhythms in the course of each life coaching and executive coaching client session and sequence.

• Caution: It is not a coach’s function to efficiently pace sessions and manage life coaching and executive coaching time in order to make sure that clients achieve satisfactory results within set deadlines. 

Coaches, again, are not to be identified as project managers to solve client issues and achieve their ambitions. They are not responsible to realize client results within imperative time frames, in order to undeniably demonstrate their coaching effectiveness.  Much the contrary.  A master coach respectfully accompanies clients as they progress in their own way and manage their own quest, in their own time.  And if the life coaching and executive coaching time-space truly and completely belongs to the client, coaches need to be particularly attentive to the time patterns that surface in the relationship.  Consequently, client time also requires full and deep attentive presence and respect, completely freed from coach time-management intentions.

• Caution: Rather than feeling they must be the keepers of shared time and become efficient pacers of the life coaching and executive coaching process, it would be more coherent with the philosophy of coaching and a truly professional coaching posture to let the client express the patterns of who they are within their own time architecture.

Do coaching clients make time to finish early and run off? Do they take their time and finish late? Do they run after their time while their time escapes them?  Do they loose or waste their time or again savor and cherish each instant?  Do they effectively use their time or try to buy time?  Do they write off their time, or are they stressed by their potential lack of time?  How can a coach accompany clients by letting them express themselves fully, in the open space of their own time?  How can coaches be present to clients until they develop their own original presence to themselves, to their lives and to their personal time-space as it slowly unfolds?

• Caution: Masterful systemic coaches need to develop sensitivity to client time patterns, an attentive presence to the way clients install themselves in their time.  This sensitivity concerns the way clients exist in the time of their life coaching and executive coaching sessions, sequences, homework, action plans, and personal dialogues.

Client time can manifest precise and repetitious forms and structures, characteristics and patterns.  Some clients are slow to start.  Whatever they begin, they first need to warm up, and gradually pick up speed. Others are over-compressed and seem to start everything they do in a revved-up sprinting mode.  Still others manifest difficulties to finish or conclude whatever they begin, while others still resemble long distance runners who display a resilient capacity to keep a steady pace over very long distances and periods of time. Some need very little time, achieving extraordinarily brilliant, almost immediate results. Some clients seem to prefer to get lost in original and creative meanderings, introverted bubbles, and concentric circles or unpredictable sidetracks. Still others regularly choose to take surprisingly creative tangential shortcuts or adapt to totally new directions with surprising ease. Whatever the type of time or pace clients choose to adopt, a masterful systemic coach simply accompanies them, as a witness to their particular way of being within their time-space.

• Synthesis: Attentive presence to how each client begins, follows and concludes an hour-long session, a sequence over minutes or a sentence over seconds provides masterful coaches with an intimate understanding of the patterns within which those same clients may manage their life segments over days, months, years and decades.

Clients inscribe themselves in their life coaching and executive coaching sequences in the same way they install themselves in their lives and professional times spans. A presence to client time patterns allows master coaches to intuitively feel how each client’s rhythm and energy is deployed in the time-space of all they decide to avoid or achieve.  In order to perceive each client’s particular way of inhabiting their time, it is imperative for a life coach or executive coach to totally respect client pace and rhythms, just as much as they need to be respected in their space.

Attentive presence to client time structure will allow coaches to fully become one with each one’s specific type of rhythm and energy, and understand how each is in time, in everything they choose to accomplish. Consequently, resting on the principle that the universe can be perceived in a grain on sand, all client time patterns within all segments of a life coaching and executive coaching process can illustrate client ways of being in their projects, missions, ambitions and all other personal and professional endeavors.

• The way clients start a life coaching and executive coaching sequence can illustrate they way they generally begin all their other projects and action plans.
• The rhythm or pace in the way clients follow these beginnings and all the hesitations and accelerations during each sequence of a life coaching and executive coaching relationship can illustrate their patterns in all other realms of their existence.
• The way clients end or close a sequence, conclude a session: early, on time or late, softly, abruptly or with precipitation etc. also illustrates their capacity to properly wrap up and finish. Life coaching and executive coaching session conclusions illustrate the quality of client 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 structuring role.  They could actively and effectively manage life coaching and executive 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 time process.  This would then principally serve to reveal coach time management patterns and control issues.
• On the other hand, coaches could choose to simply accompany their clients in their own delegated time management.  These coaches would then occasionally give respectful indicators about the way clients choose to be in or out of their own time.  This would be more in keeping with a truly masterful posture, corresponding to just being attentively present to client time-space, without any intention to modify it into a predetermined form. 

This second option is obviously less conducive to creating client dependency.  It respectfully helps clients become conscious that they own their time, that this time is a precious commodity, and that they can gain in managing it as effectively as they see fit.  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.

• Caution: Numerous beginning coaches, and some more confirmed, actively manage their client time, privileging short-term effectiveness to help clients achieve results.  These life coaching and executive coaching professionals believe they are responsible to ensure client results in order to provide them with immediate and tangible satisfaction.

For these coaches, any individual or team coaching session must start with a precise and concrete contract.  This phase is followed by an exploration phase, then a search for practical solutions, and finally the process is topped off with a solid action plan.  In this perspective, one must indeed manage clients in order to conclude on time.  Of course, these coaches maintain that they respect clients and accompany them without trying to influence them in any way.  This may be true as far as the content of the work is concerned, but clearly in such situations, the coach manages client time in a relatively directive fashion.

Granted, it can be argued that such a voluntary coaching stance may be useful to achieve material results on the short term in order to acquire client satisfaction.  This type of approach does not provide clients with the opportunity to first express, then become aware, and finally modify their own way of being within their own time processes.  This may have huge consequences when we know that one of the main indicators of individual and collective client success is client capacity to manage their own time to achieve their own results.

• Synthesis: What if it was not a coach’s responsibility to keep an eye on the clock and manage life coaching and executive coaching time?  What if coaching clients were invited to work on their own way of managing their own life coaching and executive coaching space, in order to practice their own time management autonomy?

Interestingly, as the saying goes, time is money.  It is also significant to realize that the word finance comes from the same root as finish.  This indicates that client time management can provide systemic coaches with metaphorical insights as to how clients manage their finances by observing how they spontaneously manage their time.  How are life coaching and executive coaching clients who are regularly late finishing also living over their financial budget?  How do clients reveal their capacity for financial success by finishing early, with a measurable time credit?  How are clients who waste time illustrating their strategies by which they waste money?  An open attentive presence to client time management can give excellent insights to their credit rating, and give the systemic coach numerous opportunities for powerful questioning.  To do this, however, it is imperative to let clients express their time management patterns.

Consequently, masterful life coaching and executive coaching consists in accompanying clients while they unfold and expand in their time-space provided in the here-and-now coaching environment.  Attentive presence to the whole client and the way they inhabit their time and space provides the systemic coach with very clear client patterns, strategies, shapes and rhythms that are totally in resonance with who the client is in many other dimensions of their lives.  This intention-free attentive presence to client being in the coaching time and space first allows client to assume total responsibility for who they are in their time. This fundamental respect then allows clients to freely choose who they want to become, in their own time.

Everything can change when both coach and client together develop the awareness that each can take their time, and much as they do with their space, and then decide to occupy it and share it as they see fit, in the accompanying process.  For clients and for coaches, presence to their shared time reflects the way each find their fundamental space in other realms of their much larger personal and professional environments.

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 life coaching and executive 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 and where does the client stand and sit and what is the client attention to personal comfort?  How does the client acknowledge the presence of others in the immediate environment?

The first few minutes at the onset of every life coaching and executive coaching session often supply the coach with very important indications of the larger context that surrounds conscious client interfacing preoccupations and issues.  During those few preliminary minutes, clients offer vital information on their relationships and exchanges with the larger envelope of their existence and on vaster ensembles than what they consciously know.

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.

• Synthesis: 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 life coaching and executive coaching relationship.

Everything the client says and does in a life coaching and executive 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 provide new intellectual perceptual structures nor detailed knowledge of intricate, global and 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 if not banal 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, coaches need to learn to be very present and attentive to heed these minute coincidental details, to catch their particular form, and their pertinent message.  One needs to give these details all the attention they merit, to hear the deep meaning they convey.  With the careful development of their attention to these minute details, coaches will gradually grasp how much the global exists within the local, how much the important is constantly present in the apparently insignificant.

• Synthesis: We exist within 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 our attention to pertinent messages. These are conveyed only to those among us who can be truly present and attentive to the instant.

Apparently, systemic experiences and the 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 life coaching and executive coaching context can often magically reveal infinite details of client interactive and existential patterns.  Of course, the coach is also powerfully and intimately concerned with and involved in all these patterns. 

Consequently, within their local common environment and interactive context, clients and coaches reproduce together and unconsciously 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.

• Example: At the first meeting with a client recently promoted CEO to a country branch of an international company, the coach was briskly accompanied to the executive floor of the head office building.  Interestingly, the meeting was organized on a Saturday morning and the office building was practically empty of weekday staff.

Before starting the meeting, the executive client spontaneously showed the coach around the deserted executive floor.  The tour started with the visit of a spacious and obviously unoccupied corner office with a large terrace and a superb view of the city.  The office had belonged to the previous CEO that the client had replaced with very little advance warning, a few months before.  The coaching partners then visited another angle office, occupied by the country financial manager, and still another smaller office occupied by the local executive Human Resource Director.  The visit was finally concluded in the executive client’s much smaller personal office, which incidently had no terrace.

This executive coaching contract concerned accompanying the newly appointed CEO during a transition period. The client was to rapidly take full responsibility of the new executive position.  Prior to that appointment, the client had occupied a Chief Operating Officer job, reporting to the prior CEO.  Interestingly, the visit of the executive floor revealed that the client had not yet moved into the glamorous CEO office in spite of having the job for several months.  The predecessor’s ghost seemed to still occupy the room, and be floating in the darker shadows of the office building.

Following this obvious client lead during the first meeting, the coach quickly directed the work on the subject of space allocation on the executive floor.  When does the client intend to move into the vacant CEO office?  What type of rite-of-passage will the client organize to accompany this act and whom will be invited to the event?  Who should take the present client  office that will then become vacant?  What could be the perceived meaning of this second move?  What is the quality of relationship with the financial manager who also disposes of a glamorous angle office with a terrace?  What other symbolic decisions concerning moves and could be planned to accompany the transition, and how should these be informed to the personnel?

The client dialogue on the allocation of office space indirectly helped both coaching partners to tune into intuitions. This helped the coach formulate some interrogations concerning the transition period into the new position.  This work inadvertently focused on the office space offered a very light and highly effective way to approach the subject of managing the transition, and permitted the client to make rapid and practical decisions to fully inhabit the CEO role.

The life coaching and executive coaching context is such that almost all clients bring personal themes, issues and ambitions that are also important if not central to their coaches’ personal and professional lives.  In short, specific client issues generally fit their coach’s issues to a tee.  For each client and coach, this correlation does not only concern vague concepts, nor general values and principles; this correlation concerns very specific occurrences, real personal characteristics and significant incidents in both the client and the coach’s lives.

This type of coincidence in life coaching and executive coaching is not due to chance but to natural underlying processes that structure interpersonal attraction and seem to underscore all human relationships. As the saying goes, likes attract likes.  Affective clients find affective coaches, technocrats trust technocrats, angered individuals attract and relate with other angered people, etc.  We cannot please everybody, so a natural choice process works by elimination to very effectively limit the range of clients a coach can attract, and vice-versa.

When we pay more attention to these unconscious echoes, shared attractions, and coincidences, they turn out to be very precise.  A person in search of meaning may attract a coach in a developing quest for faith.  A young 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 his or her personal agenda.  A coach with financial issues may attract clients who repeatedly forget to pay.  A client considering major changes in personal relationships may unknowingly partner with a divorcing coach.  Consequently, transference situations are also the rule life coaching and executive in coaching.

These apparent coincidences may render a coach’s task much more difficult whenever facing client contexts.  Personal and sometimes painful personal and professional events in a coach’s life may suddenly surge out of client issues or problems 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.  The two partners’ emotions mix and resonate. The client coaching space and time becomes totally filled with the coach’s personal affect and emotional implications.

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.  Tuning into their personal vulnerability, coaches may then experience a very real loss of client distance and coaching competency. The open, empty unconditional receptacle for client development is suddenly overflowing with coach experience, thoughts, emotions, limits, and personal intensity.

A systemic coach knows that overlapping patterns between coach and client realities are the rule rather than the exception.  Systemic coaches intimately know that coach neutrality is an illusion.  Client-coach resonances are to be considered the common lot of most systemic life coaching and executive coaching relationships. When these take place, professional and authentic coaches can rapidly recover their appropriate posture and attentive presence through the use of simple and transparent communication accompanied by a clean ethical stance.  An attitude of humility and the capacity to accept one’s own vulnerability and humanity are the first obvious conditions to bring these occurrences into the coaching relationship for the benefit of life coaching and executive coaching clients. 

Coach and client transference can be perceived to be in complete agreement with quantum physics theory, where the observer is systematically involved in the processes and results of the observed.  In the same way, coaches are irremediably included in their clients’ quests, issues, meaning, difficulties and growth processes.  To be performing, master coach experience and client issues are obligatorily linked in unitary resonance.

• Synthesis: The shared experience between a coach and a client, including their apparently separate lives and issues, need to be considered as one unitary phenomena that is part of a unique inseparable reality that belongs to single universally shared realm of information.

Life coaching and executive coaching can be inscribed in the quantum reality of the universe where the principle of the external or distant scientific observer disappears to make room for the collaborative principle of the scientific participant.  In this perspective, the external universe is also internal and irremediably becomes a field of shared participative awareness and processes.  As in all attempts to understand quantum reality, coaches who accompany client dialogues actively participate in reshaping both client universes and their own realities.  The boomerang effect of life coaching and executive coaching is that clients constantly participate to reshape coach existence.  At no time can a coach pretend to be a neutral, external observer. Never can a master coach truly partake in a client relationship without also enduring lasting consequences.

Obviously, regular supervision is the preferred setting to attempt to make the difference between what may really belong to each coach and what may belong to their clients.  Therapy may also help life coaching professionals and executive coaches gain a deeper awareness of their own baggage, and of whom they attract as partners in personal life and work. In those setting, however, the goal is not to achieve a theoretically ideal level of awareness where overlaps between client and coach contexts will cease to surface.  That would be an illusion, and an immense loss of added value would be the price for it.

The object of coach supervision is to achieve a positive just-in-time awareness of these echoing phenomena between the coach and the client.  The master coach will gradually learn to immediately perceive and transparently use coach-client issue overlap to propose avenues for shared growth. The obvious growing edge for master coaches is to learn how to use all these resonating occurrences for them to grow in their own personal quests.  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 life coaching and executive coaching, it is consequently very important to constantly expect these overlapping occurrences between all client issues and significant personal experiences in the coach’s life. Professional coaches can systematically prepare themselves to meet their own issues and challenges in every theme that every client comes forward to offer.   It is an integral part of the coach growth process to achieve really masterful attentive presence to oneself and one’s own issues.

• Option: 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 each client, or at each and every meeting with each and 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 life coaching or executive 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 part 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 that will invariably have a boomerang effect.

The second section of this text would be incomplete if it didn’t cover the place and role of synchronic occurrences, one important element in the frame of reference of systemic life coaching and executive coaching.  The phenomena of synchronic events have already been approached several times in the above text.  Numerous examples originating from real life coaching and executive coaching situations have already been provided as common occurrences.  It is still difficult to offer proof as to how and why these synchronic events occur and how predictable its operating principles may be.  However, it seems more than useful to share some observations on its manifestations in the course of truly systemic life coaching and executive coaching processes.

• Example: During coaching relationships that rest on a transparent and shared attentive presence characterized by deep alignment between the partners, it is quite common for the coach and client to experience synchronic events, either separately, or within their relationship.  Although many coaches can’t explain how these occurrences happen, they feel repeatedly blessed by synchronic coincidence.

By definition, synchronous phenomena are coincidences between events that are not linked in an apparent causal fashion but that convey a shared meaning that is perceived as profoundly pertinent by the concerned actors.  We have already mentioned above that synchronic events are reputedly more common between people who are intimately linked such as twins, a mother and child, life partners, very close friends, etc.  This relational intimacy also exists in the course of many intense life coaching and executive coaching partnerships.

• Caution: The word coincidence is not synonymous with chance.  Coincidence means correlated incidents, or incidents that are related to each other by the meaning we read into them.

Synchronic experiences also seem to also naturally occur whenever people are undergoing profound personal or professional transformations, are vitally ill, going through a mourning processes or a life rupture, living an important transition, intensely in combat or survival situations, when experiencing rapid life accelerations, when totally involved in very creative research, or again when in fundamental questioning on the meaning of their existence.  This extensive list may explain why synchronic experiences can be relatively common occurences in all accompanying professions, including masterful life coaching and executive coaching.

It seems Carl Gustav Jung first mentioned the term of synchronicity in 1968 during a speech concerning Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the Yi King from Chinese to German.  Jung said that the Yi King, otherwise known as the Chinese Book of Transformations did not rest on the “principle of causality, but on a principle (unnamed until then because not observed by us) that I will temporarily call the synchronistic principle”.

• Synthesis: As defined by Jung, synchonicity is a coincidence of two or more events occurring within no measurable causal relationship, that have a common meaning, or which would have a similar content signification.

Interestingly, this definition suggests a surprising frame of reference that challenges mainstream perspective.  It suggests that there are perceptible links between our minds or the meaning we give to our lives, and external or observable material phenomena.  As much as surprising as this may seem, this would consequently concern observable and measurable interactive links between mind, or what we think or feel on the one hand, and matter, or the tangible reality of the exterior world, on the other.

Today, almost fifty years later, the concept of synchronicity is very well known amongst most professionals in human development fields.  It defines a recognized phenomenon that still remains very difficult to explain.  Recent theories that come closest to explaining synchronous experiences can be those of David Bohm and his concept of implicate order, of Rupert Sheldrake and his morphogenetic fields, of Ilia Prigogine and his dissipative structures, and probably of other researchers in modern biological and physical sciences.

According to several of these sources and numerous observations, critical moments of life on the one hand, and very intimate relationships on the other can produce an intense vital internal or shared energy that would allow the concerned people to resonate together and with other pertinent ensembles in their environmental context.

Let us repeat here that these two criteria are often characteristic of a life coaching and executive coaching relationship.  Consequently, it is not so surprising that synchronous events should occur when clients partake in a significant personal quest, or between well connected life coaching and executive coaching partners.  Synchronic events appear in coaching as testimonials that alignment is occurring between the partners in the accompanying process and with the much larger contextual environment and that highly significant potentials are being developed. 

On the one hand, synchronic phenomena seem to be unique and personalized and on the other, they appear to be part of a much larger universal order.  When experiencing these phenomena, our actions and reflections seem to outgrow the limited circle of our everyday personal existence and suddenly invite us to get aligned, participate or dance with a more comprehensive meaningful universe.  Unannounced, synchronic events consequently intrude into our daily lives, they confront us with the unexplained possibility of a fundamental union between our individual beings and a universal reality.

• Synthesis: When we experience synchronic events, these seem to convey an almost physical sense of magic.  They impose an impression that one is in contact with another much larger, more existential, spiritual or transcendental dimension.

Also, synchronic events seem to reach beyond the notions of time and distance.  In this way, they really challenge habitual perception concerning causal relationships that would have a specific cause influence a precise following effect, and that both are physically connected within a given limited space, at a given time.  Synchronic events seem to follow another timeless or parallel logics, as if internal forms and events that occur in very different places and that have no apparent connection could establish bridges of meaning that could suddenly, temporarily and meaningfully bind them.

We need to consider that when a true master coach offers a posture of transparent presence accompanied by intense attention, this accelerates client intention and proposes a very powerful work context.  This relational architecture, this interpersonal alignment characteristic of systemic life coaching and executive coaching seems to greatly facilitate emerging synchronic phenomena. 

Consequently, in the following section of this book, a number of systemic coaching steps will be presented.  These describe how emerging solutions naturally occur when coach presence rests on true transparent presence accompanied with focused attention, without intentions as described in the previous chapters.  For master systemic coaches, it seems obvious that powerful emerging realities and reframed perspectives rest on the same frame of reference than one that allows for synchronic occurrences.

To be more precise, there seems to be a clear and direct resonance link between naturally emerging new perspectives and solutions that convey pertinent meaning to interacting partners.  This naturally happens most often in true partnering, network or peer relationships such as life coaching and executive coaching. Superficially, these synchronic events often surface as if by chance.  With masterful alignment, they can almost become a defining criteria of systemic coaching, and allow for extraordinary range of new options, decisions, and solutions.  The section below deepens and illustrates this process.

When coach and client attentive presence have reached the right level of quality, intensity and depth, when they are both aligned and co-accompanying in their quest and destination, sharing a common rhythm, paced in their shared process and context, then the magic of coaching can begin to operate.

“The magic of coaching” is a phrase that is often used to name what is perceived as a consciously provoked process that nevertheless always takes the life coaching and executive coaching partners by surprise.  This magic concerns a sudden unexpected shift, a new blinding vision, an almost overwhelming gift.  This magic concerns a disruptive breakthrough inevitably characteristic of truly successful and performing life coaching and executive coaching.  But to just poetically name this elating transformational moment “magical” is not sufficient here.  It is necessary to describe this key coaching process, and define its principal distinctive steps.  This is what we propose to offer in the section below.

For one, the magical breakthrough moment is generally preceded by a disruptive and shared feeling of discomfort, confusion or aimlessness, of mental and emotional chaos, of dispersion or confusion, as if the attentive presence shared by the coach and client had suddenly evaporated and disappeared.  For both coach and client, the indicator of this chaotic phase is often strong feelings of confusion or fear if not panic.

If and when coach and client succeed in breaking through this difficult passage or hurdle, the confusion magically disappears and makes space for the surfacing of a radical change of perspective. This is the above mentioned breakthrough moment typical of masterful coaching.  It is characterized by a sudden feeling of almost overwhelming liberation provoked by an unexpected, naturally emerging new and exciting perspective.  The new frame of reference immediately strikes the coaching partners with its obvious pertinence, its synthetic, global, coherent dimension.

This perception of a new and enlarged shared reality generally feels immediately right, almost universally coherent and sustainable. Without warning, it suddenly 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, perception of space seems to enlarge, 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.  Coach and client intimately feel as if they are important human actors that are integral parts of a much vaster, coherent, universal play.

When they emerge, these welcomed new perspectives enlarge the space of possibilities and provide a surprising new supply of energy and motivation.  They come to offer new directions to better proceed and new oxygen for vital inspiration.  They provoke an immense feeling of exhilarating liberation, both for the coach and the client.  Furthermore, this new perspective triggers its suite of new options for action.

At the magical breakthrough 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 creates the premises of the expected breakthrough, leading to an essential acceleration.  Indeed, the vacuum offered by the master coach was only a particular introductive relationship, a simple preliminary phase that ultimately serves the possibility of a very particular, quasi-explosive emerging liberation. 

Almost instantly, at a pin’s drop, both coach and client feel they have reached their destination.  They have arrived to a new realm of possibility, an original environment composed of pure opportunity.  In this new territory, both coach and client immediately feel they are unhindered to totally redeploy their constructive energy.

The most surprising feeling for both client and coach is that they both implicitly feel that this newly shared reality had always been potentially present, although hidden by a thick veil of misconception and misperception.  It is not the world that has changed. It is simply the perception of the coaching partners that has very significantly shifted.  The new perspective had simply been hidden from their view, in the folds of their minds and souls, kept inaccessible in the deeper meanders of their consciousness.  It seems as if both client and coach had unwittingly, unknowingly, simply been locked up in a much more restricted internal space.

The sections below attempt to provide a few practical indications concerning the different steps that may structure a breakthrough emerging process.  Here, the question is: what is the structure of this process, gradually made possible by master coach non-directive attentive listening and presence without intention?  Although the proposed steps may not always be clearly perceptible and although they do not always present themselves in the same order, they often serve to characterize what is commonly described as the magical dimension of systemic masterful coaching.

Before precisely defining the emerging process in individual and collective coaching, it is useful to get inspiration from similar phenomena that have been observed in nature.  Indeed, the emerging process that is of interest in masterful coaching is observable in the organization of ant colonies, in bee, fish and bird swarms, in the development of cities over centuries, in communication such as in rumor effects and the circulation of information on the web, in research on artificial intelligence and computer programming, and in numerous other flat or network systems.  Note indeed that all of the above exist in the absence of hierarchy.  Consequently, what characterizes and facilitates emerging processes in all non-hierarchical systems can be studied in order to attempt their reproduction in coaching relationships.

In all the systems named above completely unexpected forms can naturally surface, without effort.  These un-programmed solutions, these surprising creative patterns surface, or come up from the bottom without formal preparation or specific plan.  Without leadership, they emerge from the troops that simply exercise active local responsibility and initiative, without direction, predictability nor control.  For many people, it is hard to accept that such evolving processes can simply and naturally take place in the absence of directing schemes, preconceived plans, and with minimal or no hierarchy.
It is important to note that these emerging processes generally occur when a minimum of three preliminary conditions are satisfied:

• 1.    When there are no excessive descending directives or top-down controls initiated by hierarchical elements.

Note that the life coaching and executive coaching relationship very obviously and precisely answers this criterion.   A coach does not lead, has no intention on individual or collective client goals, work, outcome or autonomy.  Coaches position themselves within a peer relationship, partnering with their clients as equals.  They are on the same level as their clients, accompanying them without directing, neither pushing, nor carrying nor pulling, creating a maximum amount of space for the client’s natural expression.

• 2.    When these flat systems can naturally self-organize by implementing relatively simple, local modus operandi or operating principles.

There too, coaching individual, team or organizational relationships rest on the implementation of totally shared, very simple, basic procedures.  This consists in stating an objective and staying focused on it, in proceeding in practical and measurable steps, in respecting a small number of simple communication techniques such as questioning, reformulation and in staying focused on immediate practical solutions.  All through this text, we have indeed that to be masterful life coaching and executive coaching needs to remain simple, and that it is precisely the necessary simplicity of this accompanying process that is so difficult to achieve for all those who want to master the profession.

• 3.    When the relationship partners, peers, team or network members are given the fundamental liberty to focus on achieving their results within a uninterrupted, interactive and dynamic environment.

The interactive framework or architecture of the life coaching and executive coaching relationship, the privileged time allotted to the client, the simple protective and confidential framework provided for the work corresponds to this third criterion.  The life coaching and executive coaching space offered to clients is completely open and free, allowing them to wander, search, discover and grow, as they well see fit.

In order to accompany client teams and organizations with a life coaching and executive coaching approach, the three above principles are equally respected.  This is identical to the simplicity of an ant colony that can include millions of members who each participate in a immense self-organizing process by effectively and continuously communicating with every immediate other local member.  Note that within this type of natural system, there never exists the equivalence of a CEO, nor an executive team nor a hierarchical structure to organize effectiveness and ensure centralized control.

When these three preliminary conditions or principles are not respected, maybe there are others, an emerging process cannot surface, neither in nature nor in our organizations.  Without those principles, either chaos rules due to the lack of elementary operating procedures at the most local level, or a hierarchy will appear to take control and ensure structure, survival and results.  This second option will most often succeed by imposing limits and centralizing the power of initiative.  Note that these complementary dynamics, chaos or centralizations, both belong to the same frame of reference.  Indeed, politicians have always scared populations with the possibility of chaos in order to take over, limit local initiative and reinforce centralized control.  And so chaos and centralized control alternate in our human societies until local self-organizing emerging structures can begin to offer other more creative alternatives.

When the three above principles are active within delimited systems such as in a life coaching and executivecoaching partnership, alternate emerging processes can begin to surface and blossom.  From the foundation up, between equal and respectful partners can then naturally grow new forms, solutions, patterns, initiatives, creations, etc.  This result can only be produced out of what is commonly called collective intelligence or wisdom.

This same ensemble of principles is applicable in team and organizational coaching relationships.  In these collective contexts focused on accompanying much larger formal systems, coaches particularly focus their attention on the evolution of all implicit interactive architectures that define operational interfacing.  Large-system coaching therefore also rests on the application of extremely simple operating procedures that allow for effective interfacing on the most local levels of the whole.  With this approach, master coaches also help create the conditions for subsidiary emerging solutions to gradually form and surface.

The systems concept of circularity is the equivalent of interactive fluidity.  The term does not refer to the notion of circular, but to that of circulation.  In systemic life coaching and executive coaching, circularity concerns the capacity for uninterrupted fluid interaction or interfacing between all the individual or collective client information bits and states and with the coach.  Circularity concerns the almost arbitrary elimination of all boundaries, barriers, categories and structures between all the meanings that were previously organized.  For coaches and their clients, this apparent creative disorganization in the form of freewheeling fluidity permits the real possibility to reorganize acquired patterns into new forms of meaning.

The notion of circularity of energy is intimately linked to the principles that permit emerging processes and solutions.  Consequently, when a system displays a very high capacity for circularity, it also rests on a delegating architecture, with a very low tendency to centralize power and ensure control.  The system and all its constituting members can then interact with a liberty that is only limited by simple local rules of the game, and with an intense sense of responsibility focused on achieving collective results.

Circularity, or fluidity in the shared context created between coaches and their clients is a necessary condition to facilitate and ensure the natural emergence of new perspectives.  It is circularity that first creates the perception of chaotic remodeling, the loss of security that indicates innovating risk taking.  In life coaching and executive coaching environments, spontaneous reorganization processes supported by new mental and emotional structures will almost inevitably follow energy circularity.  Without creative circularity between clients and their coaches, real surfacing changes of perspectives and solutions can never really occur.

• Example: Within a same team, all meetings are structured in an almost completely predictive fashion.  The same people are seated around the same tables, in the same order and interact in the same processes to achieve the same predictable results, to satisfy the same clans with the same strategies.  In a same organizaton, from one meeting to the next, only the subjects seem to be superficially different, as if they were used as a mere pretext for a repetitious interactive ritual.  Likewise, if the content of different meetings within a given team or organization is different, their process patterns are so similar and predictable that their inevitably become totally boring for all the participating members.

Within such team meeting, the circulation of energy seems to follow a completely predetermined path.  Informative Powerpoint presentations follow one another.  The same team members unconsciously interact in the same pre-established order to achieve a result that all could have intuitively predicted.  The same clans and people observe and confront each other in contradictory debates with predictable arguments and end with a usual stalemate that often consists in postponing decisions and action plans to an ulterior meeting.  True creative circularity based on truly creative, fluid and spontaneous interfacing is inexistent.  Preserving formal organizational rituals is paramount to allowing for any unexpected emerging process, to permitting any interactive agility that would provoke needed changes of perspective.  In most organizations, everything is under control, except, of course for this highly professional soporific top-down controlling process.

Naturally, we all cherish our safe, well-identified, predictable, smaller and bigger habits and rituals.  Unfortunately, if routine provides security, it also ensures totally predictable results, good and bad.  The more we repeat the same behaviors, the more we achieve the same results, the same conclusions about these results, and the inevitability of a boring, predictable future.  In order to create true energy circularity in interfacing processes between two or more people, it becomes necessary to break habits and create spaces where could emerge uncertainty and its lot of unexpected novelties.  That is the price of change, creativity and innovation.  This is particularly true in systemic coaching.  The fundamental architecture of the life coaching and executive coaching relationship always permits astonishing innovation when it distances itself from secured mechanisms to evolve towards intuitive unpredictability, one of the intrinsic characteristics of nature.

• Caution: It would be quite opportune for a coach and client to regularly change their meeting place from one session to the next, to each time modify the relationship’s space and architecture, to avoid the very thought of regular hours and precise time spans.

When relationships are not organized to fit to predictable schemes, they become more creative by allowing for all the unexpected pertinent interruptions real life has to offer.   A creative life coaching and executive coaching process can evolve from face-to-face in situ to a phone-coaching call, to a video-conference via Skype, to a session in a car ride, through e-mail or any other pertinent means, to again meet in person, but maybe in a small group with other pertinent partners.

• Synthesis: A recurring routine, a structured program, the reassuring security that offers predictability can only succeed in bogging down a life coaching or executive coaching relationship.  Repetition eliminates surprises, slows progress, and ultimately succeeds in putting all coach and client synapses to deep sleep.

Numerous master coaches avoid proposing long coaching processes that last over ten sessions spread out over months.  Indeed they have regularly observed that the two or three most productive sessions are at the beginning and the end of the relationship.  Too often, after a couple of sessions, routine invites itself into the client and coach relationship.  And when the two finally approach the end of the series of programmed sessions, they suddenly wake up and get back to work to achieve the expected goals.  To conclude, the truly effective life coaching and executive coaching, sessions are often the first and the last.  How can we eliminate the rest?  How could everything be achieved in just one session?

Much like when experiencing an intense and short-lived love relationship, systemic coaching can be all the more powerful when it is profound, quick, focused and short.  A few months or years later, the partnership can suddenly be revived to face an urgent situation, a new challenge, a temporary doubt, and inventive quest.  In this way, an accompanying process can avoid the routine of programmed meetings at a regular rhythm that will inevitably invite repetition and ritual.

• Example: An executive coach establishes a contract with a dynamic entrepreneur.  It includes a program of set meetings for twelve face-to-face sessions, programmed over a period of six months.  A little later, this same coach is surprised to discover that the client is postponing meetings, arriving late, leaving early, and finally cancelling what is left of the planned accompanying process.  Now which of the two is most anchored in reality?

During a life coaching and executive coaching session or sequence, coach presence and client dialogue should also loose their logic of efficiency linear structure.  To find oneself again, it is necessary to accept getting lost.  To innovate, it is useful to give up straight lines, the security of well-known itineraries, and blind trust in tried and true methodologies.  Master coaches abandon the reassuring model of the expert consultant that has an answer for everything to become a real client partner ready to leap into the unknown.  The more a coach takes risks in the course of coaching sequence, the more the client repeatedly and unexpectedly veers off a linear course, the higher will be the benefits of the conversing partners.

• Caution: The key strategy here is to know how to constantly create interruption, provoke circularity, mix the playing cards, avoid tested tracks, get eccentric, mix standard thinking patterns, question all premises, welcome humor and lateral thinking, play with paradoxes, dive into confusion, mix genres and submit to the temptation of the outlandish and unreasonable.

Only at this price will the coach and client know how to create chaos, and leap out of standardized, tried and tested conservative solutions.  Only by espousing the strategy that consists in provoking and attracting all that is unexpected will the life coaching and executive coaching partners be able to welcome confusion, the one necessary passageway to access completely new perspectives.

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 nor pierce the veil of perception.

• Caution: During this eminently difficult phase of the life coaching and executive coaching process, coaches will experience a tension linked to the meandering efforts displayed by their clients.  This tension is not only useful, it is absolutely necessary.  Similar to contractions that announce an impending birth, a master coach needs to welcome intensity of chaos with silent and truly attentive presence.

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 and the shared process does not appear to be an effective vehicle for development.  Both client and coach experience the disappointing possibility of not getting anywhere, of a high risk of failure.  They feel that they have come to a culminating point marked by shared frustration.  At this point there is a shared temptation to stop the coaching process or postpone it to a more opportune moment.

During a masterful life coaching or executive coaching sequence, this phase is highly critical moment.  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 tempting option for either or both is to take an easy way out, an illusionary short cut, an escape exit to opt out.

Loosing their cool, beginning coaches sometimes interrupt client silence and shorten client difficulties by asking a futile or superficial question.  Insecure or unsupported clients sometimes change the subject and offer tangent issues or input humorous comments to dance their way out of the troubling space.  Immediately the tension is released, and simultaneously, the emerging coaching object becomes unattainable.  Both on the part of coaches and clients, these natural avoidance strategies are designed to make it easier on themselves during a tough passage. Unfortunately, all these avoidance strategies consist in making a lasting mistake in order to solve a passing difficulty.

• Caution: During this difficult phase, one needs to be tenacious.  The moment of shared confusion is there to be welcomed, seized, respected and held.  At this point, experienced coaches need to search deep within, tap on all remnants of their trust in their capacities, 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, abandon their will to the wisdom of the shared accompanying process, and trust their intrinsic qualities, capacities and personal resilience. 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 with futile words, yet another question.  Almost systematically, it is important to show respect to confusion with a very patient, attentive silence.  It is urgent for the coach 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 really innovating forms of organizations and created original social structures.  Gothic cathedrals are emanations from the dark ages.  For the traveler in search of absolutes, it is often out of the darkest nights, in the midst of the most anguishing fogs and after the most terrifying storms that emerge hidden continents, mythical lands, long desired destinations.  In all important quests through chaos and turmoil, determined travelers must imperatively keep a faithful heart and clear direction in order to discover the land of their dreams.  The same is true for life coaching and executive coaching.

• Caution: I life coaching and executiven 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 capacities of your client, of the surrounding context, of the kingdom of life.

It is precisely at this point in time of the life coaching and executive coaching process that the feeling of emptiness or fathomless void can truly attract novelty. When favorable conditions are set, when a real presence to the client development context and process is well installed, the anguishing moment of confusion is a temporary difficult passage announcing the transition 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 well and learn to cherish it.  They sometimes provoke and facilitate the coming of a state of client confusion by abandoning all reassuring linear processes.  They will sometimes 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.

• Caution: At this point, one needs to be conscious that client and all 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. 

Much more than carefully selected themes, organized issues or selected goals and ambitions, the one and only real subject of client presence in life coaching and executive coaching is the client.  Consequently when one accepts that a state of apparent confusion remains right in the middle of client dialogue and context, one simply accepts to welcome a thorough self-reorganization of the client’s frame of reference and perspective on their quests.

• Synthesis: Consequently, rather than accompanying clients to deepen only one subject or issue with method, a single line of thought or preoccupation at a time, systemic coaches often help to create an absolutely necessary confusing fluidity between different client themes.  This is the best way to allow the establishment of numerous new connections between all the apparently separate client fields, strategies, ambitions and issues.

These coach interruptions aim to create a greater circularity between different client states, within a much larger range of contradictory and therefore complementary emotions and reactions.  Within this larger and apparently more chaotic ensemble, new synapses will start connecting.  This is exactly where new perspectives will be most likely to emerge.

Consequently, a systemic life coaching and executive coaching process may sometimes appear to be disorganized, segmented and directionless.  But whenever confusion is felt, it is the result of a static perception from much too close and at a given time.  This apparent confusion is just part of a much larger picture whose coherency and beauty will only be perceived from a little more distance and in time.   

• Synthesis: In the course of a life coaching and executive coaching sequence, it is not highly recommended to accept the difficult passage represented by shared confusion.  It is also necessary to welcome it as within the coach and the client, and even to know how to provoke this fundamentally uncomfortable state, in order to use it as a door to access new dimensions.

Beware for what you wish, for you will get it

A breakthrough is a quantum leap, where in the way of Alice in Wonderland, we perceive that we have broken through the proverbial mirror or another form of heaven’s gate and reached another time-space, another facet of reality.  In life coaching and executive coaching, a breakthrough takes place when the veil of perception seems to suddenly drop and both coach and client experience a sudden passage into a new dimension.  Suddenly a spotlight seems to have been turned on to shed light on the shared coach-client context in a way that had been unknown until then.

Almost simultaneously, the life coaching or executive coaching partners establish new perceptual connections and pierce into a completely different awareness of their common quest.  New meanings emerge, unexpected perspectives shape and creative solutions come forth.  Out of the enlarged context emerge new forms of awareness, feelings, understandings, and different standards and scales seem to apply. Deeper and wider meanings of reality impose themselves and new, original references and restructuring perspectives emerge. Although these were expected, they always astonish the partners in coaching. Both unannounced and apparently involuntarily 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 expressed the two partner’s discomfort, and then silence again.

A few indicators are always present to accompany this and other similarly powerfully moving or magical occurrences in human relationships. First, the coach question or comment just seems to appear out of the blue, without preparation, and it formulates itself without any precise intention.  Typically, coaches seem to hear and experience the power of their question or comment at the same time as their clients.  Coaches are consequently just as surprised and affected as their clients by the reach of their own comment or question. Immediately after that, the two partners are simultaneously rocked off their foundations by the shared experience of a new emerging perspective as it re-organizes their shared perception.

The immediate apparent reaction is usually a profound shared silence. Sometimes a bout of laughter filled with excitement or tears of joy will burst out and serve to hide their awkwardness as they soak in the surprising new landscape. 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 have become.

• 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 personal 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 both 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 masterful question or comment just seems to emerge out of the shared context, to channel through the coach and to impose its meaningful spontaneously to enlarge the client’s perspective, if not reveal to the coach who he or she profoundly is.

This type of powerful life coaching or executive coaching intervention obviously serves to equally surprise and provoke the all partners in progress. Its function 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 a very different perspective and finally take whatever action may seem most appropriate.

In this last example, one could consider that the coach’s question is quite influential and directing the client towards a specific goal.  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 another range of very different answers.

• Caution: Often in life coaching and executive coaching, one can imagine that clients are searching for to be confronted to themselves, to their fundamental values, to belief systems and behaviors.  One can even consider that this search for confrontation is one of the unconscious criteria by which they choose to work with one coach or another.

We can consider that chance occurrences do 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 that we can choose to interpret one way or another.  In this perspective, it is important for coaches to remain humble on the relative influence they may have on clients.  They just need to proceed and serve their open and confronting questioning without doubt or censorship.  Indeed, clients are powerful enough to make their own choices.

Back to breakthroughs, it may be useful to underline that the paradox of masterful life coaching and executive coaching is often 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 or expectation from themselves or from their clients, the higher the chances that a surprisingly different perspective will just emerge out of the shared context.
• The more coaches try to protect themselves and their clients by avoiding uncomfortable passages through doubt and internal uncertainty, the more breaking through the proverbial mirror remains out of reach, becomes impossible.
• The more coaches let loose, follow the flow of the relational contexts that bind them to their clients by trusting the creative and emerging 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.  Any known common context is a constraining structure.  It must be reshuffled before any unexpected and innovative solution can be expected to naturally emerge. 

Only when we really let go of our voluntary and programmed intentions can the accepted vacuum welcome innovating forms of perception and new mental passages announcing original solutions.  Our only responsibility as coaches and clients is to be attentive and seize these breakthrough moments and the meaning they convey, when they spontaneously appear.

Consequently, without conscious and directed intention, without searching for anything, a coach’s attention is on the lookout for unexpected emerging new 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 without any conscious intention, but very attentively present to his issue, Archimedes was ready to seize the breakthrough solution that had always been there, just out of reach:  Eureka!

The nature of systemic life coaching and executive coaching as it is described up to this point permits a performing, original breakthrough process from which new perspectives naturally emerge. To grasp and embody this process, coaches need to fully understand the importance of the intention-free listening strategies described throughout the chapters of this text.

• On the one hand, masterful listening is deep, silent and attentive.  It requires extreme personal presence and concentration.
• On the other hand this listening skill it is free, floating and agile, without intentions on client results. It accepts apparent client uncertainty and confusion, meandering and questioning.   It never stops to analyze the details of any specific client content or direction.

Consequently, masterful attentive presence is not specifically focused on understanding any one or other of the multiple conscious dimensions of client expression or client manifestations. Logically speaking, this listening without intention blossoms in apparent client diversity if not in client 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 as a participating factor of the client quest.  If emerging solutions surface from the bottom up, as the expression clearly illustrates the process, this specifically means they are never top-down conscious or controlled mental or intellectual constructs.

This listening skill is not focused on any particular objective but attempts to be present to the whole coach-client context as if to an undivided ensemble with multiple connections, including those that intimately engage the coach as a person. 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.  From this whole coherent ensemble, new perspectives, forms and solutions naturally emerge.

Gradually, without directing their attention, coach general attentive presence naturally taps onto the connections that exist between the numerous elements of a given client’s context.   This includes all the issues and interfaces that very personally, intimately concern the listening coach. Progressively, a masterful coach can invite and 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 and specific, coherent form can self-organize and emerge from each individual client’s global context.

• Caution: Masterful coaches gradually learn to feel existentially secure, knowing that sooner or later, new configurations will emerge from the totality of diverse client manifestations and comments concerning multiple subjects, especially when these are presented with floating approximations or apparent disorder.

In all chaotic situations, in all turbulences and changing states and transformational processes, nature often proceeds in a fashion that escapes the eye of an unknowing observer.  Hidden by the apparent confusion, much finer, subtler, indirect mechanisms gradually prepare new foundations. Original meaning is forming and future structures are growing.  Only when these become sufficiently important will they begin to become apparent. 

The observation and description of these underlying structuring mechanisms cannot be achieved locally.  They are minute, but simultaneously present in the whole system, in every one of its apparently segmented parts. 

In physics also, it has been demonstrated without a doubt that from the chaos of nature, there naturally emerges new forms of D.N.A., and new subatomic organizations, unexpected chemical structures, original crystalline forms and unknown mathematical solutions.

• Synthesis: All the apparently disconnected elements that compose each client’s context and reality are in fact intimately connected and necessarily interacting in reciprocal influence.  They all rest on a common foundation. They all inseparably create and can reveal an emerging whole.

In masterful life coaching and executive coaching, new perspectives regularly emerge from this whole 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 or ego) to unconditionally accompany shared coach-client energy and context.

When coaches let go on all urges to control and guide client processes, when on the contrary, they facilitate the expression of lateral and complex connections, of multi-polar and contradictory or confusing client motion and emotion, then new forms of global, synthetic and systemic connections can emerge.  During these essential moments of creativity, the coach and the client, the implicit and the explicit, information and relationship, content and form, mind, spirit and time are all intimately merging to become un-dissociated, suddenly and fundamentally unified.

Professionals in the fields of cybernetics and systems thinking know this process well.  It is often observable in many different fields:  It is the capacity of creation or self-organization of natural systems, when they are left free to interact, simply or elementarily accompanied by simple interactive rules.  To be sure, this life process permeates everything in the universe.

After the surprise created by a new emerging perspective and the excitement provoked by the discovery of new horizons, both the coach and client can easily let their breakthrough perception slowly fade away or evaporate back into the inner folds of their consciousness.  All too rapidly, each can go back to their business-as-usual daily habits and routines, its lot of realistic constraints and forget their enlightened glimpse into a realm of enlarged possibilities.

Beware indeed, for new and radically innovative perceptions can often be fleeting.  Numerous personal and professional breakthroughs have probably been lost for mankind or at least postponed, for the lack of a pen and paper or personal organizer to immediately jot them down.  When a perceptual breakthrough blesses us, it is useful to take the time to understand it’s meaning, to integrate it, and then to decide to implement very concrete action plans to materialize it’s consequences.

In life coaching and executive coaching also, the accompanying process cannot be considered completed when an astonishing new perspective reshuffles our perception either of a pressing issue, or of our lives taken as a comprehensive whole. Although perceiving an exciting new possibility can be elating, the profession is not only or simply centered on expanding client and coach fields of consciousness. Indeed, the life coaching and executive coaching profession is not reputed because it is focused on getting exciting emotional rushes from temporarily enlarged awareness.  It is also reputed to accompany decision-making and solid action plans in order to achieve the concrete, measurable results made possible by that expanded consciousness.  This needs to be reminded time and again. Successful life coaching and executive coaching sequences are focused on achieving practical measurable results, anchored in reality. In fact, the profession may sometimes be disqualified by idealists for this very reason.

Paradoxically, the very practical dimensions of life coaching and executive coaching are often the skills on which most beginning coaches focus, almost to a fault.  Indeed, concrete decisions and their measurable action plans most ensure client observable results. All too often, these may serve to reassure coaches in their need to feel useful and professional.

The difference with masterful systemic life coaching and executive coaching as it is presented above, however, is that the need for practical results should not justify a coach or client obsession focused on obtaining measurable achievements.  In masterful coaching, focusing on concrete results must be preceded by a fundamental client shift in perspective or context transformation.  

The very practical tools of life coaching and executive coaching are much more pertinent when they serve to realize actions that rest on new innovating perspectives in client personal and professional lives.  They are most useful when they help implement totally new achievements in personal or professional dimensions that rest on much deeper foundations, and embrace life with a much wider reach.

But sometimes, the new connections created by a client breakthrough are as fragile as they are unexpected.  Facing the consequences of a new perspective can be scary if not terrifying. The discovery can provoke clients to take a big leap backwards and choose a more or less temporary avoidance strategy.  Fundamental life coaching and executive coaching questions sometimes offer such possibility for radical change that clients may feel the urgent need to step back and reconsider the true quality and strength of their motivation.

Consequently, to perceive reality in a totally different way is only a first step, a simple shift in perception, sometimes and important eye opener.  But this new awareness doesn’t necessarily include a real commitment to implement change until it becomes normal everyday reality.  To really decide to actually do something about what we perceive generally has many more consequences. And beyond a new awareness, determined action is what provokes lasting transformation.

• Caution: This is where coaches need to avoid becoming linear and directive, very practically insisting on logical actions, measurable steps, challenging deadlines and measuring tools focused on satisfying performance.

Remember that when a fruit is ripe, it will separate from the tree with relative ease.  But that is exactly when you have to reach out to pluck it.  In the same way, emerging processes do not call for much effort.  If decisions seem to impose themselves without difficulty, action plans also roll out as if they attracted waves of favorable winds and available energy from the participating environment.  Of course, it is necessary for the client to remain truly present and attentive to accompany results.

Indeed, a true change of client perspective often liberates energies that were previously ignored, naturally frees unexpected means and attracts positive forces and other useful support.  The universe almost seems to conspire to implement breakthrough decisions. That follow-up, however requires attentive presence to details, ensuring that actions are truly in keeping with the essence or spirit of the newly emerged perspective.

It is sometimes urgent to keep from precipitating oneself into impatient action.  An important change of perspective in a precise dimension may be a simple echo of a much more fundamental and consequential transformation.  It may consequently be imperative to respect clients who want to take their time before implementing actions.  In those cases, master coaches need to accompany those clients who choose to explore the deeper layers of their personal and professional needs and motivations before considering more practical action plans.

• Example: During the third coaching session in a professional coaching process, a very performing and successful client timidly began to share some elements of her private life, mostly concerning her ten-year relationship with her companion.  Over the past decade, they had shared an extremely satisfactory common path and had developed very well both separately and as a couple.  Although their common life still had all the makings of a very satisfying relationship, the client expressed with factual precision her sad certitude that it had reached its limits.  She said that she was convinced that it was high time to free themselves from their commitment to each other, in order to each consider separate futures.

The coach stayed relatively silent and very attentively present throughout the client dialogue that had quite unexpectedly veered away from professional issues into a very personal direction.  The client formulated with difficulty that if the relationship with her partner remained loving and respectful, she was more and more conscious that she had to break up with her partner in order to create space, so that they each could completely reinvent themselves and consider totally different personal futures.

The coaching conversation openly advanced borrowing meandering, circular back-roads and unstructured sidetracks.  Several times, the coach reformulated the client dialogue to test her determination, the strength of her motivations to end the long-lived relationship.  The coach accompanied the formulation process as the client searched for words that would best express her deepest intuitions and begin to structure how she could best announce her decision to her companion.  Although the session was slowly nearing its end, the client was proceeding very slowly, really taking her time.  She seemed to still be searching for something else, just barely beyond the reach of her personal dialogue, somewhere at the limits of a context that had all the characteristics of a clearly positioned conviction.

At one point in the conversation, the coach changed the context and asked the client what could be an equivalent decision if everything she had expressed also concerned her professional life, her current executive position or her potential in her company.  The sudden subject shift into a completely different realm surprised the client.  She quickly denied the eventuality that there could exist any parallels in how she felt about her career. And then, she became silent.

After a short while, the client started formulating that maybe, her leadership role with her team had also reached a plateau, marked by a rather comfortable routine, and that maybe, she could also consider that it was high time to move on, to explore other options and grow in other professional horizons.  In this context too, she gradually came to realize that both she and her team could gain in choosing different future directions, each going their own way to their next challenges, on separate paths.

Ultimately, the enlarged perspective of the coaching process revealed to the client and the coach that the real subject did not necessarily only concern the client work environment, nor did it only concern the shared relationship with her partner.  The real subject was the client herself and her personal transformation process.  That personal yearning for development into new possibilities had consequences in all aspects of her current life, both professional and personal.  The client stopped to think and plunged again into her thoughtful silence.

From that point on, the client’s personal dialogue changed its focus.  Gradually spiraling forward, she consolidated her perception that the real change that deeply preoccupied her was much more fundamental than her personal and professional relationships.  The client had indeed matured to the point of becoming ready for new horizons in all aspects of her life.  Even if her first focus on her personal relationship was the immediate indicator of her deeper transformational process, consolidating her awareness of the bigger picture turned out to be the real coaching subject that captured all her attention.

• Synthesis: This case can illustrate that if coaches attempt to cash in on quick wins focused on immediate client objectives, they may be instrumental in losing sight of the much deeper transformational process that those clients could in fact be facing.

In the above life coaching and executive coaching case study, the client eventually elaborated a whole range of action plans that was designed to create new meaning in all the different facets of her life.  In her private life, in her work and most important, in her preferred artistic field, she made a series of decisions that were truly aligned with her need for personal transformation.

True changes of perspective in life issues are often conjugated in multiple personal and professional dimensions.  Masterful systemic life coaching and executive coaching can often successfully accompany clients to understand the larger perspective within which a more immediate and limited motivation for change is expressed.  In this way, an aspiration to act in one restricted dimension of one’s life may offer an opportunity for coaches and clients to perceive larger, more fundamental patterns that apply to all other aspects of their existences.

Reputedly, professional life coaching and executive coaching processes permit new and more performing client decisions that in turn call for performing action plans to achieve measurable results.  In the context of attentive presence and listening described above, however, that affirmation also calls for clarification and questioning.  To introduce the reflections below, a transnational linguistic reflection may help reconsider some fundamentally different approaches concerning the very notion of decisions.

Consider for example, that in English, decisions are made, when in French, decisions are taken.  In the first linguistic context, made decisions need to be fabricated or constructed.  Consequently, they are perceived as previously inexistent.  In the second context, decisions are seized as if they had always been present, virtually suspended somewhere, waiting to be properly handled.   This difference can no boubt 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 can choose 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 seized or elaborated.  We can also reverse that proposal.  One can imagine that in some other cultural contexts, truly appropriate decisions are so evidently obvious that they leave humans almost no other choice but to follow them or adopt them.  In this eventuality, appropriate decisions could naturally emerge out of our deeper consciousness, to surprise and engage us.  These decisions would then seize the most enabling persons, those who could respect their pre-defined purpose, and who would then carry on to properly implement them.

• Synthesis: When a truly present and attentive life coaching or executive coaching process permits fundamentally emerging or unfolding dynamics to both the coach and client, one may often perceive that the best decisions seem to also naturally surface and impose themselves as pertinent and almost inescapable necessities.

In numerous masterful systemic life coaching and executive coaching situations, new emerging perspectives and their obvious corresponding decisions almost simultaneously surface, hand in hand.  The needed decisions are not independent, but present themselves as integral parts of larger unfolding realities.  Consequently, it can be construed that when a new perspective is perceived, it can be accompanied by an urgent need for specific decisions.  These are evidently present, offering avenues to implement a range of obvious actions in keeping with the new awareness.  In this way, appropriate decisions almost seem to preexist, in total coherence with 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 their corresponding appropriate decisions often appear synchronically.  This ensemble is intimately felt to be integral parts of newly discovered realities.  So when clients perceive and welcome truly appropriate emerging perspectives, they seem to also automatically consider and accept the decisions that come along with them, as if in a bulk package.  There is often no perceptible choice as if the concerned actors only had one true option: to put themselves humbly at the service of absolutely necessary action to serve a new, obviously pertinent future.  Consequently, perceived as integral parts of new realities, these emerging decisions are immediately and intimately perceived to be inescapably appropriate, just and fundamentally sustainable.

When masterful systemic life coaching and executive coaching conversations rest on profound and intention-free attentive presence, this process will sometimes provoke both coaches and clients to question some fundamental principles and beliefs concerning the voluntary and individualistic achievement-oriented reputation of the coaching profession.  The same is often perceived in team and organizations coaching. New perspectives that truly emerge from the development of or shared wisdom collective intelligence often come with their obvious decisions. Participating decision makers often only need to humbly validate and follow.

In this perspective a truly masterful coaching relationship accompanies individual, team and organization clients as they make decisions to profoundly realign, not only with themselves but also within a much larger, almost universal context.

• Caution: Of course, this doesn’t mean that decisions just appear while we wait for them to come out of the blue.  They emerge from the deep only once the client and coach systemic process has occurred and both are in profound internal alignment and in resonance with their much more comprehensive environmental context.

This realignment first takes place between the coach and client, and then gradually enlarges to include 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 all-inclusive context, appropriate perspectives, decisions and actions naturally emerge, almost concurrently.  When they become so self-evident that they impose themselves, decisions are neither to be made nor to be taken.  They simply emerge to the presence of the life coaching and executive coaching partners, in a much larger and comprehensive perspective to which both clients and coaches are invited to belong.

It is useful to remember here that if analysis often allows a detailed understanding of what is already present as a result of our heritage from our pasts, decisions have the inherent function to allow us modify our future possibilities.  Decisions are active acts in the present that can only modify all that can happen after they are made or accepted, and then acted out.  Consequently, decisions are considered to be central occurrences in a life coaching and executive coaching process as only they are capable of defining or redefining client futures.  In that respect, decisions need to totally belong to the coaching clients.

Designing an action plan is generally the ultimate phase of a coaching sequence.  It is generally perceived as the ultimate sequence after a meandering process that may have been the occasion for a number of sidetracks, mistakes, difficulties and dead ends.  When all these pitfalls in the coach-client accompanying process are finally been avoided or solved, when the time finally arrives to bring the relationship to a positive conclusions, many coaches start coasting on a relatively linear road that is perceived to lead straight to success.  That final sequence of the coaching process is action planning.

Numerous performing methods exist on the market to accompany the elaboration and implementation of effective and performing action plans.  Although most of these have proven their methodic pertinence in terms of results, these procedures are often very logical, linear, and let us admit, hopelessly Cartesian in their nature.  Truly, action planning is the part of coaching that rarely offers much surprise. 

Most of these methods are related to project management principles that directly inherit from the efficient frame of reference of the Industrial Revolution.  For the most part, they have been tried and tested and ensure the predictable, timely realization of very complex human and industrial projects.  In general, these project management processes or procedures rest on the precise definition of clearly delineated, consecutive steps that are each coherently articulated into a coherently structured whole, in the fashion of an efficient assembly line.  This ensures that any well-defined project can be successfully accomplished within reasonable deadlines, respecting both defined costs and quality expectations.

In the same spirit, well trained, performing, professional coaches know how to accompany clients all the way to their finish line by using a set of very practical questions that belong to the recommended classical skill-set, such as; What? With whom? When and for when? Where? How? Etc...

Beyond the above obvious foundational coaching skills, it will often be useful for the systemic master coach to regularly abandon the above mainstream techniques and strategies and choose to experiment with a less linear frame of reference.  Indeed, a number other less burdensome and non-linear action-oriented frames of references may sometimes allow coaching clients to consider their action plans in a much lighter, more ecological and energy-efficient fashion in order to achieve maximum sustainable results with a minimum display of means.  Action planning can also serve to undermine established perspectives and shift client frames of references.

• Example: In the course of a team coaching process focused on conceiving and realizing a major change in structure and processes, a project team finalized a very ambitious project that was designed to turn their organization around in a little less than a year.  After this exemplary teamwork was painstakingly finished, the team coach asked its members how the ten-month transformational project could be totally redesigned if it was absolutely vital for the organization to undertake its turnaround in less than four weeks.

After a first expression of disbelief displayed by some of the more creative team members, and the expected resistance strategies vehemently expressed by the rest, the group settled down and proceeded to accept the challenge.   They finally imagined and adopted innovating strategies to conceive of a much more performing action plan that could achieve more challenging results in record time.  The organization achieved the totally revised plan within six weeks, with a consequential economy of means and a much more immediate return on investments.

• Synthesis: In all our projects, what takes the most time is our extraordinary capacity to postpone.  The most time consuming element in most projects is very simply the comfortable deadlines established between each one of their constitutive steps.  This is a fundamental characteristic of all systems that operate within a linear frame of reference resting on the principle of centralized control.

Paradoxically, the above example may give the wrong impression that a coach’s function is to push clients to accept to put themselves under enormous pressure in order to achieve extraordinary results within record time frames.  On the contrary, systemic coaches accompany individual and collective clients in creative processes help them perceive time and other available environmental means as their most solid allies.

• Synthesis: Very rarely will a systemic coach ask questions centered on setting very short deadlines in order to help clients visualize how to achieve goals in a highly demanding and voluntary behavioral context.  Systemic coaches are more focused on accompanying clients in a fundamental change of their perception of time and energy, in order to help them develop projects that are tailored to succeed in the lightest possible and manner most time and energy-efficient organization.

Rather than quickly center clients on performing deadlines, it is often much more strategic to first ask clients where they could initiate their actions most effectively, or who are the allies that could most probably offer support, or again how they could initiate all the pertinent actions simultaneously and immediately, in several complementary directions.  These and other creative questioning strategies will serve to re-center clients, or de-center them, in order to adopt an attitude that will open them to capitalize on all their misperceived environmental aids and on all preexisting means already present within their established context.  This type of systemic strategy based on effective interfacing with existing resources will very often allow for an important gain in time and energy.

• Synthesis: When preparing for action, it is certainly important to consider to do it with quality.  It is also vitally useful to eliminate all possible delays and postponing between all the action-plan sequences in order to achieve synergy in simultaneity. 

For many people, teams and organizations, initiating new actions is synonymous with lengthy preliminary information campaigns, to expect sustainable effort, to allow for prolonged preparatory negotiations, to consider heavy investments in time and energy, to plan for the need to extensively communicate throughout the process, to prepare persistence in follow-up, to accumulate economic resilience to survive through the process, and of course, to evaluate the imperative uncertainty in results. 

For these people and systems, the subliminal moral to the story is that change is necessarily risky and difficult to achieve.  To succeed an exceptional project, this frame of reference stipulates that one must be prepared to churn out much more energy than usual dispensed, for a predictably long period of time. In this fundamentally masochistic and pessimistic perspective, the motto is: if change were easy, its results would already be achieved.  In this context it is a given truth that success is extremely difficult to achieve.  Of course, that is an excellent excuse for these people and systems to indefinitely remain in the relative comfort of their established equilibrium.

For an individual or a team, this frame of reference often implies a defensive or competitive attitude that can only exist in opposition to the environment.  A more systemic perspective rests on totally different premises by which appropriate actions aiming for sustainable transformations are naturally adopted by a positive, fluid environment in the midst of pre-existing dynamic synergies.  In fact, useful, sustainable projects are generally rapidly linked with, and intimately supported by participating environments.  They are fed by a positively inclusive and ecological context.  Durable qualitative achievements often cluster to co-align and resonate in effortless reciprocity.

Examples:

• Observe that people and systems that exist in opposition to their environments, who conceive their actions as intense battles within difficult contexts, can never allow themselves to lower their guard, to take time off for leisure and reflection. 
• Consider also that all successful people and systems that succeed with their environments, those who collaborate in concert with their networks, know how to achieve four times more results with relative ease and comfort.   The latter do not display more efforts than the former.  They simply exist in a very different frame of reference or worldview that is completely in keeping with systemic coaching.

Before changing perspectives, it is useful to acknowledge the fact that failure almost systematically requires and consumes much more time and energy than success. Whenever facing any heavy project that seems to require excessive means and considerable effort, a number of measurable criteria can be observed. 

• First, the concerned people and systems experience the same type of difficulties on a recurring basis, in most everything they undertake. 
  
• They harbor the principle that their projects and ambitions must be solitary undertakings, carried out without others. 
  
• They want to achieve their goals with controlling, individualistic strategies, with independent means and actions. 
  
• They spend large amounts of energy to protect themselves from their environment, perceived as dangerous, in order to ensure that they will be the sole beneficiaries of whatever results they achieved. 
  
• They therefore act against rather than with, spending time and energy to control their environment. 
  
• Often, they just don’t want to owe anyone anything. 
  
• In short, their frame of reference and strategy unwittingly cuts them from all possible surrounding forces in the universe that could support and accompany a light and easy successful endeavor.

On the contrary, successful people and systems seem to achieve much higher goals in much less time, with much less effort.  These individuals and organizations act within a principle of reciprocity with all and everything in their environment in what is called today a fundamentally sustainable perspective.  They seem to continuously interface with this environment, maintaining constant transparent interaction to achieve a form of communion of spirit and soul.  These people and systems seem to be much more generously inserted within their natural social and professional contexts.  They maintain a simple and dynamic policy of mutually beneficial reciprocity.  Their vital energy seems aligned with all the positive forces in their environment.  And not too surprisingly, it seems that in return, this environment openly supports them and their projects.

It seems very clear that all exchanges or interfaces within a positive systemic frame of reference rest on mutual trust and generosity.  These interactive foundations allow for the achievement of much more economical, ecological and performing results than when each tries to achieve results alone, in spite of their environment or despite their network.  When they are imposing, solitary ambitions require way too much personal effort.  On the other hand, one plus one plus one… permits fluid miracles when all operate in concert.

• Synthesis: Systemic coaching action plan conception and implementation rests on the creation and consolidation of a multiplicity of performing interfaces with the whole environment of individual and collective clients.  These interfaces are considered to be one of the most important contributive factors to achieve truly sustainable project results.

In this way, visualizing an appropriate location that would be most suitable for an action can automatically evoke a whole set of supporting factors such as environmental allies and naturally available useful means.  The search for a strategy that would permit multiple simultaneous actions, opening numerous operational fronts at the same time, almost obliges one to loose control and attract active and responsible partnerships.  Only when one juggles with numerous different actions and useful support systems will naturally appropriate dates and times emerge to client consciousness.  Action plans that are conceived in the complexity of a systemic frame of reference are relatively light, naturally collective and surprisingly simple to manage within a dynamic and motivating distributed structure.  They need less effort and take much less time.

• Synthesis: Numerous coaches identify themselves and measure their success with their client results.  They are consequently much too eager to see them succeed.  These coaches generally consider that short deadlines give action plans added value. All too often, coaches promote voluntary and utilitarian strategies at the expense of lighter, more indirect and more fluid strategies that could greatly benefit client results.

In a subtle way, coaches who are too centered on tight client deadlines, those who drive clients to achieve in a timely fashion, are often attempting to indirectly take control of the client situation.  In a way, they are also subtly suggesting that their clients too, should be in control, at the detriment of a lighter delegating and collaborative and interactive relationship with their environments.

Consequently, rather than identify themselves with a solid and performing action plan that would include well structured, logical steps and engaging dates, systemic coaches gain can in performance when they accompany their clients with a minimalist attentive presence, in a trustful state of mind that rests on a respectful, interactive emerging process.

 Sorry...

UNFINISHED TEXT BELOW... come back soon

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 project-management 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 and environmental 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 very 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 methods.  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.  Within a totally open and free relational architecture, 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 open and welcoming 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.

"May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, returning, I will sing you as no one ever has, streaming through widening channels into the open sea."

RILKE's Book of Hours