Coaching Circles – Practices of a leader – Part 1

I’ve devoted a lot of time over the past year to building our online course to support coaches and other human development professionals in designing and leading coaching circles. This gave me an opportunity to reflect on what it means for me to be a teacher, a coach and a facilitator of this powerful process. I wanted to share with you some of the practices and related qualities I believe are essential to leading these groups and that inspire those who come to work with us. I am pretty sure that these make a positive contribution to any group or community we belong to.

 

Being Real

 

Being real means bringing our whole self to the work, without pretence or posturing. It requires that we remain grounded in the middle of our life. When our leadership is an extension of who we are, we also make it possible for people in our group to show up as who they really are, thereby creating a rich field of exploration, openness, and compassionate holding. A coaching circle is not an event to attend or a stage to perform upon. In this container, our talents and our humanity form a seamless whole. This allows the relationship with everyone in the group to be real.

 

Doing Our Inner Work

 

Inspiring a commitment to learning and growing comes from living into that commitment ourselves. Doing our inner work means that we first hold the mirror to ourselves and constantly seek ways to better understand the kind of person we are. Can we be with all of our experience without turning away from what we don’t like? How present are we to our reactions? Which self-image do we protect the most? Living authentically with these kinds of questions infuses our humanity and creates the opening needed for others to step into their own work with courage and dedication. As long as we do not believe we have “arrived” or figured things out, there is room to wonder and to grow. Some call this having a beginner’s mind. It means holding what we know with soft hands.

 

Cultivating Presence

 

Being fully present to those around us is one of the greatest gifts we can offer. In a state of presence, we are fully attuned to our own sensations, feelings and thoughts while being in direct contact with and impressed by those we are meeting. While in action, we can self-observe, notice our reactions and distractions, and bring our attention back to what is occurring, to why we are here in this moment. Cultivating presence requires steady practice. When we keep up our practices, whether it be through meditation, yoga or any other mindful activity, we develop important capacities such as concentration, sensitivity, alignment, wholeheartedness, stillness, and detachment, to name a few. Our quality of presence directly impacts our ability to meet our colleagues where they are, to hold the room so that learning and development can take place through all trials and tribulations.

 

You can read about the other practices that are central to this work in an upcoming Part 2 of this article.