Book Excerpts

This page links you to any of six excerpts from Presence-Based Coaching.  You many read the entire excerpt online, or download it as a PDF and share it freely.

Excerpt #1: Introduction

Many years ago, I faced a significant professional challenge. I was about to fly overseas to teach a ten-day seminar to a group of Latin American professors at a prestigious business school. It was early in my career, and I was terrified. I was positive that the participants in the seminar would be smarter than me, more knowledgeable about the subject matter, skeptical, resistant, and questioning of my competence.

I spoke with my mentor the day before I left. He saw capacities in me that I was not yet able to see in myself. He calmly reminded me of indisputable evidence about my competence, ability to design, and capacity to respond creatively to the unexpected. Remembering this evidence (which, in my panic, I'd conveniently forgotten) was reassuring. More important, an intangible quality in his voice-call it confidence, authority, or presence-invited me to relax, lean into my knowledge and instincts, and step openly and calmly into this unknown territory...

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Excerpt #2:  Presence and Coaching

Presence-based coaching accelerates the development of authentic leaders by providing three critical structures for an integrated development methodology. The structures themselves have been around for millennia in traditions that value the cultivation of character and leadership. We can think of coaching as simply a modern form, relevant to our times, for providing those structures.....

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Excerpt #3: An Identity and Development Story

It is essential to have a narrative that can guide our work as leaders, coaches, and educators. Our capacities and achievements as executives, teachers, authors, coaches, and entrepreneurs are enabled, shaped, and limited by a myriad of elements embodied in who we are. To know ourselves is to understand our nature as a biological organism who received certain stories we came to hold as true, as someone who has a unique genetic endowment and history, as the inevitable cumulative product of both our own deep histories and every choice that we have ever made....

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Excerpt #4: Becoming Self-Generative

Let's now explore what's required to make the shift from automatic, conditioned behaviors focused on survival, fitting in, getting validation, and achieving success to new and creative actions linked to purpose, contribution, efficacy, and fulfillment.

We can choose to live with a less desperate focus on achieving competence for current circumstances and a greater explicit commitment to our growth, change, and evolution. ...

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Excerpt #5: Coaching and Self-Generation

Developing self-generation in ourselves (and in our team members and clients) establishes the grounding from which specific skills and competencies can be chosen and executed. As coaches, we are continually working at becoming more self-generative in our own lives. Similarly, to focus our coaching efforts simply on measurable outcomes while ignoring the calling to the inner work of self-generation misses the extraordinary leverage for extraordinary learning that self-generation provides.

A central question, then, is how we as coaches can support each of the four components of self-generation: self-observation, realization, reorganization, and stabilization...

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Excerpt #6: Living in Self-Generation

We live in a field of presence; presence is always available to us. Yet when we live habitually, we are not aware of this, and naturally organize ourselves around our attachments and aversions. We live to maintain and protect our identity.

The illustration shows how we can respond to the events in our lives in one of two fundamental ways: constrained by living in the Habit Loop, or self-generatively, by living in the Generative Loop, informed continually by presence....

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