Coaching Presence: Building Consciousness and Awareness in Coaching Interventions

by Maria Iliffe-Wood

One of the hallmarks of maturity as a coach is awareness of how your values, beliefs, and other factors affect your coaching interventions. It takes skill to notice these influences which can manifest both physically and mentally during coaching, while simultaneously ensuring a client focused approach.

Coaching Presence examines how self-awareness can be built across key aspects of coaching practice, introducing a model that will help you make a conscious and deliberate choice for every approach or intervention that you use with your client. It explores how, by paying close attention to the motivations behind every coaching choice, you can minimize the unconscious negative influences and bias to produce the best outcome for the client and their wider system. It will also help you recognize when conscious visibility expressed explicitly to the client may actually be the best coaching solution. An online supporting resource includes a 'Leader as Mediator' white paper.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Stefano Di Lollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maria Iliffe-Wood’s Coaching Presence is an in depth look at the coaching “levels of awareness” and the extent to which these levels can enhance or stifle coaching styles, experiences, interventions, and relationships. This book can certainly help the novice and expert coach alike, as there are aspects of a coach that one may not be aware is influencing coaching (examples: upbringing, values, guiding beliefs, assumptions, judgements, contagious emotions…etc). The author aims to help coaches navigate through four modes of presence (Invisible Coach Mode, Emerging Coach Mode, Evident Coach Mode, & Visible Coach Mode), and connects these modes to numerous coaching interventions and client channels of perception. Iliffe-Wood has a wonderful way of making a complex aspect of coach maturity easy to understand, enjoyable to explore, and useful for integration into one’s reflective practice.

Illife-Wood’s personal case studies (not dialogues) are strategically inserted into the book and offer enjoyable examples that support the content and maintain a pleasant flow throughout the book. Every chapter ends with a series of reflective questions that can be useful for any coach looking to improve their practice and grow as a mindful person.

This book truly stretched my thinking as a coach in training, and it unlocked some issues that I was struggling with as I grow into my own coaching style. Understanding the levels of awareness and modes of presence truly allowed me to let go of many misconceptions and fears that I was experiencing during my own coaching sessions. I truly believe that I was often remaining in the “Invisible Coach Mode” because I feared (or felt guilty) entering the other coaching modes described in the book. This book has brought me more clarity and is an excellent extension of my ACTP training. I would describe this book as chock full of actionable strategies, and I truly appreciate the numerous descriptive interventions offered in the book. The emphasis on contracting in relation to the different modes was also noteworthy.

Last but not least, I felt the author ended the book with helpful tools to structure and enhance reflective practice. I would most definitely recommend this book to any coach, and I am certain I will be rereading portions as I continue to fill the margins with personal notes. I feel like my review hasn’t done the book justice with regards to how much I feel it’s helped me grow.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. A real treasure-trove of practices to enrich coaching practice.

[Paul Laughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb guide that I would recommend to any practising coach. It significantly improved my 'being' with clients.