Most coaches can recite the levels of listening in their sleep. Level 1, level 2, level 3. It was foundational curriculum – the kind of framework that shapes how you first understood the coaching conversation.
But here’s a question worth sitting with: what if listening levels are only part of the picture?
Working through articles on presence for an upcoming issue, something kept pulling at me. The conversation in the field has expanded. There are indicators, emerging ideas, and real practitioner experience pointing to other dimensions of what it means to be present as a coach – not just listening at different depths, but being present in ways that go beyond where the microphone is pointed.
Presence as a concept in coaching has always carried more weight than it sometimes gets. The ICF lists it as a core competency. Coaches talk about it in training. But the lived experience of presence – what it actually feels like to be fully there with a client, what gets in the way, what shifts when you are – that’s a richer and messier territory than any numbered list captures.
What are you present to in a session? The client’s words, yes. Their emotions, their silences. But also your own reactions. Your assumptions. The pull toward a technique or a question you want to ask. The part of you that’s already three moves ahead.
That’s where it gets interesting.
The articles coming later this year dig into this – the layers of presence that coaching school may not have named, and the real impact on clients when coaches inhabit them. It’s a thread worth following.
In the meantime: next time you’re in a session, notice not just how you’re listening, but what you’re actually present to. The answer might surprise you.
