We briefly interrupt our series on Agile Transition to bring you a shallow dip into a very deep pool. At www.agilecamp.org, Jeff McKenna and I gave mini-workshop on the importance of cultivating mindfulness and accessing presence when coaching others. Most of us equate mindfulness with stillness and meditation. While there is huge value in such practices, here we are talking about active mindfulness while serving others. All of the common coaching skills require some level of self-awareness. A coach who can access presence while serving their client will have more success, both from being more capable in their craft and by nurturing mindfulness in their client.
Here are the slides we used to summarize the concepts along with the associated handout. See the handout for references. We titled the workshop “Presence-Based Coaching” because it was strongly influenced by the work of Doug Silsbee. In this post and future repetitions of the workshop I will switch to “Mindful Coaching” to avoid confusion with Mr. Silsbee’s much more extensive and passionate work. Our workshop is just an appetizer to his many-course banquet.
We have an additional exercise that did not fit in our time allocation that takes the concepts into another, more practical level. If you are interested in knowing more, contact me for details.