A coach argues that real leadership means being fully present with people instead of trying to fix them. True availability requires first resolving your own fears and self-doubt, then meeting others in their reality without imposing your story. When people feel seen and heard without judgment, relationships deepen and growth happens.
Chapters
True intimacy is a form of being available. Availability is a form of being present. Presence, as far as relationships go, are concerned with allowing us to meet people inside of their own realities, seeing and hearing the way that they view their world, which inherently stems from the way they perceive their position in the world. Not safe. Not good enough to do what they want to do or afraid. As a leader in any relationship, romantic, familiar, or your clients, your access to being present with another person lies in your ability to not needing to be anywhere else or to run away from your own story of how things are happening. And so the question I ask is, can we really get the world our people live in without going into our own story of what it might mean about us and our values. Can we just get that that's their world and that's where they're coming from right now? Invariably, when we do this, we create more time to ask questions, time to be curious and not to fix anything, but really understand the world they're coming from, which, if we do this, has them feel seen, heard, and recognized. There's a key difference between getting the world people live in but not living in it with them. Leaders have compassion but stand true to their values. They're respectful but don't abandon their boundaries so that another can continue living in their limited world. If you've been a part of our coaching programs, then you might even be able to hold a space for them to challenge the validity of the lie that they've been living in and believing about their safety and inadequacy and worry. We're only available to hold this space for others when we have reconciled our own stories and we don't react from our own old places of inadequacy to where we know fixing things is not the goal, but allowing others to have their own process, acknowledging how they feel. And this is enough sometimes for the relationship to prosper. Everyone knows their world better than ever we could. If you want to facilitate anyone to be open growth, then they need to recognize that you're on their side and totally get their reality, even if you know the foundations of what's holding their reality together. People want to be met. They don't want to feel like they need fixing. Ironically, when you do this, their internal lies start to crumble as every call out that is based in fear is really a call to be seen and their pain to be expressed and recognized. I personally just don't like to let people hang out there longer than they need to. Let me do that again. I personally don't like people to hang out in their pain and suffering for any longer than they need to. But again, there is people's own process to what that looks like. Starting off by acknowledging them can bring a sense of ease to their body of being heard. And our ability to meet someone is proportionate to the level we have met our own selves and stories and reconcile them to create more space to be whole, present, and available, absent of fear. That might be all your relationship needs is just meeting them. I've had people in my life where attempting to get their reality was met with even more resistance because they were picking up on my own lack of compassion for them, which really stemmed from my own resistance of compassion and acceptance for myself. In month 2 of our coaching retainer, which is about practice and exploration, we explore helping ourselves challenge the validity of what keeps us from being present, which is the precursor to stress as we dissolve keeping up an act to be anywhere else but here now. And that involves, you guessed it, Feeling potentially uncomfortable feelings just for a moment. Uncomfortable to our story of the way things are, not for what's actually happening. When we ask, is it actually true that what's happening now is that I am someone that's not safe or not good enough? How do I know this? What do I assume is making me feel inadequate? What do I believe is stopping me? Here we reveal our own blind spots and we give these storied answers that reveal the unconscious way that we've been relating to our world and ourselves from a perspective we bought into about who we were that wasn't totally accurate, but rather degrees away from the reality of what's actually happening. Often you'll find we're answering these questions that reveal our blind spots of feeling not good enough, unsafe, while life presents to us all of the results and evidence to say the opposite. It's just not how the story wants it to be proposed to us. So we end up distorting our evidence to keep us feeling unsafe and inadequate. Still, the root cause of your stress, disease, and limitations, as well as our loved ones' issues, is where we place our focus on. Our subtle unconscious focus is usually the world we end up living in, even if we are trying to avoid it. Shifting focus starts with recognizing the values of the world we'd been living in were based in avoidance. Fear, inadequacy, so that we can reconcile them and drop that whole strategy to be present to the abundance that is in our life each and every moment.
