In this interview segment, Arjuna Ardagh expands on the evolution of coaching from its sports origins to its application in spiritual awakening. He credits Thomas J. Leonard for pioneering the transfer of coaching principles to leadership, executive, life, and wellness domains, and explains how those principles can be applied to awakening without the coach needing to be more enlightened than the client. Ardagh outlines six core competencies essential for effective awakening coaching: (1) Inspired Certainty – unwavering confidence in the client’s ability; (2) Absolute Presence – complete external and internal attentiveness; (3) Radical Awakening – guiding a client from mental chatter to spacious awareness; (4) Radical Releasing – liberating reactive charges without narrative attachment; (5) Embodiment – living the realization in all life roles; and (6) Spontaneous Creation – intentionally generating positive frequencies. He also describes the “Basic Skills” training program, a five‑day, ten‑teleseminar course held in Nevada City, designed to teach these competencies. The passage blends personal anecdotes, instructional language, and enthusiastic endorsement of coaching as a transformative, wine‑like experience.
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to what we are. And then we discover in a mysterious way that what I discover, who I am, and what you discover, what you are, is the same. That means oneness, you see, to realize that there's the appearance of Emmet and Arjuna, but one flight of stairs down from that illusion is oneness. Where there are 20 fingers, 4 eyes, 20 toes, 4 kneecaps, the appearance of separation, but one awareness meeting itself. And the coaching part? Well, coaching is a very beautiful thing. Sorry, I got a little distracted there, counting the kneecaps. Coaching is a very beautiful thing, you know. Very, very beautiful thing, really worth sipping like a fine wine to understand what is coaching. Up until the end of the '80s, coaching was really something that happened in the context of sports. So a great athlete at tennis player would have a coach. Tennis coaching. A great swimmer would have a swimming coach. A basketball team would have a basketball coach. Now there's a few beautiful things to point out about coaching in that context. Number one, a coach can do a magnificent job of coaching an athlete without being better at that sport themselves, right? That's a beautiful thing. It's different from teaching or mentoring. Because somebody could be a great basketball coach but not be able to coach— not be able to play basketball as well as the players. So what coaching means is that you see the brilliance in somebody else and you know how to encourage them, how to believe in them, you know how to inspire them, but they can do way better than you could yourself, right? So it was in the early 1990s But a beautiful man named Thomas J. Leonard saw that this relationship of coaching in sports could easily be transferred to other things. So he developed leadership coaching, executive coaching, life coaching, wellness coaching. So we've taken that— he died very young, unfortunately, but he was one of the great geniuses of our time, Thomas J. Leonard. We have taken Leonard's work and applied it to awakening. And the important thing, it translates perfectly, you see, that you can coach someone to awaken fully to their true nature. You don't have to be more awakened than they are or more enlightened or something. It's a matter of respect, you see. It's a matter just of asking the right questions, knowing the right questions to ask so that someone's attention is pointed back to themselves. So we have 6 competencies of awakening coaching, which we can revisit maybe if you'd like to. 6 core competencies which make someone really great at coaching. Okay, so these are, these are not competencies that we have any ownership of. I would say these are the, the core competencies which make any human being effective at facilitating awakening with another human being. So the first of these competencies we call inspired certainty. And it's something we're all familiar with. You know, when I moved to the Sierra Nevada Mountains about 11, 12 years ago now, I started to ski. In my 40s, I started to ski for the first time. And you know, I was being a kind of tall skinny guy, I was pretty nervous about falling down and hurting myself. And I remember the first time I went really up, up, up, up, up in the lift with a young New Zealand ski instructor. He was like 18, 20 or something. And we got all the way up to the top of the mountain, you know, and I was petrified. And he was super relaxed. He said, "No, mate, no problem at all. Just, you know, just lean your weight in there. You go that way. Just lean in there. Go that way." No worries, mate. No worries, mate, it's simple, you know. And I was like, oh no, no, he said, I've done this with a million— everybody can do this, no problem. Now, it wasn't that day, it wasn't so much techniques that he taught me that got me down the mountain, it was his unwavering confidence that I could do it. I call that inspired certainty. He was free of any doubt. He was absolutely confident that I could do it, that anybody could do it. We have all had somebody like that at one time or another in our lives. Maybe your father, maybe it was a grandparent or a teacher or somebody who just completely believed in us. "I know you can do this. You are great. You are brilliant." I would call that inspired certainty. And that quality of inspired certainty is incredibly important to awakening, that the coach knows without any shadow of doubt that although this story of you and me and our successes and failures and triumphs and defeats, although this story is here, who I really am and who you really are is deeper than that. Who I am and who you are is the silence hearing the sounds, is the limitless less experiencing the limits is the peace which is unaffected by chaos or by resting. So this is inspired certainty, is to— that the coach absolutely knows who we are, whether or not we're recognizing in this moment. The second core competency we call Absolute presence, which means the capacity within, at least within a coaching relationship, to be completely there with your client, free of external distractions but also free of internal distractions, to be absolutely present. Now we know what it's like to be free of external distractions. That just means that when I'm talking to you, I'm not also texting or, you know, reading or something, I'm here. But to be free of internal distractions means that when you're speaking, I'm not rehearsing what I'm gonna say. I'm not evaluating, judging, remembering. I'm only listening. We train people how to meet their clients in a context of absolute presence. A third of these competencies we call radical awakening. How anybody can be trained to sit with another human being and guide them in a matter of a few minutes from being immersed in thinking to being in recognition of the spaciousness which contains all thinking. And we teach very specific, very reliable tools to facilitate that shift. The fourth of these core competencies we call radical releasing. Because once we have this awakening, once we have this recognition of being spaciousness, we also recognize that we have reactive charges which frequently arise and meet life. So somebody says something that feels a little insulting, we go into a contraction. We all have this. These contractions are quite difficult to liberate. When we experience them with a story. But if you know how to experience them in their essence, just as frequency, they become quite easy to liberate. So this is the fourth competency, is how to liberate charges without having to reference a story or a why or a because. The fifth of these competencies we call embodiment, embodied awakening, and it means Now that you have this recognition of being spaciousness, now that you've learned to liberate these charges, how can the way that we live become an embodiment of our deepest realization instead of old habits? How is intimate relationship? How is sexuality? How is being a parent? How is educating? How is being in business? How is being a responsible inhabitant of this planet? How is social and political action from awakening? So that's embodiment, that not only we have the realization, but we live it as a gift, as a potent gift in every aspect of our lives. The last of these competencies we call spontaneous creation, and it means how we can actually generate life and frequencies out of ourselves. Instead of life being something that happens to us, how there can be intention brought within this spaciousness to generate frequencies like happiness or generosity, how that can be generated as a frequency which then becomes the quality of our life. Wow, how long does it take to learn all that? Our training is in different modules. So the basic module is called Basic Skills. It's a 5-day course with 10 teleseminars. So you attend 5 days right here in beautiful Nevada City.
