How successful we are as coaches depends in part on our ability to stay present and on how our internal landscape is embodied and transmitted

 

Recently I’ve been reflecting more deeply on a quote that I came across a few years ago: “The success of an intervention is dependent on the interiority of the intervenor” (Scharmer, 2007). 

This insight was written by Bill O’Brien, the former CEO of Hanover Insurance and later popularised by Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT who developed Theory U (Scharmer, 2007).

Any intervention we deliver is significantly influenced by our inner landscape as coaches. This interiority, which includes our mindset, emotional state, relational attachment style, level of personal and field awareness and our ability for reflexivity and embodied presence, influences our capacity to be responsive to the particularities of the context in which we are situated. 

At its foundation, our interiority rests on our sense of inner safety or the width of our window of tolerance (Siegel, 2012). This determines our ability to stay present and connected, particularly in the face of stress. The more resource our nervous system has to hold and process difficulty, the wider our window. When a client shares something that is activating for them, their nervous system will be unconsciously scanning to determine whether we as their coach are able to stay open to their experience. 

Research into psychological safety has shown that the more safety there is in a learning context, the greater the potential for learning and creativity. So, paradoxically, the safer our clients feel, the more able they are to step out of their comfort zone – where growth lies. If their sharing becomes uncomfortable for us, parts of us will shut down and then we’re no longer available. This will compromise the safety in the field and inhibit any depth of inquiry. 

 

Global Witnessing

Through recent experience I’ve come to see the architecture of the relational field from a higher resolution and this is nuancing my understanding of O’Brien’s statement. These thoughts are early shoots and I assemble them here with some vulnerability.

Over the past few months, I’ve been engaging in a Global Social Witnessing training program offered by The Pocket Project, a non-profit organisation dedicated to growing a culture of trauma-informed care in service of collective healing and global restoration. Mindfully attending to global events with an embodied awareness creates an inner world space that mirrors and brings compassion to these events. It engenders a shift from being a mere bystander to an active witness, responding from our bodies, hearts, and minds. Most importantly, it supports a deepening of our capacity to gently turn towards difficulty on both a personal and collective level and directly feel it deep in the body. This naturally expands our window of tolerance and resilience and opens our hearts, to ourselves and each other. 

I recently attended the final session of the first of three modules of this year-long programme. This was my first experience of being ‘live’ with Thomas Hübl, a spiritual teacher, collective trauma expert and the founder of The Pocket Project. I felt present and grounded in an awareness of my body and interiority. 

As the session unfolded, I began to experience an exquisite coherence emerging in the field of almost 300 of us. Hübl describes this internal state as a sense of flow, where the elements of our phenomenological experience –emotions, body awareness and thoughts – feel integrated. 

This harmonious internal alignment brings a feeling of ease and presence. Hübl’s immense skill combined with an exquisitely grounded, clear, loving presence, sent signals to all of our nervous systems that this space was profoundly safe. I felt a warm sweetness pour into my chest and spread outwards into my body. Hübl’s energetic transmission of coherence was like a tuning fork, sending waves of energy into a collective field of tuning forks and each began to resonate as one sound. Our inter-connected nervous systems became a resonant container – one body – for the holding, co-regulating, metabolising and healing of experience. 

 

Self at our core

Following the principles of nature, it’s clear to me that this collective phenomenon is fractal – a pattern that repeats itself at different scales so no matter how much we zoom in or zoom out, we see a similar structure. We can see our interiority as the epicentre which radiates outwards into the relational fields we are integral to. 

I’ve been working with an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist for two years. Alongside this I’ve recently started an IFS intensive training which is building on my experiential understanding of the process of seeing our interiority as a system of multiple parts with Self at its core. Self is the source of energetic resonance, coherence and healing. It emanates love, calm, compassion, clarity, confidence, courage, creativity and connectedness. When we are in Self, we are fully within our window of tolerance. We can witness internal parts, feel emotions, and respond skilfully without being hijacked by survival responses. 

Intergenerational and cultural trauma fragments our inner system into disharmony and dissonance and we lose touch with the life energy of Self. Our fragmented parts overwhelm our conscious awareness in an attempt to maintain balance and safety in a compromised system. By learning to recognise and differentiate the parts of ourselves we begin to access the healing presence of Self. When this energy touches those parts, they begin to weave their way back into the whole where they are held in a system increasingly characterised by trust, coherence, spaciousness and responsive relationality. 

Placing this evolutionary process into the context of sitting with Hübl, he was transmitting Self energy into the field which called forth the Self energy of each of the elements in the field. When we’re grounded in Self – our wider window of tolerance – that coherence radiates outward, creating conditions of safety for others. 

The bottom line is simple: what we embody – our interiority – we transmit. Hübl holds that everyone working to help others embodies the self-healing mechanism of humanity, ie, each of us plays a part in activating the global immune system, a shared organismic intelligence for healing. What an inspirational message to carry as we do the work of integrating our shadow to increase our window of tolerance, for the benefit of ourselves, our clients and everyone we’re in relationship with.  

 

References

• Scharmer, O.(2007). Uncovering the blind spot of leadership. DailyGood. Available at: https://www.dailygood.org/story/450/uncovering-the-blind-spot-of-leadership-c-otto-scharmer
  (Accessed 10 September 2025).
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. 

 

 

• Jane Brendgen is founder of Compassionate Cultures. She is an executive coach specialising in authentic leadership, adult development and therapeutic coaching. She is a mindfulness supervisor.