I remember the first person who enrolled in my program.
She was sitting in a small conference room in Rome. It was 2016, and what I was calling a "coaching training" at the time was little more than a structured attempt to share everything I had spent fifteen years learning — about the body, about presence, about what actually creates change in a human being.
She wasn't a professional coach. She was a doctor. She had come because a friend had mentioned what I was doing and something in her, she told me later, had said: this is the conversation I've been looking for.
I think about her often now, a decade and 500 coaches later. I wonder what I would say to her today, knowing what I didn't know then. What I would have taught differently. What I would have had the courage to say more simply.
This is my attempt.
First: presence is not a competency. It is a state. Stop trying to develop it like a skill.
Every coaching school I know — including the tradition I was trained in — teaches presence as something you demonstrate. You are present when you're fully listening. When you're not distracted. When you show the client you are "with" them.
But that's the description of presence as observed from the outside. It tells you nothing about what produces it.
Presence — real presence — emerges from a particular interior condition. When the إشارات حسّية جسدية are flowing freely: when the physical sensory signals you're receiving from the client, from the room, from yourself are landing without being immediately processed through analysis and response. When you are in contact with what is happening before you decide what to do about it.
You cannot demonstrate your way into that state. You can only cultivate the inner conditions for it.
If I could go back to 2016, I would have started there. I would have taught less about questions, and earlier. I would have given the first six weeks entirely to this: helping each student become familiar with the territory of their own interior — the chest, the breath, the jaw, the quality of sensation in the hands — so that when they sat with a client, they had somewhere to return to when the session became difficult.
Most coaches I've trained have the technique. The ones who are extraordinary have the presence. And what separates them is not talent. It is the willingness to do the interior work.
Second: direction is more useful than objectives. For your clients, yes. But first, for yourself.
التفكير الحسّي — Somatic Thinking — rests on a foundational idea: that an objective is a limit. It is the boundary of what you could imagine at the time you set it. And the great gift of coaching is not helping people reach that limit — it is helping them grow beyond it.
But here's what I didn't say clearly enough to early students: this applies to you as a developing coach, not just your clients.
When coaches enter training with a goal — "I want to earn my PCC," "I want to build a six-figure practice," "I want to be known for this niche" — I watch what happens. The goal becomes a ceiling. Every experience in the training gets filtered through whether it helps them reach the goal. Growth that doesn't serve the goal becomes invisible.
The coaches who grow furthest are the ones who set a direction — toward depth, toward presence, toward understanding what they actually believe about human development — and hold their objectives lightly. They achieve them, almost without noticing. And then they keep going.
I wish I had handed that permission more explicitly to my first students. The permission to want something larger than what you can currently name.
Third: the mirror metaphor is everything — and you probably misunderstood it the first time.
We describe the coach in Somatic Thinking as a crystal-clear mirror. Students often interpret this as neutrality. Don't project. Don't advise. Reflect back.
That's not wrong. But it's incomplete, and the incomplete version produces a kind of coached blankness that clients find exhausting.
A mirror reflects clearly because of the quality of its surface. The clarity of what the client sees in you depends on the quality of your own النَّفْس — the living self you bring to the session. When your interior is cluttered — with your own unexamined patterns, your wish to be helpful, your anxiety about whether this is going well — the mirror distorts. The client is looking at your unprocessed material, dressed up as coaching.
The work of becoming a good mirror is not cognitive. It is somatic. It is the ongoing, disciplined practice of attending to yourself — before sessions, during them, and after — so that the surface stays clean.
Five hundred coaches later, this is still the thing I find myself returning to in every training. It sounds simple. It is lifelong.
The new Manhajak cohort opens in September. If you are a coach who wants to go deeper — not just in technique but in the interior work that makes technique matter — I'd like to meet you there.
Bring your questions. Bring your doubts. Bring the part of you that already knows the work isn't finished.
That's the part I'm most interested in.