There was a period — I don't talk about this often — when I couldn't coach.
Not because something had happened to my technique. My questions were still precise. My listening still sharp. But somewhere between sessions, I had lost the thing that made the technique matter: I was no longer fully there.
I remember sitting across from a client — a brilliant executive who had traveled three hours for our session — and noticing, somewhere in the second half of our conversation, that I was present in the way a person is present in a meeting they're not really attending. My body was in the chair. My voice was responding. But something essential had gone quiet inside me.
After she left, I sat for a long time with that feeling.
We speak about presence in coaching the way we speak about talent: as if it's either there or it isn't. Either you're a present coach or you're not. Either you have the gift or you reach for your toolkit to compensate.
This framing has cost many coaches more than they know.
Presence — what I've come to call the living state of attentiveness — is not a trait. It is not a superpower you either have or have to fake. It is a practice. And like all practices, it requires maintenance. It can be neglected. It can erode quietly, the way fitness erodes — not in a single day, but in the accumulation of days when you substituted motion for stillness, efficiency for presence.
That period in my life was the accumulation of too many days when I had prioritized output over inner quiet. I was delivering. I was producing. By every external measure, I was functioning at a high level. But the النَّفْس — the living self — had slowly been pushed to the background, attending to what was happening inside me only when something broke through loud enough to demand attention.
I had taught التفكير الحسّي — Somatic Thinking — for years by then. I had written about it. I had published on it. And I had quietly stepped out of practicing the most basic thing it demands: pausing, turning inward, reading the إشارات حسّية جسدية — the physical sensory signals — that my body was sending long before my mind formed a coherent thought about the situation.
The body had been trying to tell me something for months. I had been too busy to listen.
What I discovered in that period is something I now consider one of the most important things I know about coaching presence:
It disappears not in the dramatic moments but in the ordinary ones.
It doesn't vanish during the hard session — the one with the client in crisis, the one where everything is at stake. In those moments, the adrenaline brings you back. You're called to the present by necessity.
It erodes in the between-spaces. In the ten minutes before a session where you're answering a message instead of arriving. In the commute where you're planning instead of noticing. In the evenings where the day's residue is still running in your system but there's no container to process it. Slowly, without drama, the window through which you see your clients — and through which they can see themselves — fogs over.
I recovered my presence not through a technique but through a return to a fundamental practice: extended periods of structured stillness. Deliberately removing myself from output. Creating conditions where the body could speak without competing with the noise of productivity.
This is what led me to build Ihya.
Not as a wellness offering. Not as a retreat in the sense of escape. But as a container for what I believe is the most neglected need among experienced coaches and leaders: the regular, intentional practice of returning to themselves.
I've now guided hundreds of people through immersive experiences designed around one core premise: before you can be fully present with another human being, you have to be willing to be fully present with yourself. Not in the polished, performing sense. In the raw, unfiltered sense — where the body speaks and you listen without editing.
What I notice, every time, is how quickly the fog lifts when conditions are right. People discover that the presence wasn't gone. It was just buried under accumulated noise, unprocessed experience, and the relentless forward momentum of a life organized around achieving the next thing.
The living state of attentiveness, I've learned, is not permanent. It is a direction you keep orienting toward — every day, in small ways, and regularly, in deep ways.
If you sense that your coaching presence has thinned — not visibly, not in ways your clients have named, but in ways you privately notice — that signal is worth honoring.
The next Ihya retreat is this October. Four days. A small group. A container designed exactly for what I've described here.
If something in this piece recognized you, that recognition is worth following.
→ [Learn more about Ihya and the October retreat dates]