Bring to mind a client (or any person you know), and take a moment to consider: what is the most loving thing you can do today for that person? It’s a vital question to be asking regularly, as the path to deep trust and connection and so much more runs through the heart.

Now, your intellect might not quite agree with that. Your intellect may be firing neurons in protest of that question. “How is ‘loving my client’ really going to help my coaching? That is not a tool I can use! I need something more concrete than love to be more effective as a coach.”

I love the intellect. It really does try hard, and is capable of creating extraordinary things. If you’re like me, you will have built much of your coaching practice on the thinking, figuring out, strategic capacities of your intellect. And there is nothing wrong with that. The challenge for transformational coaches, who are learning to move beyond the intellect as the driver of our life decisions, is that the coaching industry is awash with intellect-based coaching approaches—tools and systems and techniques to increase your coaching proficiency.

It seems to me that few people in our industry are talking about our most fundamental human need—to be loved—and how coaches can foster that inner experience.

It is a lack of self-love that is at the root of so many of our negative thoughts and behaviors, and a driver for so many others. Yet our industry, despite being filled with some of the most genuinely caring human beings on earth, relies heavily on head-based thinking to develop and advance.

Slightly to One Side

Whenever I think about our collective propensity towards the capacities of the intellect, I recall Ken Robinson’s early TED Talk on creativity in schools when he observers about professors, “There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.”

I know many coaches like this as well, particularly those who coach in organizations. It’s not that they are completely disconnected from their hearts—after all, it is often the desire to help others grow and develop that brings them to coaching—but there is a strong focus on the head, and slightly to one side. Which means that any question of how to improve coaching efficacy is almost guaranteed to be answered from the head.

Shift Where You Come From

Today I will be the voice in the room that speaks for another way, a potential that flows not from the intellect but from the heart, and it is grounded in this Deep Coaching practice: Coach More From the Heart, Less From the Head.

Instead of focusing on being a “thinking partner,” focus on becoming a “spiritual partner.” Rather than trying to do differently with your clients, the practice invites you to be differently – to be a loving presence in which others can find rest and connect in that same place within themselves.

The greatest need every human being has is to feel loved, to feel valued, to feel worthy. This is why everyone is striving so hard to “be better” or “create value” or “improve performance” or “be successful” or even to “make a difference in the world”. At the core of our being there is a deep human need to feel worthy and valued—to matter.

Moment of Pause

Take a moment now and try this: Close your eyes, take a deep breath, drop into your heart center, bring to mind a client or any other person in your life, and ask within:

What is the most loving thing I can do for this person?

Trust what comes up and move with it fearlessly.

Practice this every day and every session for at least a week, and notice what changes. Then repeat.

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