• What Changes?

    What Changes?

    The stories we are telling at any given moment, are the stories we are walking into. — Krista Tippett

    I’ve been spending time in reflection lately, especially as I get pulled unwittingly into so much change in our world right now. I’m talking about all types, shapes, and scales of change that many of us are facing. Personal relationships, work challenges, family conflicts. AI implications, war, economic uncertainty, polarization. A sense of purpose fading under the pressure of ongoing responsibilities. A growing weight of unprocessed sorrow and grief.

    My own reflections have spurred a burning question in me as I see change revealing itself in every corner, outside every window, literally everywhere I turn: What actually changes?

    As we explore this question, I offer a framing for thinking about change and what changes. I propose we look at change as a phenomenon from two distinct views: outer change and inner change.

    The Landscape of Outer Change

    The many facets of outer change are often out of our reach or domain, or even beyond our scope of influence. How can we keep from feeling overwhelmed, losing our sense of agency, or worse, falling into helplessness and resignation?

    The way I see it, it boils down to what we have control over and what we don’t.

    One way I’ve worked with this reality is to investigate the other side of the outer-change coin—the terrain of inner change. Moving my focus to what’s inside me (to at least some of what I can control), opens the door to a surprisingly generous world of options.

    Witnessing Ourselves

    This inner view involves a practice of witnessing myself in action. Paying close attention to some of my control patterns: my attachment to a specific outcome, for example, or holding myself back to influence how others see me. Attempting to manage others’ moods through my behavior. Noticing the ways I’m overly responsible for someone close.

    You may recognize some of these strategies in yourself. 

    Your relationship to change might involve things like denial, avoidance, resistance, fighting it, or shutting down. When I look closer at my relationship to change, I sometimes see that I am flailing around, not sure where to go next, so I resort just doing, doing, doing. This reminds me of one of my father’s favorite quotes: “It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

    It can feel like that!

    Where We Have Leverage

    Instead of flailing, I can shift my perspective—and thus my relationship—to change. Especially to change I have little or no control over.

    For example, there is a bit of space created when I observe and shift the story I am telling myself inside. Moving from “I can’t do anything about this” to “What do I really want or need here?”

    Or from “They are doing that to me” to “How might I respond in a way that aligns with who I want to be?” Or from “I’m stuck here forever” to “What is one small step I could take to move forward, and who can I ask for help in this?”

    I’ve learned over the years from the Presence-Based Coaching and Leadership work that outer challenges often present an opportunity to enact change on the inside. And if we haven’t yet considered that one option might be to grow inside to meet the current outer conditions, we can easily get stuck in the suffering of being at their effect.

    I see this both in myself and with my clients.

    Growing to Meet What is

    The fact is that outer conditions might not change—ever.

    But inner change is where our development lives. Here we can find the choice to grow into a different way of being—to move towards more of the human we can be, or, as Doug Silsbee (founder of this work) used to say, “become our best self.” This inner perspective, this self-work, enables us to meet current reality differently.

    Here are a few questions to get you started down this path of inner change:

    • Where in your life might it be helpful to reassess what actually does change?
    • What step can you take to witness and shift your own perspective about the current conditions that might be derailing you or keeping you stuck?
    • What would it be like to focus on the inner change that’s possible—the change that offers you a move toward your own development, growth, and freedom?

    Bebe Hansen

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  • Developmental Distinctions

    Developmental Distinctions

    Developmental Distinctions

    I had a recent whole-body insight as I was talking to a colleague about how I tend make a distinction between the Presence-Based Coaching that is a business, and the Presence-Based Coaching that is “the work.” Many of you will recognize this distinction and intertwined expression of growth from our PBC principles of Being and Doing. 

    There are many challenges that PBC the business is facing these days. The business is operating within a current climate of uncertainty on many levels (economic, political, social, environmental, to name a few). The business is also facing a slew of new coaches putting their shingles out there; I’m referring to those who are not trained in any specific coaching methodology and are entering the field with a statement such as: “Oh, I’ve always coached people.”  The business is also witnessing a mass of new coach training businesses coming online post covid, most of which are claiming unrealistic results, such as: “learn coaching in 6 weeks and earn a six-figure income.”

    In response to these contextual changes, PBC the business has updated our website to be clearer about what we offer while refreshing it’s look and feel; we are upping our social media messaging and overall marketing game; we are offering no interest payment plans to our participants. These all fall into what we might call Doing level challenges and solutions. This is how our current business environment is unfolding and what we are (ahem) “doing” to respond to these new conditions on the ground.

    I can tease out this Doing level from how I view the “work” of PBC. The inner change work we teach to our coaches and offer to our clients is the Being level of PBC.

    The work is located inside us: who we are learning to be as coaching practitioners that supports our clients to meet their coaching goals through their own Being.

    What I saw in that moment of insight was a new perspective emerge before my very eyes. That Presence-Based Coaching itself has embodied these Being and Doing levels — as a business container (Doing) that holds the “work” of PBC (Being). This may seem obvious to you who know our work, yet it was a revelation to me in terms of the changing and challenging environments in which we now operate. And this new view sparked a fresh perception of how to hold what’s happening now, and a new understanding how to approach and work with it. 

    Further, I got a felt sense of the resiliency of the work of PBC, the Being level. In particular, what is happening in the Doing level may feel overwhelming and out of control, but what’s called for in the Being level of the PBC work itself is actually the catalyst for our individual and collective growth. For the work’s continued evolution as it moves with the challenges on the Doing level. An invitation to evolve to meet these challenges. That feels like a resourced and positive opportunity, rather than an overwhelming one.  It’s the good kind of stretch that we ask our clients to face – somewhat edgy, yet with it a sense of rightness and inner feel of knowing, even certainty that this is what’s next for me. Not about the details of what needs to grow, but that the work itself needs its own kind of development.

    And of course, the PBC work itself has always been iterative, and has evolved from the emerging interests of the founder and faculty, and from the students who come to learn about coaching, who offer their ideas about what else is needed. I have made it a practice to listen carefully to this feedback loop, which interestingly includes the land we are honored to teach on and with, as well as help steward. It is this sense of place that supported this work’s birth in the first place and that continues to hold our work of inner change and development.

    The impact that we ultimately embody is based in both levels of development, the Being and the Doing, the inner and outer focus. It is these inexplicably linked threads of DNA of development that shepherds the growth of us as coaches and as humans, and of PBC itself. Both the coach and the client sit at the edges of their own and each other’s development where these developmental distinctions are at play. Both of these strands of interwoven wholeness need attention if there is to be real transformational change. Not only change in broadening skillsets (the horizontal) but freedom from limiting mindsets with an overall approach that includes presence, healing from outgrown patterns, and a big picture worldview of care and service (the vertical).

    What’s needed now, especially these days, is paying attention to both the Being and Doing levels, our inherent love for the aliveness of this PBC work, with perhaps now, an added emphasis on where the work itself wants to go and grow. 

    Bebe Hansen

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