I'm moving myself through the Absence of You Coaching tools and concepts so I can gain facility with these new ideas, and because I like to first subject myself to anything I ask my clients to experience. Seems only fair, right? The journey has been, and continues to be, quite enlightening. Not surprisingly, it's also none too easy. It's not for the faint of heart, that's for sure!

Absence of You Coaching is Thomas Leonard's creation, and the staff at Coachville, (an organization Leonard created whose mission is to improve the quality of coaching worldwide), have picked up where his genius left off. They recently offered the first Absence of You training which I attended. The core, from my perspective, of what we are looking to 'absence' is the illusion of separateness. While the teachings of wholeness—a greater sense of being One—have been around for millennia, humans have been challenged with the 3D sense that everything (and everyone) are separate. This is a basic dilemma of living on the planet.

The Absence of You training outlines 12 core dynamics that are at the root of common problems—occurring both in personal life as well as in the corporate setting. The idea is to learn how to eliminate or 'absence' these dynamics, which starts by understanding how each of them currently lives inside you and manifests in your life. Because this work is very exciting, I am eagerly applying the dynamics and practice to my life and simultaneously bringing them into my work with clients. Here is a snap shot of how I am working to 'absence' the first dynamic called 'Resisting Feeling Things Fully' in my personal practice. I notice times that I am 'in the grip' of an emotion. When that happens, I pause and systematically bring myself into the core of the feeling that is gripping me, going deeper and deeper until I get past all the churning, evocative, eruptive forces and finally into the calm center that is me.

Sounds simple, but it takes practice to learn how to use this tool with facility. Once I reach the calm center, now I can begin some important work. I articulate what I am experiencing—for me, it's a blend of thoughts and feelings—a balance of head and heart. Articulating it helps anchor any insights that follow, and with the insights, I identify patterns. Knowing the patterns is particularly helpful, because then I can recognize the early surfacing of a pattern and shift to another more coherent direction. This saves time and energy and prevents getting caught in 'the grip' again. Of course, like any new process, it works in ratios, not all at once. In other words, if I notice myself falling into a pattern 70% of the time, my goal is to reduce that to 65%, then 50%, then 40%, etc., until I have it down to nearly zero. It's rarely a complete zero, but getting the pattern significantly reduced makes a huge difference in my execution of actions and plans, my connections with people, and with how I feel overall. And that's enough—it makes all the difference in the world!

Lindsay Wagner