You are a radio. You are always transmitting a frequency — through your emotions, your words, your energy, your very presence — and that frequency goes out into the world and affects every person, relationship, and situation you encounter. If you’re wondering why your coaching isn’t working, pay attention to what you bring into the room before you reach for another technique.
Most people are not aware of what they are transmitting. And for coaches, facilitators, healers, and leaders whose work is to support the growth of other human beings, this lack of awareness may be the single biggest gap between the impact they want to have and the impact they actually do have.
Leon VanderPol invites you to look at the quality of presence you bring to a session. In transformational coaching, how you show up can shape the work as much as what you say or do.
You Are Always Transmitting Something
The idea is simple and far-reaching: everything you are as a human being radiates outward. Your emotional state transmits. When you are having a good day, people can feel it. When you are frustrated or heavy, they feel that too. Your words transmit. Your values transmit. Even your unspoken inner state — the quality of your consciousness when no one is observing — transmits.
But Leon’s point is that all of this surface-level expression sits on top of a deeper transmission. Beneath your emotions, your words, and your actions, there is a quality of being that is constantly broadcasting. It is this deeper signal — not the things you say or do — that most profoundly affects the people you work with.
“If that’s my work in some way — to support and uplift other people — then this idea that it’s not necessarily just what I do or what I say or how I feel, that there’s a deeper transmission going on that really has the potential to shift the greater potentials of another human being’s life… then I need to look at that,” Leon says.
For practitioners who have built their entire professional identity around skills, certifications, and methodologies, this is a reorientation worth sitting with.
Coaching Presence and the Gap Between Words and Being
Here is where the challenge becomes concrete. A coach who talks about growth, possibility, and empowerment but who is privately immersed in fear, worry, or egoic patterns of self-protection is sending mixed signals. The words say one thing. The transmission says another. And people — even if they cannot articulate it — pick up the deeper signal.
Leon puts it bluntly: “If you’re a practitioner of the work and you’re talking about helping other people grow beyond the worries and concerns and the challenges of their life, but you yourself haven’t really grown beyond that — you are sending out mixed signals.”
This is not about performing confidence or manufacturing positivity. It is about the actual state of your inner life. Are you living the values you teach? Not as an abstract ideal, but as embodied reality — “the walking, talking, living, breathing exemplification of that value in the world,” as Leon describes it.
When he works with students in the Deep Coaching program, one of the first questions he asks is: what are your values? And then the harder follow-up: are you the living embodiment of those values? The gap between what we espouse and what we actually are is the gap in our transmission — and that gap is felt by everyone we work with.
Why It’s Not a Numbers Game
One of the most common things Leon hears from practitioners is some version of “If I could just get more people through the door, I would have greater impact.” The assumption is that impact is a function of reach — more clients, more followers, more visibility.
Leon challenges this directly. “I’m here to say it’s not a numbers game. The quality of your transmission has the capacity to uplift countless others in ways that you may never ever witness.”
This reframe matters because it shifts the practitioner’s attention from external metrics to internal development. If the deepest impact you have on another person comes not from your technique but from the quality of consciousness you bring into the space, then the most important investment you can make is not in marketing — it is in your own transformation.
This does not mean external growth is unimportant. It means that the foundation of genuine impact is the practitioner’s inner state, and no amount of business strategy will compensate for a transmission that is incongruent with the work.
Fear-Based vs. Love-Based Consciousness
Leon draws on the work of David Hawkins and his Map of Consciousness to make a broad but useful distinction: there is consciousness born of fear, and there is consciousness born of love. They have fundamentally different qualities, and they produce fundamentally different transmissions.
Fear-based consciousness — worry, concern, defensiveness, scarcity, the need to control — constricts. It is binding. Even when it is not overtly expressed, even when it operates in the background of your awareness, it becomes part of what you transmit. People in your presence will feel it, whether they can name it or not.
Love-based consciousness — compassion, openness, genuine care, a sense of unity and connection — expands. It creates space. It invites the people you work with to be more of who they truly are, rather than reinforcing the defended, contracted patterns they came to you to move beyond.
The question Leon asks practitioners to sit with is not “What is the quality of my words?” or “What is the quality of my actions?” but “What is the quality of my consciousness? That deeper field in which I abide, day after day — because that is what people will actually be picking up from me.”
The Sweet Spot: Whole-Self, Heart-Centered Intelligence
Near the end of his exploration, Leon names what he considers the destination — not as a finish line to be reached, but as a sweet spot that fundamentally changes everything about how you relate to your work and to the people you serve.
He calls it becoming a transmitter of “whole-self, heart-centered intelligence.”
The journey of transformation, Leon explains, is at its core a healing journey — a peeling away of everything that does not reflect who you are at a fundamental level. When you land in that wholeness, you become a transmitter of something essential. Your heart leads — not just emotionally, but through what Leon calls the intelligence of the heart, which he describes as “the intelligence of a vast, aware, creative universe.”
When you are transmitting from this place — undefended, whole, operating from the deepest reality of who you are — you are implicitly, consistently giving other people permission to find that same ground within themselves. They may not hear it in your words. They may not even be consciously aware of it. But at the level of transmission, something is happening that is altogether healing, empowering, and evolving.
“When you come from that healed one, from the whole one, from that most expansive reality that you are, other people will perceive that in ways that may not be conscious,” Leon says. “And this is where the trust piece comes in. Can you trust that there’s a transmission happening that is altogether healing for others?”
Developing Coaching Presence Through Inner Work
Leon is careful to clarify that this is not about holding “transmitter of whole-self, heart-centered intelligence” as a goal to be achieved. It is about recognizing that there is a quality of being that your development is moving toward — and committing to the daily interior work that moves you closer.
“I’m in my practice, day by day, doing the interior design work to heal myself, to grow in ways that I feel I’m being called to grow,” he says. The transmission is not manufactured. It arises naturally from the depth and quality of your inner life. The more you do the work, the more your transmission shifts — not because you are performing a frequency, but because you are genuinely becoming something different.
For coaches, healers, facilitators, and leaders, this reframes the entire enterprise. The greatest thing you bring to your work is not your technique. It is “absolutely the quality of your presence and that silent, unheralded transmission that emanates from the core of your being that is a reflection of your state of consciousness.”
For more on the inner work that supports coaching presence, explore Leon’s book A Shift in Being.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn’t my coaching having the impact I want?
If your coaching feels technically sound but something is missing in the depth of impact, the issue may not be your methodology but what you are transmitting at the level of consciousness. People pick up on the deeper signal of your inner state — your fears, your unresolved patterns, the gap between your values and your embodiment of them. Deepening your own inner work often produces greater shifts in your effectiveness than adding more techniques.
What does it mean to be a “transmitter” as a coach?
Every person constantly transmits a quality of energy, emotion, and consciousness into the world. For coaches and practitioners, this means your impact on clients extends far beyond what you say or do in sessions. The quality of your presence — rooted in your state of consciousness — is itself a transformative force. Becoming aware of what you transmit, and doing the inner work to shift it, is one of the most powerful things a practitioner can do.
How do I shift from fear-based to love-based consciousness?
It is not a switch you flip but a developmental journey. It involves honestly examining the fear-based patterns operating in your life — worry, control, scarcity, defensiveness — and doing the ongoing inner work to heal and grow beyond them. Practices like silence, self-inquiry, community, and working with a skilled mentor or coach can support this shift. The transformation of consciousness is gradual, but each step changes the quality of what you transmit into every relationship and space you inhabit.
The Deep Coaching Intensive develops practitioners who understand that the greatest contribution they can make comes from the quality of their being — not just their technique.