After more than fifteen years of practicing and teaching deep transformational coaching, Leon VanderPol — founder of the Center for Transformational Coaching and author of A Shift in Being — has arrived at something he calls his secret coaching sauce: the one core practice that, more than any technique, consistently deepens the work and accelerates lasting change.
It is not a new question type. It is not a proprietary model. It is not a curriculum or a protocol.
It is a quality of being.
What Fifteen Years of Deep Coaching Teaches You
Most coaches, early in their practice, are looking for the right tools. The perfect question. The elegant framework that unlocks insight. The intervention that shifts perspective. This is natural — tools give us something to hold onto, something that feels like competence.
But over time, something shifts for coaches who go deep. They begin to notice that the most transformative moments in their sessions don’t happen because of what they said. They happen in the quality of silence. In a moment of genuine contact. In the space that holds rather than directs. In what the coach is, rather than what the coach does.
This is what fifteen years of refinement has distilled at the Center. Not a better technique. A deeper way of being present. And this insight is not incidental to the Deep Coaching framework — it is its foundation. Each of the nine transformative practices in A Shift in Being is, at its core, a practice of presence: a different facet of the same essential discipline.
The Core Practice: Presence as the Primary Instrument
The secret coaching sauce is not complicated to name. It is extraordinarily demanding to develop.
At its simplest: the core practice is the cultivation and consistent embodiment of genuine, full, loving presence in every coaching conversation.
Not presence as a mood or a style. Not presence as a performance of attentiveness. But presence as a state of being — a real, felt quality of complete availability, total openness, and genuine love for the person across from you.
To be truly present means to have genuinely released the agenda of what the session should produce. It means to be free — at least in this moment — from the need to be impressive, helpful, insightful, or useful in any demonstrable way. It means to be so fully here that the client’s experience — whatever it is — can be genuinely met, without redirection or management.
And it means to bring love. Not sentimental love, not professional warmth, but a deep, grounded, unconditional regard — a quality that says, without words: All of you is welcome here. There is nothing you can bring that will be too much.
This is the core practice. And it is what changes everything.
Why Presence Accelerates Change at Every Level
One of the most important insights we return to in our training is this: genuine presence accelerates change at every level of the human being simultaneously.
In A Shift in Being, Leon describes the fundamental purpose of a Deep Coaching session as being to energize a shift in being — not a conceptual shift (“what it would be like if they did”), but a tangible shift during the session itself, so that the person being coached experiences a higher-than-previously-realized level of existence. That energizing happens through presence, not through analysis.
Mentally, when clients feel truly held — when they sense they are in the presence of a coach who is fully available and free of agenda — their thinking changes. The habitual loops that ordinarily dominate their mental activity begin to quiet. New associations arise. Insight that was unavailable in a more guarded or pressured context becomes accessible.
Emotionally, emotions that have been suppressed or managed surface when genuine safety is felt. And rather than being destabilizing, this surfacing is often profoundly liberating. Emotions that are felt and acknowledged — in the presence of a coach who is neither overwhelmed nor dismissive — carry tremendous transformative potential.
Spiritually, presence is the catalyst for the deepest shifts. When a coach is operating from genuine loving awareness — when the coaching space carries a quality of sacred openness — clients often access dimensions of themselves they hadn’t previously been able to reach. The soul-level knowing that had been obscured by noise and conditioning becomes available. And from that knowing, a different kind of life becomes possible.
The Practice of Arriving: Before the Session Begins
This corresponds to Practice 1 in the Deep Coaching Method™️: Slow It All Down and Sync with the Rhythm of Life and Spirit.
One of the most concrete expressions of presence as core practice is the practice of arriving — the deliberate, intentional work of clearing one’s own interior before a coaching session begins.
Most coaches move from one appointment to the next, carrying whatever is in their minds and bodies from one context into the next. The stress of the previous call. The preoccupation with an unfinished project. The mild anxiety about a difficult client earlier in the week. These things accumulate. And they permeate the coaching field, whether intended or not.
The practice of arriving means deliberately setting all of that down before the session begins — taking a few minutes of genuine stillness, breathing consciously, allowing the accumulated noise of the day to settle. Setting a deliberate intention: choosing the quality of presence you want to bring, rather than defaulting to whatever you happen to be carrying. Taking a moment of genuine regard — actually feeling, not just thinking, your care and respect for the person you’re about to meet.
Slowing down and syncing with the rhythm of what is most real is not a warm-up exercise. It is the foundational spiritual discipline of the Deep Coach. This practice takes minutes. Its effects shape the entire session.
The Practice of Releasing: During the Session Itself
This corresponds to Practice 2 (Release Your Agendas; Live Your Spiritual Values) and Practice 9 (Cultivate Trust in the Mystery and Magic of Transformation).
The second dimension is the ongoing discipline of releasing — the continuous letting go of the agenda, the need to be helpful, the subtle pull toward directing the client’s process toward a conclusion.
This is perhaps the most counter-instinctive aspect of the work. We have skills. We see patterns. We have insights. And when those patterns are present, the impulse to point to them — to offer the observation, to ask the question that will unlock the next level — is very strong.
The practice is to hold all of that lightly, and to trust the process more than the impulse. Not to become passive. To become available. To trust that what the client most needs will arise in the space of genuine presence — not because the coach engineered it, but because the quality of the field allowed it.
This trust is itself a spiritual discipline — Practice 9 in A Shift in Being: Cultivate Trust in the Mystery and Magic of Transformation. It requires genuinely believing — not just intellectually but in one’s bones — that what is needed will arise. That the silence holds something. That the client’s own wisdom, given real space and real contact, is sufficient.
The Practice of Silence: The Space That Holds
This corresponds to Practice 4: Let There Be Silence.
One of the most powerful — and most underused — expressions of loving presence in coaching is silence. Not the awkward pause before the next question, but genuine, held, intentional silence that says: There is room here. Take as long as you need.
In A Shift in Being, Leon describes this as one of the most transformative practices available: “Silence is a transformative practice, aimed at bringing us into an experience of our deepest interior.” When a coach can hold silence with genuine ease — not anxious to fill it, not managing their own discomfort — the client’s own deeper wisdom has room to surface.
Many of the most significant moments in a Deep Coaching session happen not in response to a question, but in the space after a question is asked and genuinely held. The quality of the silence is the invitation.
The Practice of Love: The Field That Changes Everything
This corresponds to Practice 5: Coach More from the Heart, Less from the Head.
If presence is the core practice, and arriving and releasing are its primary expressions, then love is its substance — the energetic quality that makes presence genuinely transformative rather than merely attentive.
Practice 5 in A Shift in Being makes an audacious claim: that the heart carries a different kind of intelligence than the head — one that knows what the analytical mind cannot. Coaching from the heart means operating from that intelligence first, and from analysis second.
In coaching, love looks like unconditional positive regard: not agreement with everything a client believes or does, but genuine, non-judgmental care for who they are — regardless of what they bring. It looks like spaciousness: room for the client to be exactly where they are, without needing them to be further along. And it looks like genuine interest in what is most real — not just in the client’s goals or challenges, but in who they actually are.
This interest, when it is genuine, is felt. And when it is felt, it opens things in people that ordinary professional attention cannot reach.
This is the secret sauce, ultimately: not a method, but a maturity. A quality of being that has been cultivated through years of practice, self-inquiry, and genuine commitment to the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the “core practice” behind deep transformational coaching? After 15+ years of practice, Leon VanderPol identifies genuine, full, loving presence as the single practice that most consistently deepens coaching and accelerates lasting transformation. In A Shift in Being, this is developed through nine transformative practices — including Slowing It All Down, Releasing Your Agendas, Letting There Be Silence, Coaching from the Heart, and Cultivating Trust in the Process — each of which is a different expression of the same essential discipline.
Can presence really be developed? The International Coaching Federation identifies presence as a core coaching competency — and our experience confirms that it is not fixed at birth but deepened over a lifetime of intentional practice. Yes — though it develops as a practice, not a skill. Presence deepens through ongoing commitment: contemplative practice, self-inquiry, the discipline of arriving and releasing, and genuine devotion to your own interior development. It deepens over years, not weeks.
Why is love part of a professional coaching practice? In our approach — grounded in Practice 5 of A Shift in Being — love is understood as a field of intelligence, not sentiment, that creates the conditions for genuine transformation. The heart carries a kind of knowing the analytical mind cannot replicate. Coaching from that knowing, rather than from technique alone, is what shifts the quality of the work from skilled to genuinely transformative.
How does releasing agenda help the client? When the coach is genuinely free of needing the session to go a particular way, the client feels genuinely free to explore — without subtle pressure, without the need to perform insight or progress. This freedom is often what allows the most authentic and transformative material to arise. Practice 2 calls this releasing the agenda so that the coach’s spiritual values can occupy that space instead.
How does the Deep Coaching Intensive develop presence as a core practice? Through the Deep Coaching Intensive, coaches develop presence not as a concept but as a lived capacity — through embodied, experiential training built around the nine transformative practices of A Shift in Being. This is ICF-approved training rooted in over fifteen years of refined practice, designed to develop not just what coaches do in sessions, but who they are between them.
The Practice That Holds Everything Else
There is a paradox at the heart of deep transformational coaching: the less the coach tries to produce transformation, the more transformation occurs. The less they push toward insight, the more insight arrives. The less they fill the space, the more the space can offer.
This is not a technique to be deployed, but a practice to be sustained. A quality of being cultivated slowly, imperfectly, and with genuine humility about how much there always remains to learn. It is the thread that runs through all nine practices of A Shift in Being — the animating principle behind the Prime Directive, behind Spiritual Partnering, behind every moment in which genuine transformation becomes possible.
Coaches who commit to this practice find it doesn’t just change their coaching. It changes them. Their relationships deepen. Their own inner life becomes quieter and more spacious. The capacities developed in service of their clients — presence, openness, genuine love — become the texture of their own lives.
This is the gift of Deep Coaching: a practice that is genuinely reciprocal. A path that serves the coach as it serves the client, and deepens both with every step.
If this is the coaching you’re called to offer — or the kind of encounter you’re seeking as a client — explore the Deep Coaching Intensive at the Center for Transformational Coaching. And let The Deep Coach Podcast and what transformational coaching truly is accompany you on the journey.