“I am the bottleneck. Everyone comes to me with their key decisions. In order for us to mature as an organization, I know this needs to change. I am trying different techniques and they have helped but only marginally. I really need a significant shift to happen. People need to feel empowered to decide and act. Not only that I want them to experience their own agency, leadership and be empowered. I want to make the shift organizationally to a teal organization—one where self and collective leadership co-exist. We need to develop organizationally.”
These were the opening words from a CEO running a large multinational company. The conventional solutions—delegation structures, decision-making frameworks, regular coaching sessions, and leadership training programs—had all been implemented and maxed out. He was hungry for a more dramatic shift in his organization, the kind of transformation that business journals celebrate but rarely explain how to achieve.
This gap between having all the right tools and creating actual transformation isn’t uncommon among leaders today. We’re living in what feels like the age of burden. Leaders carry an endless litany of tasks, responsibilities, and expectations. The pace is relentless, the stakes feel high, and the old playbooks often don’t apply to the challenges we’re facing.
Traditional leadership development offers frameworks and techniques, but what happens when you’ve checked all the boxes and still feel stuck? When the methods work in theory but something essential is still missing? This is where integral coaching enters the conversation. Not as another methodology to master, but as an invitation to expand into more of who you already are.
What Is Integral Coaching?
The breakthrough with the multinational CEO came from examining who he was being in his interactions. Despite his best intentions to empower others, his way of being was unconsciously undermining his efforts.
Picture giving someone a carefully chosen gift. Now imagine them politely acknowledging it but never unwrapping it, never discovering what’s inside. That’s how his direct reports felt in conversations with him. On the surface, he was doing everything “right”—asking for input, creating space, offering support. But something deeper was missing: the genuine receipt and integration of others’ contributions.
He was making all the “right” moves in conversations. Asking them for their view, holding back what he saw to give them space, offering what he would do to help evolve their ideas. But as we peeled back the layers, we discovered he wasn’t really receiving their input or allowing it to change his view. People left conversations feeling like what they offered wasn’t received. It was like they gave him a gift and he didn’t bother to unwrap it and appreciate what was inside.
The shift came when he learned to embody a different way of being—one where he could genuinely receive, be impacted, and let that impact be visible to others. This wasn’t about learning new conversation techniques. This was about becoming the kind of person who could truly listen and receive, someone present enough in their body to be in the conversation, connected enough to their heart to feel the impact of the other person, and clear minded enough to have their patterned thinking changed by what they took in.
Integral coaching operates from a simple premise: we are always being. You cannot “not be.” The question becomes: How much of yourself are you including in your conscious awareness? When leaders expand this capacity—to be present with their emotions, their bodily sensations, their intuitive knowing—their natural response to challenges becomes more creative, grounded, and effective.
This differs fundamentally from approaches that focus solely on behaviors or competencies. While traditional coaching might ask “What do you want to achieve?” integral coaching asks “Who are you becoming in the process?”
Why Leadership Development Needs a Holistic Approach
The limitation isn’t in the tools themselves, but in approaching leadership as if it’s separate from the wholeness of who we are. When we try to manage life from the neck up, we miss crucial information. Our bodies hold wisdom about what’s sustainable. Our emotions point toward what matters. Our intuition often sees patterns our analytical minds haven’t yet recognized.
Modern leadership requires what I call integral pragmatism—the ability to hold depth and practicality together. To embrace “yes, and…” thinking rather than either/or solutions. Leaders need to develop what we might call triadic receptivity: attunement to their inner landscape, responsiveness to others, and openness to the larger patterns emerging in their field.
This isn’t mystical thinking. It’s practical wisdom. When leaders can stay present with complexity rather than needing to immediately solve it, they make better decisions. When they can include their emotional experience rather than suppressing it, they create psychological safety that enhances team performance. When they can sense the energy of a room, they can respond to what’s actually happening rather than what they think should be happening.
The Impact of Integral Coaching on Leadership Qualities
Let me share another example from my experience. A client came to coaching who wished to be less constrained in their expression and more able to be in the flow of the moment. When they came into coaching they experienced life through their luminous mind, which had many benefits. They could really see possibilities, synthesize and apply models. All this led to wonderful outcomes in their life and those they served. They could also sense the limitation of this, and desired to access more of life through their sensate experience and feel alive.
In our coaching together a marked shift occurred. One example they shared was the capacity to interject in conversations more. They could feel the grounding of their body and were able to compassionately interrupt and take the lead in conversations. Their voice had more power to it, and in speaking with them I could feel the umph in what they were saying.
When we can access, or include, more of ourselves, everything changes. This is self-awareness that includes the whole of our experience, not just our thoughts about our experience.
Emotional Intelligence as Presence, Not Management
Another client exemplifies how integral coaching transforms emotional intelligence. They came to coaching in a fine place—life seemingly going well with their family, success in their work—and there was an inkling of something amiss: A subtle sense they had of not being connected to life in some foundational way.
When we began exploring their emotional experience more fully, a reconnection began to happen for them. They could see places in their relationships where they were not noticing their own or the other’s emotional state and how that was influencing their conversations.
As they started paying more and more attention to how they were feeling in response to being with the other person, the way they acted in the conversation changed, and the conversations themselves began taking fresh twists and turns. The relationships shifted as a result.
This showed up in multiple relationships and opened new ways for them to both ask questions of the other and express how they felt. Through the development of the emotional stream, they had reconnected with a dormant part of themselves, which supported them in feeling alive and connected to each other.
Decision-Making That Includes the Whole Self
I’m reminded of another instance where exploring what was happening in the body led to profound sense of life direction. This client was exploring what was next for them in their career. They were in a successful place and felt compelled to do something more purposeful with their work. They didn’t know exactly what it was, and attempts they made at it left them feeling exhausted and inadequate.
As we began to include how they experienced what was going on for them in their body—which took the form of me asking them to say what sensations they noticed—they didn’t know exactly. The question left them feeling blank. We started there. What was the blankness like?
As they turned toward and lingered with the blankness, what they came to sense was a vast openness within them. This led to a feeling of being unpleasantly alone, with an impulse to move away. With support, the client was able to linger longer and longer with that sense of inner openness and become more comfortable including it versus going with the reaction to move into action.
As they did, they began to experience more groundedness in themselves, which freed them from feeling the need to be perceived in a particular way by others. They saw they had been pursuing some of the more purpose-driven work attempts as a way to appear as though they were doing something that would be considered by others as more significant.
As they connected more deeply with this anchored part of their somatic experience, they began taking on projects that previously felt too “out there.”
Integral Coaching in Practice
The multinational CEO’s transformation manifested in subtle but powerful ways:
- Meetings shifted from presentation forums to genuine dialogues
- Team members began initiating more strategic conversations
- Innovation started emerging from unexpected places in the organization
- Decision-making naturally distributed itself across the organization
Ten years later, this CEO describes that shift in his way of being as the catalyst that transformed his organization. The changes continue to compound, creating an environment where both individual and collective leadership flourish.
What made the difference was attending to who he was being in each moment. This involved developing somatic awareness to be fully present in conversations, emotional capacity to feel and show the impact of others’ contributions, mental flexibility to let new perspectives genuinely alter his thinking, and slowing down his internal state to allow for a change in mood and possibility.
As human beings, we’re exquisitely attuned to these subtle dynamics, even when we can’t articulate them. When a leader transforms their way of being, it creates ripples throughout the entire organization, opening new possibilities for everyone involved.
The coaching process incorporates multiple dimensions of human experience. We might explore what’s happening in your body during difficult conversations. Not to analyze it, but to include it. To use your felt sense as information about what’s true and what’s possible.
We pay attention to emotional experience as texture and movement rather than problem to solve. What is this frustration pointing toward? What would happen if you stayed present with uncertainty rather than rushing to resolution?
The work often begins with turning toward rather than fixing. Instead of immediately focusing on what needs to change, we create space to become more intimate with what’s actually present. This can be surprisingly challenging for leaders accustomed to solving problems quickly.
How to Choose the Right Coaching Certification
For those called to this work—either to develop their own capacity or to support others—choosing an integral coaching certification requires looking beyond surface credentials.
I remember around 2003 being introduced to the Enneagram, a well developed vertical development system. My exposure to it came as I was transitioning from a well planned life of being an engineer into the direction of…what exactly I didn’t know. One aspect that particularly stood out to me was how my type had a difficult time with being still or in silence. I learned that, though there was good reason for these traits, taking on practices of stillness, contemplation and meditation could be beneficial.
Over the ensuing 20+ years of practicing silence and solitude I have come to experience more of myself—parts that weren’t accessible through my personality, which is automatically drawn in the opposite direction. The saying, “you are more than your personality” has become more of a lived reality. It has me open more to what lies beyond my immediate experience, and trusting that what I am currently experiencing is only a part of the story.
This is, in large part, what we are aimed at with Integral Coaching. Inviting people to expand into themselves—or said differently, to include more of who they are.
Seek programs that emphasize transformation over information transfer. The most effective certifications focus on the coach’s own development, recognizing that we can only support others as far as we ourselves have traveled.
Look for depth of training. Integral coaching isn’t a weekend workshop. It requires time for integration, practice, and the kind of developmental work that can’t be rushed.
Find programs that embody what they teach. If the certification uses only intellectual learning methods, question whether it truly understands integral development. The best programs incorporate multiple ways of knowing—embodied learning, reflective practices, and real-world application.
For those specifically interested in leadership coaching in San Francisco, look for programs that understand the unique challenges of this environment while maintaining universal principles of human development.
What Becomes Possible
Twenty years ago, sitting in a garden level flat in San Francisco, I was living as part of a newly forming spiritual community experimenting with what we called Urban Monasticism. I had finished several hours of work and a friend asked what I was going to do next—”I am just going to sit in that chair and be.” I felt the need for reprieve and a chance to breathe.
Back then I had a constitution that was excitable internally, like putting a big speaker in a small room, it didn’t take much for it to get loud, at least inside of me. My response: get away from the external noise/demands/requests—what I was terming ‘just be.’ In other words, “just being” was really me saying “turn down the volume, it is overwhelming me.”
Since that time I have learned that turning down the volume can be helpful. But the next step and one with more significant and long-standing impact: making the metaphorical room bigger. In a bigger room, when the speaker is turned up it isn’t as noticeable—the speaker needs to be turned up louder to get the same change in sound.
What this meant practically was expanding my view of myself and in turn possibilities for actions I could take. I did not want to disappoint people—said another way, I wanted people to like me and say nice things about me. This often meant I would over commit and take on more than I was capable of completing as promised. Making a counter-proposal was not something I considered because of the internal belief I had. Shifting this story I had about myself and what is acceptable opened more possibilities—it made the room larger. Now when requests were made I could receive them and know I had an expanded range of responses. I could now be more present in my life.
This shift from managing external demands to expanding internal capacity is subtle but profound. Rather than constantly adjusting the volume knob of life, we’re creating a space where both the noise and the quiet can coexist. Where ‘being’ and ‘doing’ aren’t at war with each other, but dance together in a larger room.
Integral coaching offers something different from traditional leadership development. Instead of adding more tools to your toolkit, it expands your capacity to respond freshly to whatever life presents.
Leaders who engage in this work often describe a shift from performing leadership to embodying it. From managing their experience to including it. From solving problems to dancing with possibilities.
This isn’t about becoming a different person. It’s about accessing more of who you already are. About making the metaphorical room bigger so that complexity doesn’t overwhelm you, challenge doesn’t diminish you, and success doesn’t separate you from your humanity.
Each of us has our own walls ready to be moved, our own limiting beliefs to examine, our own unique way of creating more space within ourselves. The question isn’t how to copy someone else’s path, but rather: what walls in your own room are ready to be moved?
If you’re curious about exploring this question—whether to deepen your own leadership or to support others in theirs—integral coaching offers a pathway that honors both the complexity of our challenges and the vastness of our potential.
Ready to explore what becomes possible when you include more of who you are in your leadership? Whether you’re seeking to develop your own capacity or interested in learning to support others through coaching certification, the invitation is to begin where you are, with what’s present, and see what wants to emerge. Join our Foundations Course and experience it for yourself.